Alphabet's cyber unit Jigsaw introduces a new security app to bust censorship
techcrunch.com
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I'm a very harsh critique of Google due to the threat they pose for privacy, however here they are doing a good thing, along the lines of the public DNS servers they provide, which I know have helped people [1].
Having your requests go through Google is not ideal, however not many people have the capacity to search for better, but more obscure solutions.
Also this isn't about privacy, but about working around censorship at the DNS level. If you want privacy, you use an anonymous VPN or Tor. And frankly, if you can't trust Google's privacy policy for this service, then you shouldn't use a Google phone.
And Google already censors search results in the EU with the right to be forgotten, where they've received 41,000 requests from EU politicians, so there is precedence in working with local governments
Which ones? I wasn't aware it was even live. Are you talking about Bing, which is already operating in China?
https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-l...
I do despise google's efforts in dismantling any privacy which is left on the internet, but this particular program is very good.
I don't get this attitude of 'don't take a cake from the devil'. A) google is not devil, just another megacorp B) don't be blinded with slogans, evaluate merits of each offer individually. This particular offer is great and helps real people aka 'makes the world a better place', lol.
Edit: if you want to downvote, please also reply with your ideas and tell me why you disagree with me.
That said, this particular product, which has nothing to do Google's business with China, is absolutely crucial for people facing censorship elsewhere, and it is without a doubt a morally good product. You can't even claim that they're doing it solely to gather DNS data (for whatever reason), because if they were making an attempt at that, they would sure as fuck wouldn't allow you to choose Cloudflare.
You can sit here and call that hypocritical because of Google's relationship in China, but that doesn't make their solution any less good to those facing censorship. Nobody else stepped up. Jigsaw did, and they deserve to be thanked for that.
Even if someone's intentions are evil in nature, you're not going to make them less evil by saying "who cares, you're evil" whenever they do something good.
https://github.com/Jigsaw-Code/intra
Also, if you're looking for a DoH server that block adverts, here is mine:
> https://dns.aaflalo.me/dns-query
Great! I've been looking for something like this for a long time. Is the source code open? Not that I don't trust you with my DNS queries but...
https://www.aaflalo.me/2018/10/tutorial-setup-dns-over-https...
Still need to document the PiHole part.
I've also disable all logging for Nginx and Pihole. The server is also listed on https://dnscrypt.info/public-servers
Also, if you're in the American Continent, you might want to use the proxy I setup on Google Cloud Platform:
I don't think you'll find a dns server that block ads that have whitelisted Google Ads.
I also run my own DoH server in Singapore that block adverts[2] with Ansible script to deploy it to any FreeBSD servers[3] :-)
Edit: looks like mine doesn't supported running with Intra quite yet. Will work on it tonight.
[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dnscloak-dnscrypt-doh-client...
Whether the advantages of that outweigh giving google your DNS traffic (and realistically they already know every site you visit, because almost everyone uses google analytics) depends on your local security situation.
Note that your local security situation may include the good old rubber hose attack: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/194353/police-f...
Regardless of my privacy concerns regarding Google and other Alphabet-owned businesses, Jigsaw and Project Zero teams deserve to be praised by anyone who gives a shit about privacy/security.
2) I wouldn't use this if I lived in China. Companies operating in China are required to turn over data about their users to the government. And Google is soon going to be partnering with China to release a censored version of their search engine[1]. Now they can provide the government your entire browsing history, not just your searches!
[1] https://theintercept.com/2018/08/01/google-china-search-engi...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/technology/google-jigsaw-...
https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/06/01/improving-dns-pr...
Has been plenty useful getting around court -ordered clampdowns on torrent sites in India.
You can configure it to use any publicly known DoH server: https://github.com/curl/curl/wiki/DNS-over-HTTPS#publicly-av...
You can use your own DNS-over-HTTPS server if you want to.
Or "non-oppressive" governments like the UK.
Google on Venezuelan censoring: bad, fight it
Google on Chinese censoring: complicit, support it
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/03/2...
If you want to actually change something, create clearly defined, actionable rules, specify scope and follow them 100% of the time. Like "we do not log any information except X and Y".
And it worked. Sadly, there are many more evils in the world than becoming Microsoft.
1) This tool is made by an Alphabet owned company (Jigsaw), not Google, another Alphabet owned company. The companies will have different missions, even if profits flow the same direction.
2) Venezuela doesn't have a huge market where Google is blocked by a nation-wide firewall.
3) China has a nation-wide firewall blocking any Google service, thereby forcing Google to negotiate how their service works if they want to make money there.
Note: Oversimplifying the situation for the sake of pitchforking a company you might not like does no one any good. Venezuela and China are very different companies, in very different environments. Google as a company (and Alphabet, probably more so) is almost certainly anti-censorship, philosophically; they just don't operate in a vacuum.
Sorry for bringing this up (I never do that on HN) but this is just too questionable of a defense to be putting up.
I am a Google critic as much as everyone else here, but I can say with confidence that we would all be thrilled if Google took the same stand on censorship as is Jigsaw's.
Since when was being motivated to do wrong a mitigating condition for having done wrong? "Sorry officer, I wasn't going to steal it at first, but then I started wanting it."
They can either be totally censored or partially censored and still make money. Are you asking for them to give up and accept total censorship and forfeit money? If not, what would you like Google to do?
I'm not seeing the moral difference between this and the grandparent post. "We don't want to be evil, but they offered us a lot of money, so what could we do?"
If you're a police officer and you have to arrest people for some stupid law you disagree with, are you evil, or are the people requiring you to perform that arrest evil?
To answer your question: the police officer may not be evil, but she's certainly doing evil. It may be possible to make a coherent argument that the harm done is outweighed by the good the cop can do in her community if she toes the line and keeps her job. I don't think you can make that argument when the harm is "willingly abetting an oppressive government on a massive scale" and the benefit is "we make a whole bunch of money."
Not only will they steal it, but they'll use it for whatever they want.
Right now China is talking to Google because they lack the technological prerequisites to make their goals happen by themselves. If you want to see a Chinese Google competitor, just let Google get a shoe in the door and wait a couple years. Then when China has what it wants they'll dismiss Google.
Google's short-sighted greed is going to divide the internet in two. We should be letting China either stand on it's own or join the rest of the world. Instead they will prioritize market share in a technologically inept country and, quite advertently, give the Chinese everything they're lacking to completely break away from the world wide web and start their own.
I just can't wait until Google gets kicked out of the party they created for themselves.
There's no reason to bring source code over.
The whole reason AMD exists is because IBM wouldn't do business with Intel without an alternate domestic supplier.
In government manufacturing here in the US we can't even put CUI in the Cloud if the end-user is the government. And we're democratic. Can you imagine the export controls on Chinese technology?
The chances that China WON'T see the source code are zero.
Seriously? China has 1.3B people and you don't think that any of them can do the same things people in USA can do?
> technologically inept country
Add up the populations of Europe and USA and you'll still be hundreds of millions away from that of China alone. And you still believe China is technologically inept?
I can't tell if this is satire or if you just hate China. Do you have any measurements demonstrating the ineptitude you mention?
I'm struggling to see how this addresses the point about Google's variable standards. I mean, are you saying that somehow because Google needs to adjust its standard to make money in a particular market that it therefore doesn't have variable standards?
Not quite following you ...
c o m p a n i e s
How is that a justification?
However, they are different in this case because Venezuela's market isn't large enough that Google feels the need to bend to the will of the government there to be competitive in the world's market. Therefore, they can afford, on a competitive level, to stand against censorship in Venezuela, where doing the same thing in China costs them a huge amount of money. Which is their motivator, as they are a corporation.
This is the reason for much of Sony's failure/inability to build a usable mp3 player. They built amazing music playback devices, but the record label division was so terrified of 'piracy' they forced the hardware division to require a proprietary encryption format (no "plain" mp3s) which essentially ruined the usability. So the company that built the walkman was hobbled, deliberately. Even the Poor Sony Aibo robot dog had to use specially modified Sony memory sticks with encryption and keys written into the normally-unwritable boot sector.
So if the Chinese demand they get real-time access to all information Google has stored about anyone, or Google gets banned from China, they should do that too?
Is there one? PRISM and the early Snowden leaks indicated the searches were immediate. Was that not true?
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/world/asia/china-uighur-m...
> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”
> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...!
I provided evidence America does act on information.
This is perspective.
What America does has no effect on the morality of what China does. This is whataboutism at its finest.
But I suppose you’re right, the US only murders tens of millions of foreigners.
That's the point. Google is willing to throw out their supposed principles in order to make money.
Alphabet and Google can't claim to be against censorship while they're profiting from it. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
Clearly the only thing Google and Alphabet are "for" is making more money, so there's really no point pretending they have a moral compass guiding them.
It’s like a prayer to serenity: Grant me the courage to change what I cannot accept, the serenity to accept what I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Google maybe rich beyond the dreams of any single human, but they can’t force the Chinese government to stop thinking like the Chinese government.
this seems a bit reductive if not weaseling. google isn't a bystander, they're knowingly and voluntarily aiding a state oppress it's people.
Well, they can claim anything they want. If they want to be consistent and have integrity then they'll make sure their actions align with their claims. Claiming to support privacy while also conceding to China shows they have no integrity and they're only telling people what they want to hear for marketing purposes.
> Google maybe rich beyond the dreams of any single human, but they can’t force the Chinese government to stop thinking like the Chinese government.
Right, but their inability to change Chinese policy doesn't imply that they have to take an active role in helping China's censorship. They could have said, "We're not doing business in China because it conflicts with our 'Don't be evil' policy." Instead, they got rid of that policy and are working with the Chinese government to censor web content.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/20/eric-schmidt-ex-google-ceo-p...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/357494/google-to-de-rank-rt-sputn...
The most profitable SW projects often have a lot of reuse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Storie...
Will this tool bypass the censored Google that will be introduced in China?
More likely it will automatically report the user to the Chinese government if used in China.
However, it seems that Google hosts the encrypted endpoint separately anyways, not on 8.8.8.8.
1. All DNS traffic from intra must go through the chinese national firewall. Although the firewall cannot see or tamper the data, it can tell whether it is encrypted.
2. Most DNS traffic are not encrypted. Intra users will be very easy to discover to the firewall, like a flare in the night.
3. One's name is linked to one's IP in china, and encryption alone cannot hide the user IP.
It may work in some other nations. But not china.
"Alphabet's Jigsaw" would be more appropriate. Jigsaw is, at best, a sibling of Google, not a part of Google.
It is explained in the very first sentence, but comments so far don't seem to acknowledge that.
I don't think most people have really understood the Google/Alphabet transition. When most people think of "Google" they're actually thinking of Alphabet.
If you say "Google" then you're conveying the correct information using the wrong term. If you say "Alphabet" then you're using the right term but a lot of people won't know what you're talking about. What to do?
This is probably less of a problem on HN than it is for TechCrunch.
It's still Google because it's the most important part. A synecdoche, not a misconception.
> Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, ...
Didn't look through all of them, but couldn't find an instance in which Waymo is represented as Google's Waymo anywhere, let alone in the title.
If the media consistently referred to Google as Google and Alphabet as Alphabet, people would learn the difference more quickly. Using one term for the other is just delaying this process and sowing confusion.