Two Strange Stories
by JS
I first heard about the church bombings in Malaysia on NPR a few days ago. The story, which is still not at all clear, involves Muslim and Malay opposition to the use of the the Malay word for God in newsletters for Christian churches. As I understand it, this particular term has been in common use among Christians for many years in that country. The transition from status quo of peace to a status quo of violence is so surreal that I suspect some kind of tail wagging the dog style actions on the part of the government (speculation that NPR took pains to keep out of the story, but Al Jazeera doesn’t hesitate to air in the linked clip).
Even worse, maybe we have some kind of clandestine effort to destabilize the region or the balance of tensions between Christians and Muslims in predominantly Muslim countries. This seems like a strange story any way you slice it.
The next is this highly understated announcement by Google that cleverly accuses China of state sponsored cyberspace attacks on American corporations. Google’s response is to stop censoring their search engine and possibly shut down Google’s Chinese operations. This strikes me as the wrong response. For one, I’m not sure Google has the kind of dominance in China that it has in the United States, so as a practical matter, leaving the market may only generate something of a “so what?” amongst the Chinese user base. If Google really wants to engage the Chinese on the issue of human rights, why give up such a valuable foothold for conducting counter espionage against the Chinese authority? Seems like Google is throwing away a valuable set of tools in exchange for some kind of glitzy PR.
Comments
[...] sofisticado” de origen chino sobre sus infraestructuras. … Posted by Apiscam at 16:21 depth first search » Two Strange Stories I first heard about the church bombings in Malaysia on NPR a few days ago. The story, which is [...]
I think it’s pretty amazing that a large corporation is trying to embargo China. I think it’s silly and probably won’t do much of anything. Still, it feels like something out of a William Gibson novel.
its naive to think that a corporation could do counter espionage against a country. Most corporate ethics policies prevent that sort of behavior completely. It would only happen if the US gov’t was involved.
Well, I’m not sure “naive” is the right word to apply here. I’m merely speculating. I suppose I sort of assumed that the US government would be involved, but the distinction between who is doing the spying is more of a nominal distinction. In the current legal climate, it has no practical importance. Does ATT monitor internet traffic? The answer may be a technical “no,” but they provide all the infrastructure and most of the expertise that the government brings to bear on the problem.