Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/01/great-firewall-of-google.html
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Don’t be evil.
Make money any damned way you can.
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Alternate new motto - “Don’t be-- Look! A monkey!”
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I’m okay with this if (and only if) their intention is to subvert the system with a never-ending stream of engineering “oopses” that let things through on a regular basis. (Even big companies make “mistakes”, ya know?)
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Three monkeys, surely?
Or just a three-headed monkey.
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Figures.
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That kind of subversion would be pointless because the Chinese government would shut Google’s service down if there was a suspicious number of “oopses”. China doesn’t need Google; it has domestic searxh, social networking and video sharing sites with reliable censorship mechanisms.
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This statement is technically correct, but there’s a ton of ways the service could be rolled out such that any eventual crackdown would be made more difficult than just blocking a few IPs, and it would only take a few hours of unfettered access for even the most brain-washed citizens to see reality, potentially resulting in long-term effects.
Of course that assumes that the corollary to “Don’t be evil” is “Do good”.
So, again, I’m okay with this only if…
Even if banned sites showed up in Google’s search results, users wouldn’t be able to view them because they would be blocked by their ISPs.
Shutting Google’s Chinese site would be easy because the government would require all the servers to be located in China.
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You have to think a lot broader, think outside the box a bit. E.g. when the search app can’t reach the Chinese servers it goes looking for other servers, in other countries, forming a mesh to other devices nearby if necessary, looking for devices with VPNs already configured that can get out. This could be broadly deployed before any oopses, and could be triggered by any number of other means as well. You could suborn the entire network in time, randomize the unfiltered access based on any number of factors, (age of device, presence of other apps etc), fly under the radar for a long time while gradually increasing the frequency and range of allowed devices. Eventually it would be spotted of course, but by then the “damage” would be done. (Hope some Google engineers are taking notes here, lol!)
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