Google accuses China of hacking Gmail email system

[alp227]

Source: The Guardian

Google has accused the Chinese government of hacking into its popular Gmail email system. The move follows extensive attempts by the Chinese authorities to crack down on the "jasmine revolution" – an online dissident movement inspired by events in the Middle East.

According to the search giant, Chinese customers and advertisers have increasingly been complaining about their Gmail service in the past month. Attempts by users to send messages, mark messages as unread and use other services have generated problems for Gmail customers.

In the wake of the catastrophic earthquake in Japan, Google set up an application to help people find relatives and friends lost in the disaster. This service too seems to have been compromised.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/20/google-gmail

[KurtNYC]

1. this isn't what they meant 15 years back by "desktop publishing"

but we are all authors now. There is an audience for everything you write -- our government can read it, China can read it, if you are at a coffee shop then your WIFI cracking neighbors can and who knows who else.

And the fact that we communicate in text instead of audio means that computers can parse all of it. J Edgar Hoover's wet dream.

[stockholmer]

2. oh, they can parse audio too, see this story on Google spy ads from 5 years ago

ironically, this 2006 story references 2011
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2006/sep/04/googledevelopi

Google developing eavesdropping software

"The first thing that came out of our mouths when we heard that Google is working on a system that listens to what's on your TV playing in the background, and then serves you relevant adverts, was 'that's cool, but dangerous'," says Rethink Research Associates in a comment piece published on The Register. The story refers to this article http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17354&ch=infotech

As someone pointed out on Slashdot, Ars Technica reported this idea back in June: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060609-7028.html


Developers from Google's research laboratory presented a paper (PDF) http://www.mangolassi.org/covell/pubs/euroITV-2006.pdf about interactive television applications that leverage ambient audio analysis at the Euro Interactive Television conference last week. The research paper, which describes a system for providing contextually relevant web content for television consumers, received the best paper award. The described system uses a computer microphone to analyze the audio being emitted by a television, and uses that data to determine what show the user is watching. The system can then provide the user with web content that relates to the show.


Comment: The next step is presumably to use your webcam http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_16748 to keep a record of which snacks you consume during different TV programmes. It's just another part of accumulating all the world's information in order to best serve all the world's advertising.... (Of course you agreed to this! Didn't you read to the end of the agreement you clicked when you installed Google Toolbar 8 in 2011?)

Google's eavesdropping idea doesn't sound too smart coming after the publicity about how it records your every search forever, but was, of course, published before that.

[sendero]

3. It should not be..

... hackable, period.

[Corruption Winz]

4. Why try and make the nation better?

When all you have to do is simply silence any outcry?