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kercker

Goole withdrew from China years ago because it didn't want to be evil.

Now Google plans to return to China, with the same evil or more evil government still there.

This clearly shows us that in the business world, there is no evil or non-evil, only money or non-money.

That aside, I'm glad that Google is coming.

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I guess this was because of the whole "right to be forgotten" fiasco. Afterwards, I image they said: "What the hell, we are already doing arbitrary censorship, lets go back to China"

I was under the impression it was really about China sponsoring hacking and espionage against Google and then turning around and giving the spoils of that to its competitors native to China. I imagine they now feel that they can successfully defend against attacks and compartmentalize Chinese operations. I wouldn't be surprised at all if they kept all "secret sauce" code out of China altogether.

Yeah, everyone keeps mentioning the whole "evil" aspect, but I was fairly sure google left due to the many, many attacks on it by Chinese hackers (who they believed to be the Chinese government) attempting and successfully stealing their source code: http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/03/china-google-idUSN...

I've seen a couple talks by Google employees that support a massive change internally towards how they view security because of it. Besides the pressure to use Mac or Linux for workstations they also decided to just get rid of the concept of a "perimeter" for their corporate network entirely. No squishy inside if there's no inside.

It's a little more nuanced. It seems that only Google Play is going into China - not Google search. Wouldn't Google make more money by allowing their search engine to be censored in China? Isn't this a continuing, if limited, example good-evil considerations in business?

> Wouldn't Google make more money by allowing their search engine to be censored in China?

Nobody would use it, though. Baidu already has its monopoly.

Google never left China to be exact, although google.com.cn is currently a symlink to google.com.hk, which its internet governance is under HK's Common Law. One may argue that HK is under China's governance, but I have not seen anyone complaining about Internet censorship (political correctness is a different thing).

> a symlink

Like, a cname?

It's a slang I use to mean for various of things :-) like aliases. I am an infrastructure person.

Actually google.com.cn is not a CNAME to google.com.hk. You have to click on the image they put on .cn which redirects you to .hk.

I too like symlink as a useful general purpose reference point that's more specific than pointer. In this case though it's a bit dissonant since there is a direct analog in the domain of DNS (cname). Thanks for the clarification!

Hey no worries! I got carry away :-)

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