Entrepreneur Watch

Google's enormous Wi-Fi mistake

IMHO, the biggest mistake Google has made is the series of events that led to its Street View cars inadvertently collecting WiFi data.

 Google has enough trouble living up to its non-evil philosophy. This event shows that it's not as good at managing people's data as the company insists. Now there's really something to point to, a level of incompetence we might expect from the phone companies, those scourges of misinformation and playground ethics dedicated to making our lives miserable in the pursuit of profits.

Apparently the software used in the Street View system included some experimental code from another Google engineer, unaware that the code would collect WiFi data.

Score one against those programmers using their 20 percent time for neat new ideas. 

I still believe Google management and programmers try to do the right thing. But where are the checks and balances that are supposed to, among other things, protect user privacy? Yeah, the Google Programmer's Playground is a great thing. But Google has to make sure that games of strip poker don't make it into the curriculum. Who let this happen?

People and lawyers have been wondering whether Google's freewheeling management style can really keep things under control. Perhaps this indicates that the internal machinery is spinning a little too wildly.

Google tried to delete the data, but now an Oregon court demanded that it hand over that data. That's because of lawsuits alleging that Google invades people's privacy. 

Yeah, that's right, hand over personal information to lawyers in order to help protect privacy. 

This whole thing is nuttier than the inside of a chipmunk's cheeks. 

Read more blogs about Google and other interesting topics at 

RichardLBrandt.com

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Google violates Kansas copyrights

Once again, Google has shown its blatant disregard for international copyright standards.

Earlier today, Google CEO Eric "Oh aren't I smart with my Ph.D©" Schmidt announced that the Mountain View, California company was changing its name to Topeka. 

Why? Because the city of Topeka, Kansas had supposedly given up the rights to that name when it announced it was changing its name to Google.

This argument doesn't wash any better than my uncle Ernie after a night drinking with the hoboes in U.N Plaza in San Francisco.©  

Google, sorry, Topeka, knew that the people of Topeka, sorry, Google, were only planning on making the change temporary.

The Topekans, sorry, Googlans, simply wanted to call attention to the fact that children in that city of 122,000 have never had the luxury of Web-surfing faster than 122K baud, 1,000 times slower than that enjoyed by children in more developed parts of the world like Singapore. The good people of Topeka, sorry, Google, Kansas want to convince Google, sorry, Topeka, to install a Singapore-speed© broadband network in its fair city. 

Google, sorry, Topeka, has promised to do that for any U.S. city willing to change its name to Google, sorry, Topeka, wait, I'm confused now. So that city-that-must-not-be-renamed in Kansas obliged, but only for a month.

I know that Google knew this change was temporary because, in another blatant copyright violation in its attempt to destroy mainstream media, Google CEO Eric "Oh, aren't I smart with my Ph.D" Schmidt's announcement actually linked to a CNN article that described Topeka's, sorry, Google's sad attempt to gain Schmidt's attention so that the children of Kansas might catch up to the technology of the "Singapore Age"©. In that article, mayor Bill "No, I don't have a PH.D."© Bunten said it was only for a month.

CNN, of course, is owned by Rupert Murdoch©, who has complained about Google, sorry, oh to hell with it, Google stealing his intellectual property by linking to his news articles. Dr. so-smart Schmidt is just trying to goad Murdoch© into doing something stupid, like blocking his news articles from Google searches. 

When is Google going to learn that EVERY WORD any American ever writes down or steals from a native American tribe is automatically copyrighted and nobody else has ANY rights to it? Just because Topeka is temporarily relinquishing the name, Schmidt cannot violate the city's copyright©. The city has exclusive rights to that name for 123 years past the death of the city's last living resident.

Please, write to your Congressman and ask the Justice Department to crack down on Google before it becomes any more powerful. Before long, it will have a monopoly on every city name in America©.

Let's face it, if this doesn't prove that Google is evil, nothing will. ©

Deconstructing the 'Operation Aurora' attack on Google in China

Brian Prince at eWeek.com has a slide show analyzing the anatomy the back door in Internet Explorer 6 that allowed the attack on services in China. He has some interesting facts:

* Microsoft apparently has known about the vulnerability since September. (Bad PR for Microsoft to wait until Google pointed it out before letting on about it.)

* A "memory corruption" in IE6 allows attacker to remotely execute code.

* The malware used in the attack is a Trojan Horse called Hydraq. It has also been used against some Adobe Systems products.

* Social Networks like Facebook can be used to trick people into giving up info that helps the attackers.

* Evidence that the attack originated in China is "relatively scant."

This whole episode shows that you shouldn't use old versions like IE6. IE8 is now the current version. Were people at Google using IE6, or was it just people using Google products that stuck with the old browser? Personally, I use Chrome.

Bill Gates vs. Sergey Brin: Succumb to Chinese censorship?

    We don't yet know whether Google will remain in China. Google's top attorney, David Drummond, says the company is negotiating with the Chinese government to ease some controls it maintains on the Internet and may have a decision within weeks.    

    I doubt if much will come of it. There can be no significant progress with China on the censorship issue. China is run by an isolated dictatorship, and the country has never had western-style freedoms. The Chinese Communist Party sees nothing wrong with controlling information and restricting free speech.

    In fact, David Bandurski, an analyst with the China Media project, tells the New York Times that control of information has become even more important to the Chinese government recently. (Yeah, I'd say that's probably since the Olympics, now that it doesn't have to worry so much about world opinion. Remind me again how holding the Olympics there was supposed to make China more open?)

    The Chinese censors are so entrenched they're laughable to outsiders like us. The NYTimes says that the Global Times, backed by the Chinese Communist Party, wrote an article about how the whole Google issue was initiated by the U.S. government as a joint campaign to take over the world:

“As the global landscape is undergoing profound irreversible shifts, the calculated free-Internet scheme is just one step of a U.S. tactic to preserve its hegemonic domination,” Yan Xuetong, who heads the Institute of International Studies at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, said in the article.

(Unfortunately, you can't find that article on the Chinese publication's web site. The most recent article on that site mentioning Yan Xuetong that I can find through a Google search is one dated August 10, 2009: (Global Times - Think tank scholar has more fresh ideas than old shoes).)

And I didn't even know that old shoes had fresh ideas. 

    That puts Google into a Chinese Pickle. If it remains in China now, it will take a big PR hit. If it does back out, Microsoft gets the PR hit because Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have been shrugging their shoulders and asking What's So Bad About Censorship? Bill's latest comment to the NYTimes: If Google pulls out of China, "What point are they making?"

    So Google will not be able to claim it has made any progress with the Chinese government in the next few weeks. Sergey Brin has never been comfortable going along with the regime and would certainly like to abandon ship there. But if Google does leave China behind, it loses all chance of trying to improve the flow of information within China. That's a task that has but a sliver of a chance of success in the next decade or two anyway, but who knows what will happen in the next few decades?  

    But here's the real problem. Google--and all major online services--are voluntary censors. The Chinese must find it strange that Google can't publish books in the U.S. and Europe that are out of print because of copyright laws. In Germany, Google must censor neo-Nazi sites from its search engine (and who complains about that?) 

    In fact, some people complain when Google doesn't censor offensive stuff. A couple of years ago, management refused to block the search engine from pointing people to an anti-Semitic site called JewWatch. Bloggers angrily decried that decision as essentially condoning evil. Sergey (who is Jewish) publicly defended the company's position as an anti-censorship stance. And, of course, all the publicity increased traffic to the offensive site.

    But sometimes, Sergey feels the company has no choice but to remove material. Several years ago, for example, the Church of Scientology made a copyright claim against an anti-Scientology site that had excerpted text from the Church's writings. Sergey saw it as a free speech issue but had to back down because the anti-Scientology site did, removing the material rather than fighting.

    So who is right? What's the right thing to do? Unfortunately this is close to a no-win game for Google. The best it can do is make the issue a loser for Microsoft. 

    Unless Sergey can pull a fresh idea out of his shoe.

Google, Obama Administration team up against Chinese censorship. Go Hillary!

Why is Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton following up on Google's report of a cyber-attack from China and its threat to withdraw from Chinese soil with her own remarks condemning the country's policies?

Makes you wonder what conversations may have gone on behind closed doors between President Barack Obama and one of his science/technology advisors, Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Secretary Clinton has called for the Chinese government to conduct a "transparent" probe into who was behind the attacks. (WSJ summary) Yeah, good luck with that.

For good measure, she threw in the names of other countries that love to censor too much, including Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam. Sounds like a list Google could have provided, as it has done in certain books. 

Can there be any doubt that everybody thinks or knows the attack was perpetrated by the Chinese government? I mean, come on, if the search for dissidents doesn't show it, Secretary Clinton's involvement has to. Chinese officials think so, and are pissed. (Another WSJ article)

"We urge the U.S. side to respect the facts, and to stop using the so-called Internet freedom issue to make groundless charges against China," Ma Zhaoxu, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Friday in a statement on the ministry's Web site. 

Secretary Clinton sent a message to the Chinese that businesses are hampered without a free flow of information.

"Increasingly, U.S. companies are making the issue of information freedom a greater consideration in their business decisions," she said.

Sounds like a message to China, like President Obama's earlier statements in support of Google, that the U.S. government approves of the threat to withdraw.

Perhaps this is a way for the U.S. government to encourage other U.S. companies to also put pressure on China to change its ways. 

I don't think Microsoft will, though. Steve Ballmer displayed a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease by discounting this whole issue.

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NOTE: I'm collecting updates on this story at my site, RichardLBrandt.com

Microsoft creates a patch to block Google's Chinese 'Aurora' attackers

Of course, Microsoft doesn't call it Aurora. It's the "Google Attack."

Microsoft says it was an old version of Internet Explorer (IE 6) that was vulnerable, anyway.

The patch is due tomorrow (Thursday Jan 20, 2010, in case you're reading this next year when there's another Microsoft security problem.) According to Microsoft senior security program manager Jerry Bryant, the patch

 "addresses the vulnerability related to recent attacks against Google and a small subset of corporations. Once applied, customers are protected against the known attacks that have been widely publicized."

Yeah. Why so much publicity over an attack that may have been perpetrated by an oppressive government against civil rights advocates and a small subset of 20 to 34 corporations doing business in China? 

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Note: I'm keeping track of this issue at my Website, RichardLBrandt.com

Open letter to Steve Ballmer: Leave China if Google does

Dear Steve,

    I've known you for a long time. Long and closely enough to know that you're not so much the killer bulldog your reputation. makes you out to be. You're actually a smart, thoughtful, interesting and likable guy in person, albeit a ruthless negotiator and hard-hitting executive who plays the game of business like war.

    But, man, you really blew it when you responded to questions about whether Microsoft might back out of China, as Google is considering doing in light of the cyber attacks from there. You have been quoted as saying,

"We're attacked every day from all parts of the world, and I think everybody else is too. We didn't see anything out of the ordinary."

    Whoa. Nothing out of the ordinary? How about the following? 

• According to Google's announcement of the attack, "it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different."
• Google won't say it publicly, but others have expressed strong belief that this attack came from the Chinese government.
  
• Google also notes that "a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists." That includes a young woman at Stanford who has been publicly critical of China's stance toward Tibet. That lends credence to the government attack theory.
• So does the sophistication of the attack. The New York Times notes that "people familiar with the investigation" -- which is often a euphemism the press uses to mean the company itself (Google) -- say the attacks were aimed at source code repositories. 
• McAfee says the attack exploited an Internet Explorer flaw, a fact that will not be lost on people reading your "what's the big deal?" statement. 
• McAfee also says the malware allows the "attacker to perform reconnaissance and gain complete control over the compromised system." This ain't your teenage kid's usual hack. 

I don't know if leaving China is a good idea or not. But Google has gotten enormous criticism for years just for being in the market -- criticism that has skipped right past Microsoft because Google has been a better target.

Suddenly, Microsoft -- and you -- looks like the evil empire again.

Here's what the vast majority of people think: Microsoft is partly culpable because of the IE hole, is turning a deaf ear to the speculation that this could be a government attack, and wants to exploit any withdrawal by Google to gain market share and revenues in China, to hell with any ethical stance.

It's certainly what I think. And that's not good for the long-term future of Bing.

I'm maintaining updates on this story at my site, RichardLBrandt.com:

McAfee: Chinese cyber-attack Aurora is Microsoft's fault. Sort of.

China: Foreigners please come do business here. Our Internet is "open"

White House: Hooray for Google! Microsoft: We weren't attacked

Google stock down, Baidu up

What do/don't we know about what happened?

McAfee: "Aurora" attack on Google was due to a Microsoft IE hole

In a blog post, McAfee CTO George Kurtz names the attack "Aurora." He says the attackers exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in Internet Explorer."We informed Microsoft about this vulnerability and Microsoft is expected to publish an advisory on the matter soon.: Attackers chose a few people within an organization to attack (he suspects they chose people with access to intellectual property). The attack looks like a trusted source wants you to click on a link (that old scam?) which then opens a back door that allows attackers to "gain complete control over the compromised system. The attacker can now identify high value targets and start to siphon off valuable data from the company."

UPDATE ON AURORA 1/15/2010 9:30AM

Taylor Buley at Forbes has a nice update on Aurora today.

Taylor talked to Ed Skoudis, a cybersecurity researcher with IntelGuardians for some perspective on IE vulnerabilities, something that most experts thought was disappearing as IE aged. Not.

It was surprising to realize that this back door had been sitting there, possibly for years, and yet nobody had found or snuck through it before. The Chinese hackers were either "very clever or very lucky," says Skoudis.

Dmitri Alperovitch at McAfee votes for clever. The code was very sophisticated and written from scratch, not kluged out of some cookie cutter code.

Microsoft admits that the IE back entrance was "one of the vectors" in the attack.

Time to stop patching and start rewriting these old programs from scratch.

I'm keeping track of updates on this story at my site:

McAfee: Chinese cyber-attack Aurora is Microsoft's fault. Sort of.

China: Foreigners please come do business here. Our Internet is "open"

White House: Hooray for Google! Microsoft: We weren't attacked

Google stock down, Baidu up

What do/don't we know about what happened?

Google data stolen, China implicated, execs really pissed. What exactly was taken?

NOTE: FOR ONGOING COVERAGE OF THIS AND OTHER GOOGLE TOPICS, PLEASE VISIT MY WEB SITE.

RichardLBrandt.com

Big news from Google today. It has been detecting cyber attacks from China and a theft of "intellectual property." Google executives are so pissed off that they have decided to stop their self-censorship and to do as they promised several years ago and re-evaluate whether it will remain there at all. It is highly likely it will not, because China will never accept an uncensored search engine.

There are several things to say about this.

How much data was stolen?

First, exactly how big were the attacks, and what data may have been compromised either at Google or at the other companies where Google detected attacks? 

The announcement of the attacks in the Google blog says there was "theft of intellectual property from Google." The only thing it mentions is that a little info about the creation of Gmail accounts, such as the dates they were created and subject line, was compromised. Did the attackers get any other intellectual property from Google besides this info?

A Google spokesperson tells me, "So far we don't have any evidence of anything else" being taken. But phrase "so far" means they could still find more later. Also, the spokesperson says Google does not know what, if anything, may have been taken from or compromised at any of the other companies where it detected the attacks.

Should Google get rid of data sooner to protect privacy?

This shows that data is vulnerable, even when protected with Google's sophisticated safeguards. Google keeps data for nine months, but privacy and human rights advocates say it should be less and will certainly point to this example as a reason to cut the retention time.

But there's a dilemma here. On one hand, reducing the time information is kept would reduce the amount of vulnerable info. 

But on the other, Google's retained data may have helped it discover the attack. 

In an interview for my book on Google, I discussed both China and privacy issues with Google lawyer Nicole Wong. We discussed why Google keeps personal information for nine months. She spoke primarily of "denial of service" attacks, but it should apply to others. According to Wong:

"The fact of the matter is that the person successfully attacking us today has probably been trying for two years. So when we go back into the logs for a substantial amount of time, we're able to detect the pattern we have today."

Wong said that's one of the reasons they do not want to get rid of data any sooner -- that nine months is already a compromise. 18 months would be better.

Analyzing whatever data Google and the other companies have retained will now better equip them to better prevent similar attacks in the future. This debate will only intensify.

Were Microsoft and Yahoo also attacked? Who else?

Who were the other companies attacked? Google says it detected at least 20 other companies were similarly attacked, and the New York Times hears from experts that the number may be 34. Google, of course, would never reveal the names of the other companies it informed of the attacks, but it says: 

      "a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted."      

It would make sense that they were companies doing business in China. Companies with similar services at Google -- search engines and email systems -- seem obvious choices. Microsoft, Yahoo, Baidu? (But those are just guesses.) How safe is the info at any company doing business in China? 

Will any of the other companies that were attacked admit it? Google's stock dropped 1.77% today. Because of this news? Will other companies risk taking the hit? Is anyone else willing to leave China as a result.

I'll give you a hint on that one: No.

Did the Chinese government do it?

This was a sophisticated, well-funded attack. The New York Times says that servers in Taiwan and Texas appear to have been involved. Google's description of some of the attacks -- "highly sophisticated", "at least twenty other companies" targeted, the "primary goal" being trying to get info about "Chinese human rights activists" -- certainly suggests this was an attack by the Chinese government. Somebody had a lot of technology, time and money to do this.  The New York Times thinks so:

"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 its actions."

The U.S. government has to be investigating this as well. Another guess.

Google is pissed!

One thing is for sure. Google management -- and particularly Sergey Brin, who has always had misgivings about the decision to enter China -- are really pissed. The attacks tipped the debate in favor of withdrawing. Now I wonder if other companies will follow suit.

I'll give you a hint on that one also: See above.