BUSINESS
March 22, 2010 | By Jessica Guynn and David Pierson
With negotiations over censorship at an impasse, Google Inc. shut down its search engine operation in China on Monday and redirected users to uncensored results -- a move certain to anger the Chinese government and jeopardize Google's future in the world's most populous country. In taking the extraordinary action, Google said it was making good on a promise it made two months ago, when it said it would not self-censor the site as demanded by Chinese officials. At the time, Google also complained that it had been a victim of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China.
BUSINESS
January 22, 2010
WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton Thursday urged China to investigate cyber intrusions that led Google to threaten to pull out of that country -- and challenged Beijing to openly publish its findings. "Countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century," she said. Clinton said the U.S. and China "have different views on this issue, and we intend to address those differences candidly and consistently" as part of a cooperative relationship.
BUSINESS
January 20, 2010 | By Jessica Guynn
Google Inc.'s new cellphone has gotten a winning endorsement from Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak. Wozniak, a self-proclaimed "gadget freak" who left Apple in 1987, remains one of the biggest fans of its products. He stood in line in 2007 to buy the first iPhone because he couldn't wait for Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs to send him one. He didn't have to wait for the Nexus One. Google Inc. executive Andy Rubin gave one to him. Wozniak first praised the phone this month at an NBC station in the Bay Area.
BUSINESS
January 20, 2010 | David Sarno
Google Inc. said Tuesday that the launch of two new mobile phones in China has been delayed, a move that showed the company's clash with Beijing is crimping more than just its search business. Google-powered handsets from Motorola Corp. and Samsung were scheduled to be unveiled today from China Unicom, one of the Asian nation's largest telecommunications providers. Google said last week that it might shut down its search engine in China in the wake of a sophisticated cyber attack originating in China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from the company's servers, as well as the targeting of human rights activists' e-mail accounts.
BUSINESS
January 18, 2010 | By Jessica Guynn
The decision by Google Inc. to stand up to censorship in China is a marked turnaround from just a few years ago, when the Internet giant agreed to gag parts of its search engine to enter the lucrative China market. Google's threat to bolt from the Asian nation has brought praise from politicians and Silicon Valley business leaders, along with many of the human-rights activists who had condemned the company for going along with China's restrictions on Internet access. Whether Google's reversal sprang from political idealism or corporate realism, the Mountain View, Calif.
BUSINESS
January 15, 2010 | By Jessica Guynn
The scale and sophistication of the cyber attacks on Google Inc. and other large U.S. corporations by hackers in China is raising national security concerns that the Asian superpower is escalating its industrial espionage efforts on the Internet. While the U.S. focus has been primarily on protecting military and state secrets from cyber spying, a new battle is being waged in which corporate computers and the valuable intellectual property they hold have become as much a target of foreign governments as those run by the Pentagon and the CIA. "This is a watershed moment in the cyber war," James Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis at Defense Group Inc., a national-security firm, said Thursday.