Google announced yesterday that it is now taking a second look at their operations in China due to attacks on their infrastructure that originated from China.
According to a Yahoo spokesperson that spoke to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo is standing by Google. "We stand aligned that these kinds of attacks are deeply disturbing and strongly believe that the violation of user privacy is something that we as Internet pioneers must all oppose" said the Yahoo representative.
The spokesperson declined to comment on whether Yahoo was also a target of the attacks that aimed to access Gmail accounts of a number of Chinese human rights activists. As part of Google"s investigations, the company has uncovered that dozens of US, European and Chinese human rights advocates have also had their accounts accessed routinely by third parties. These accounts appear to have been accessed through phishing scams, rather than a security breach at Google themselves. As always, up to date anti-virus and anti-malware software is the best solution to protect against this.
Google is now taking a second look at their operations in China, particularly Google.cn, where they currently offer censored search results as part of an agreement with China"s government. Google is now taking a big step by informing the government of China that it is no longer willing to provide censored results, and will be entering into discussions regarding how it can do this without breaking Chinese law. Should Google find themselves unable to reach an agreement, they may shut down Google.cn, and close their offices in China.