Google, Citing Cyber Attack, Threatens to Exit China

Google threatened late Tuesday to pull out of its operations in China after it said it had uncovered a massive cyber attack on its computers that originated there.

As a result, the company said, it would no longer agree to censor its search engine in China and may exit the country altogether.

Google said that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human right activists, but that the attack also targeted 20 other large companies in the finance, technology, media and chemical sectors.

In a blog posting by David Drummnod, the corporate development and chief legal officer, Google said that it had found a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China."

"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered - cobined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web - have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China." Mr. Drummond wrote in a blog post.

He wrote that Google was no longer willing to censor results on its Chinese-language search engine and would discuss with Chinese authorities whether it could operate an uncensored search engine in that country.

"We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China," Mr. Drummond wrote, adding that the decision was being driven by executives in the United States, "without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China."

Google did not publicly link the Chinese government to the cyber attack, but people with knowledge of Google's investigation said they had enough evidence to justify the actions.

A United States expert on cyber warfare said that 34 companies were targeted, most of them high-technology companies in Silicon Valley. The attacks came from Taiwanese Internet addresses, according to James Mulvenon, an expert on Chinese cyberwarfare capabilities.

Mr. Mulvenon said that the stolen documents were sent electronically to a server controlled by Rackspace, based in San Antonio.

"For Google to pull up stakes and basically pull out of China, the attack must have been large in scope and very penetrating," Mr. Mulvenon said. "This attack highlights the fact that cyberwarfare has basically gone to the next level."

Mr. Drummond said that Google decided to speak publicly about the attack not only because of its security and human rights implications, but because "this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech."

Google entered the China market in 2006, agreeing to introduce a censored search engine. At the time, the company said that it believed that the benefits of its presence in China outweighed the downside of its being forced to censor some search results tehre, as it would provide more information and openness to Chinese citizens.

But the company said that it would continue to monitor restrictions in that country and review its decision periodically.

World's communication network due an energy diet

by Paul Marks

The internet and other communications networks could use one-ten-thousandth of the energy that they do today if smarter data-coding techniques were used to move information around. That's the conclusion of Bell Labs, the research centre in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where both the laser and transistor were invented.

The lab has launched a consortium of networking and computing firms called Green Touch that is committed to developing new power-saving technologies. The initial goal is to cut power use in the global telecoms network by 99.9 per cent by 2015.

At issue, says Gee Rittenhouse, head of research at Bell Labs, is the 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide belched into the atmosphere to power today's global telephone, internet and cellphone networks. "That's equivalent to the emissions from 50 million automobiles, or 20 per cent of the cars registered in the US," he says. The explosion in internet traffic taking place as mobiles go online and video viewing grows, plus future changes such as the arrival of 3D TV, will push those emissions even higher.

Back to basics

One way Bell Labs plans to develop low-power networks is by harnessing the theories of its late alumnus Claude Shannon that underlie all electronic communication, wired or wireless.

Shannon worked out that in a low-power channel, where unwanted "noise" is loud compared with the intended signal, a code can always be devised to extract the messages being transmitted. Today's fibre-optic and cellphone networks avoid having to take that approach by using high power levels. "But by using smarter codes we can extract those signals and reconstruct them accurately even in the presence of high noise," Rittenhouse says.

Other members of the Green Touch consortium include US mobile network AT&T, China Mobile – the world's largest cellphone operator – European mobile operator Telefonica, hardware manufacturers Samsung and Freescale Semiconductor, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, California, the University of Melbourne, Australia and the French national computing lab INRIA.

Consolidated data

MIT engineer Muriel Médard says she will be looking for ways to bundle together internet data taking similar routes through the network to reduce the traffic on power-hungry trunk routes. "A lot of energy is dissipated in vain," she says.

At the University of Melbourne, Rod Tucker will focus on the power consumed by broadband modems, phones and cellphones when not in use.

"If you have broadband your modem is probably switched on all the time, consuming a few watts," he explains. "We'll be looking at ways to make modems and phones go into a sleep mode when not in use – but from which they can wake up quickly.

Samsung of South Korea is still firming up its ideas. "But memory and displays in communications systems are areas where we can particularly innovate," says engineer Young Mo Kim.

It's not just hardware that will be getting attention – changing user behaviour can also cut power use. For example by making cellphone battery life indicators more accurate or power-saving settings easier to change, users could be encouraged to use their cellphone batteries more efficiently. "The user aspects of communications energy-saving will be a clear focus," says Bell Labs president Jeong Kim.