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posted by n1 on Tuesday September 23 2014, @01:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the knowing-when-you're-not-wanted dept.

The Chinese government is at it again. The New York Times is reporting that "Google’s problems in China just got worse."

As part of a broad campaign to tighten internal security, the Chinese government has draped a darker shroud over Internet communications in recent weeks, a situation that has made it more difficult for Google and its customers to do business.

Chinese exporters have struggled to place Google ads that appeal to overseas buyers. Biotechnology researchers in Beijing had trouble recalibrating a costly microscope this summer because they could not locate the online instructions to do so. And international companies have had difficulty exchanging Gmail messages among far-flung offices and setting up meetings on applications like Google Calendar.

"It’s a frustrating and annoying drain on productivity," said Jeffrey Phillips, an American energy executive who has lived in China for 14 years. "You’ve got people spending their time figuring out how to send a file instead of getting their work done."

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @01:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @01:46AM (#96994)
    Everyone doing business with china should have known this was going to happen eventually.
    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @12:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @12:31PM (#97126)

      I think you meant the US and if you didn't you ought to have, Google is a US company.

      China now, Europe next, and in Russia it is frowned upon. All for good reasons.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday September 23 2014, @01:59AM

    by frojack (1554) on Tuesday September 23 2014, @01:59AM (#96999) Journal

    "You’ve got people spending their time figuring out how to send a file instead of getting their work done."

    I have a customer I do development work for, to whom I can't send any zips, PDFs, Images, and certainly no executibles.
    I told them I was going to put them on my FTP server and they could fetch them when they wanted. They didn't like
    that, so I told them I'd hand deliver it, the price would be round trip airfare, one night in the fanciest hotel in Denver, meal allowance, and a rental car.
    Suddenly they decided the FTP route would be ok.

    For years there was no problem with zips in Email, but then they hired this retread of failed software guy to be their security guru. He couldn't program his way out of a wet paper bag when I last saw him try, and they Peter Principled him right out of software into some place they thought he couldn't hurt them.

    I wonder if China is worried about what their people might find out, or what our NSA has been sending into their country disguised as email or simple web pages?

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 1) by boltronics on Tuesday September 23 2014, @02:41AM

      by boltronics (580) on Tuesday September 23 2014, @02:41AM (#97009) Homepage Journal

      Seriously, an FTP server? I hope you meant pubkey-authenticated SFTP, or that those files were PGP-signed and not confidential in the slightest...

      --
      It's GNU/Linux dammit!
      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 23 2014, @03:51AM

        by frojack (1554) on Tuesday September 23 2014, @03:51AM (#97023) Journal

        Nope.

        Public key authentication is beyond this clown' abilities.
        I know their external IP.

        Besides, it hardly secret shit anyway.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @02:42AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @02:42AM (#97010)

      China's goal with the Great Firewall seems to be both to make it somewhat more difficult for their citizens to learn about their government but also so that the Chinese use Chinese web services instead of the American ones so the Chinese government has more control over them.

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @12:34PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @12:34PM (#97127)

        Hard to blame them if the alternative is US control.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by carguy on Tuesday September 23 2014, @03:01AM

      by carguy (568) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 23 2014, @03:01AM (#97015)

      We get around similar file extension "security" in email attachments by changing the extension, for example, .zip --> .zzz or .piz.
      Our customers are engineers, they don't have any problem restoring the original extension. I've even got these alternate extensions mapped to my unzip utility.

      Has anyone tried this workaround with China?

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 23 2014, @05:03AM

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday September 23 2014, @05:03AM (#97033)

        That may work with exchanging files, but from TFS it seems some of their problems are getting Gmail (and google calendar) to work correctly, and that's not something exchanging files will fix.

        China's shooting themselves in the foot here.

        Oh well....

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @07:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @07:48AM (#97064)

    Slow news day for NYT?
    Nothing in the article is current or surprising. as per the story it just got worse back on may 29. Nothing has changed since then.
    This clown who has lived there for 14 years and only just noticed? Find out what company he is an 'executive' for and sell it's shares immediately.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @01:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @01:52PM (#97147)

    Here in the US my collaborators have all moved to using Gmail for email, and Gmail refused to deliver a mail with a zip file containing a text file with a list of domain extensions. The recipients don't want to use encryption. They don't want to have to pull it themselves. So I had to spend more time trying to find out how to communicate this data than it had cost me acquiring it.

    I can't change Google's policy, I can only complain to my collaborators about their choice for business email. And of course not use it myself. Same with living in China. People know it is a dictatorship and randomly censors the internet, but they chose to go there freely. They will find a way around their problems, or they will go home.

  • (Score: 2) by MrGuy on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:57PM

    by MrGuy (1007) on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:57PM (#97236)

    If this shows nothing else, it shows that hosting your own internal mail servers (which these days usually means Exchange in business contexts) is in a number of ways superior to a web-based solution and just assuming "everything will work."

    Corporate VPN to your remote offices + hosted e-mail system = everything works everywhere!

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by cesarb on Tuesday September 23 2014, @06:31PM

      by cesarb (1224) on Tuesday September 23 2014, @06:31PM (#97289) Journal

      The article mentions that VPNs are also often blocked, so "corporate VPN to your remote offices" would not help that much.

      You could access the hosted email system directly instead of using a VPN, but it wouldn't surprise me if they start blocking that too.