Google Runs Into Chinas Great Firewall - WSJ.com

This article reports on an outage experienced by Google users in China. At first Google thought it was due to a technical issue, but now think that it was an intentional outage caused by the Great Firewall of China. It seems likely that this was a retaliation to punish Google for its statements and actions.

From the Official Google Blog (follow link for the whole post):

So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk. Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over.

I would expect to see China censor Google.cn very quickly (which would prevent the re-direct to Google.hk). It will be interesting to see if China will then take the next step of censoring Google.hk and possibly other Google properties around the world. It would be easy for Google to set up any or all of them to return results in chinese if the browser is detected to be configured in that language.

Schneier on Security: Disabling Cars by Remote Control

This is just too good. It is a great example of where giving others power over your security, which they then centralize in a single place, leads to compromise with nasty failure modes.

In this case, a disgruntled former employee uses a system to disable over 1000 vehicles.

In this article “I don’t bleepin’ believe it” ComputerWorld reports on a UK insurer raising rates on social network users. The reason points back to something I have been talking about for some time. People post travel information to their social network sites. They say when they will be away from home, and for how long. This is perfect fodder for thieves, who can typically also collect enough information about the posters to identify them and find where they live.

This is why I don’t blog, Twitter, or otherwise post about conferences I am going to, even though it would be great to use social networks to connect with folks at the conference or in the conference city.