
so?
Did anyone contact a user inside China to find out if they did the same thing to Sina Weibo? Or Twitter, Facebook, or Bing?
The Great Firewall of China swung shut on Google this Friday as the Communist Party prepares to anoint its new leader, with search, Gmail, and other subdomains run by Google completely dead. The move comes as the ruling elite in China are gathered at the 18th National Congress in Beijing to anoint elect the new glorious leader …
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>No travel or monetary sanctions for China.
The official US Treasury figures for June showed $1.1 Trillion of USA's public debt is owed to China...private sector ownership and debt is anyone's guess, but they certainly own more of the USA than say, Warren Buffett.
>AND they have the NUCLEAR BOMB!
Yeah, but they don't need it - if China turns off the money, New Yorkers will be eating each other inside a month.
>This simply highlights how stupid and short-sighted US policies are when it sanctions Iran.
Iran has very little USA wants, except oil of course - but China, India & Taiwan buy most of that and always will regardless of EU/US sanctions.
"Yeah, but they don't need it - if China turns off the money, New Yorkers will be eating each other inside a month."
...and the Chinese will be eating each other inside two months. Broadly, they only have a ton of money because we buy a ton of the stuff they make at the behest of our companies. When it comes down to it, China skims a percentage off the internal business of the US (obviously there are others, but for the sake of simplification...).
In other words, neither of us can cut off the other without suffering catastrophic consequences. China hasn't got the engineering or corporate infrastructure to design and sell things entirely on its own, and the US hasn't got the manufacturing (or at least, hasn't got it inexpensively) to produce them entirely on its own.
All things being equal, if there was a sudden cutoff between China and the US, I'd rather be in the US; we could - at great expense, but we could - manufacture things here. It wouldn't be pretty for quite a while, but it would happen.
China, on the other hand, would be in a much worse situation - they have neither the large middle class to buy things, nor the ability to make things to buy on its own. Without the massive cash inflow from the US, the whole system would collapse like an Angry Birds level. Their economy - marketing, manufacturing plants, transport, infrastructure, shipping, everything - is built around producing widgets from external designs as cheaply as possible, and getting them the hell out of the country as rapidly as possible. I doubt that would translate well - if at all - into a closed economy. They're all biceps and no heart; the US can survive as an amputee, but I don't think China can survive without any blood pumping through it.
It is. It's time to revisit our prejudices - as I was forced to do with mine on a recent visit to China. China chooses to run its business by exerting a greater measure of control over its citizens than we in the West are comfortable with - but everyone I talked to said how much better it is now than in the Cultural Revolution times. Who was it that supported our western currencies in the big crash caused by our own greedy capitalist banks? The China of 30 years ago wouldn't have done that - they would have dumped us and we would have crashed and burned. China's economy is linked with all of ours - we all stay afloat together.
Today's China has shown that it really does play well with the other children unlike some. Let's all play nicely, now.
> Who was it that supported our western currencies in the big crash caused by our own greedy capitalist banks?
I rather think they had no choice, having used most of their profit of the last ten years to buy US Government debt. The US and Chinese economies are massively intertwined - google "Chimerica" for example.
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To quote from one of those articles: "[The Chinese Government] see the state as the embodiment and guardian of Chinese civilisation. Its most important responsibility - bar none - is maintaining the unity of the country."
No, what they see is that their power and authority (and no doubt lots of very nice perks) come from keeping the lid on anything that might undermine their power, because they've got a really cushy number and don't want to lose it which is what will happen when their general populace realise exactly how corrupt their entire system is.
They may throw the occasional sacrificial lamb out when someone does something so egregiously wrong that they can't simply cover it up, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
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Why on earth would you think that China is a communist nation? :P
Seriously - no national health care plan, few regulations in the workplace, extreme disparity between the vast poor and the few obscenely wealthy, and the government props up huge corporations to ensure their success. That's not communism - it's Tea Party laissez faire!
"I feel sorry for the people of China, being run by evil communist dictators barely any better than that tubby muppet who's now in charge of North Korea. Communism really needs to be stamped out."
As opposed to lovely America where your vote REALLY lets you put the person that you want in charge?
and yet our stupid prime minister, stephen harper (Canada), has negotiated a Canada-China FIPA, worse deal ever. India ran away from a similar deal China wanted with them. The Canadian prime minister has got to be getting paid a bundle by someone to try and sell this FIPA. I don't like to think that but he's an economist and every other expert I've read has torn this treaty apart.
Google has a fresh list of reasons why it opposes tech antitrust legislation making its way through Congress but, like others who've expressed discontent, the ad giant's complaints leave out mention of portions of the proposed law that address said gripes.
The law bill in question is S.2992, the Senate version of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), which is closer than ever to getting votes in the House and Senate, which could see it advanced to President Biden's desk.
AICOA prohibits tech companies above a certain size from favoring their own products and services over their competitors. It applies to businesses considered "critical trading partners," meaning the company controls access to a platform through which business users reach their customers. Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta in one way or another seemingly fall under the scope of this US legislation.
Google is winding down its messaging app Hangouts before it officially shuts in November, the web giant announced on Monday.
Users of the mobile app will see a pop-up asking them to move their conversations onto Google Chat, which is yet another one of its online services. It can be accessed via Gmail as well as its own standalone application. Next month, conversations in the web version of Hangouts will be ported over to Chat in Gmail.
Updated Another kicking has been leveled at American tech giants by EU regulators as Italy's data protection authority ruled against transfers of data to the US using Google Analytics.
The ruling by the Garante was made yesterday as regulators took a close look at a website operator who was using Google Analytics. The regulators found that the site collected all manner of information.
So far, so normal. Google Analytics is commonly used by websites to analyze traffic. Others exist, but Google's is very much the big beast. It also performs its analysis in the USA, which is what EU regulators have taken exception to. The place is, after all, "a country without an adequate level of data protection," according to the regulator.
After offering free G Suite apps for more than a decade, Google next week plans to discontinue its legacy service – which hasn't been offered to new customers since 2012 – and force business users to transition to a paid subscription for the service's successor, Google Workspace.
"For businesses, the G Suite legacy free edition will no longer be available after June 27, 2022," Google explains in its support document. "Your account will be automatically transitioned to a paid Google Workspace subscription where we continue to deliver new capabilities to help businesses transform the way they work."
Small business owners who have relied on the G Suite legacy free edition aren't thrilled that they will have to pay for Workspace or migrate to a rival like Microsoft, which happens to be actively encouraging defectors. As noted by The New York Times on Monday, the approaching deadline has elicited complaints from small firms that bet on Google's cloud productivity apps in the 2006-2012 period and have enjoyed the lack of billing since then.
A former Google video producer has sued the internet giant alleging he was unfairly fired for blowing the whistle on a religious sect that had all but taken over his business unit.
The lawsuit demands a jury trial and financial restitution for "religious discrimination, wrongful termination, retaliation and related causes of action." It alleges Peter Lubbers, director of the Google Developer Studio (GDS) film group in which 34-year-old plaintiff Kevin Lloyd worked, is not only a member of The Fellowship of Friends, the exec was influential in growing the studio into a team that, in essence, funneled money back to the fellowship.
In his complaint [PDF], filed in a California Superior Court in Silicon Valley, Lloyd lays down a case that he was fired for expressing concerns over the fellowship's influence at Google, specifically in the GDS. When these concerns were reported to a manager, Lloyd was told to drop the issue or risk losing his job, it is claimed.
China's internet regulator has launched an investigation into the security regime protecting academic journal database China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), citing national security concerns.
In its announcement of the investigation, the China Cyberspace Administration (CAC) said:
China's government has outlined its vision for digital services, expected behavior standards at China's big tech companies, and how China will put data to work everywhere – with president Xi Jinping putting his imprimatur to some of the policies.
Xi's remarks were made in his role as director of China’s Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission, which met earlier this week. The subsequent communiqué states that at the meeting Xi called for "financial technology platform enterprises to return to their core business" and "support platform enterprises in playing a bigger role in serving the real economy and smoothing positive interplay between domestic and international economic flows."
The remarks outline an attempt to balance Big Tech's desire to create disruptive financial products that challenge monopolies, against efforts to ensure that only licensed and regulated entities offer financial services.
Google Cloud's Anthos on-prem platform is getting a new home under the search giant’s recently announced Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) portfolio, where it will live on as a software-based competitor to AWS Outposts and Microsoft Azure Stack.
Introduced last fall, GDC enables customers to deploy managed servers and software in private datacenters and at communication service provider or on the edge.
Its latest update sees Google reposition Anthos on-prem, introduced back in 2020, as the bring-your-own-server edition of GDC. Using the service, customers can extend Google Cloud-style management and services to applications running on-prem.
The Cyberspace Administration of China has announced a policy requiring all comments made to websites to be approved before publication.
Outlined in a document published last Friday and titled "Provisions on the Administration of Internet Thread Commenting Services", the policy is aimed at making China's internet safer, and better represent citizens' interests. The Administration believes this can only happen if comments are reviewed so that only posts that promote socialist values and do not stir dissent make it online.
To stop the nasties being published, the policy outlines requirements for publishers to hire "a review and editing team suitable for the scale of services".
The US Department of Defense said it's investigating Chinese disinformation campaigns against rare earth mining and processing companies — including one targeting Lynas Rare Earths, which has a $30 million contract with the Pentagon to build a plant in Texas.
Earlier today, Mandiant published research that analyzed a Beijing-linked influence operation, dubbed Dragonbridge, that used thousands of fake accounts across dozens of social media platforms, including Facebook, TikTok and Twitter, to spread misinformation about rare earth companies seeking to expand production in the US to the detriment of China, which wants to maintain its global dominance in that industry.
"The Department of Defense is aware of the recent disinformation campaign, first reported by Mandiant, against Lynas Rare Earth Ltd., a rare earth element firm seeking to establish production capacity in the United States and partner nations, as well as other rare earth mining companies," according to a statement by Uncle Sam. "The department has engaged the relevant interagency stakeholders and partner nations to assist in reviewing the matter.
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