Although I obviously had nothing to do with Google’s decision vis-a-vis China, having only started working there for a week, I was definitely glad to see it and it made me proud to be able to say that I work there. Kudos to Google’s management team for having made (IMHO) the right decision. Hopefully Yahoo and Microsoft will consider carefully what the ethical implications of their collusion and collaboration with the Chinese government’s attempt to control free speech and the human rights implications of the same.
I have my own opinion regarding the IETF’s decision to meet in Beijing, since as we’ve seen with the Search Engine industry’s attempt to accommodate the Chinese, engagement doesn’t necessarily always lead to openness and goodness. All I can suggest is that those people who do decide to travel to that meeting be very careful about what sort of message they want to send with respect to China, as well as being very careful about protecting themselves against targetted information security attacks.
No related posts.
January 12th, 2010 at 10:53 pm
Congratulations on the new job! This issue was my biggest complaint about the company during my tenure there and while I wish they hadn’t gotten into the position they are now I’m blown away by their response.
January 13th, 2010 at 7:15 am
Considering Google’s behavior in Brazil, I have to say you would have thousands of reasons to not be proud of being a “Googler”.
January 13th, 2010 at 7:26 am
Hi,
the link to the Google news is broken (wrong text in wrong field?)
Regards
January 13th, 2010 at 8:20 am
congrats ted. what on are you going to work there?
January 13th, 2010 at 12:41 pm
oh please, this has nothing to do with human rights and is all about china stealing trade secrets. get rid of the “do no evil” mantra. you’ll see much clearer then.
January 13th, 2010 at 1:44 pm
I have mixed feelings about it, having spent 3 months in the Google Beijing office. I’m mostly worried about friends there who may be losing their jobs soon.
January 13th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
@3: Icewinter,
Oops, thanks for pointing that out. I’ve fixed the link.
January 13th, 2010 at 2:58 pm
@4: Bzzz,
I’m going to be working on kernel, file system, and storage stuff. Ext4 will definitely be one of the first things I’ll be working on, see:
http://lists.openwall.net/linux-ext4/2010/01/04/8
January 14th, 2010 at 2:55 am
cool, lucky you
wish you the best.
January 14th, 2010 at 11:42 am
Bzzz, if you’re interested in feeling lucky
too, drop me an e-mail. Google has a bunch of interesting kernel projects, and we can definitely use some more talented kernel hackers. As Mike Waychison mentioned at the Kernel Summit in Tokyo, there is an effort underway so that Google can start tracking mainline much more closely, perhaps rebasing as often as every three months.
This may be, as the management gurus would say, a big hairy audacious goal, but I think it’s really cool that Google aims to do things like that. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s pretty indicative of the internal engineering culture. I’m definitely glad to be working there!
January 14th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
thanks ted, i’ll have that in mind. it’s kind of *interesting* time here in s.n
January 15th, 2010 at 2:26 am
Thanks Ted for speaking out for freedom.
Congrats on the new work challenge too.
January 15th, 2010 at 6:16 am
[...] comentó recientemente en su blog su nuevo puesto en Google, donde está orgulloso de contribuir al proceso de migración de ext2 a [...]
January 15th, 2010 at 9:44 am
Ted I’m a journalist. I was looking at your page (http://thunk.org/tytso/) to prepare a Note to our blog and seems you forgot to update there (still saying IBM there).
Congratulations and good luck!
January 15th, 2010 at 11:29 am
OH NOES, YOU DRANK THE RAINBOW KOOL-AID
.
Congrats on the new job!
January 15th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
[...] one of ext4’s lead developer, Theodore Ts’o is also a Google employee, notes SJVN indicating that Google would most likely use his expertise in further getting even more [...]
January 15th, 2010 at 4:10 pm
[...] comentó recientemente en su blog su nuevo puesto en Google, donde está orgulloso de contribuir al proceso de migración de ext2 a [...]
January 15th, 2010 at 4:17 pm
[...] expressed enthusiasm for his new job and pointed to a recent mailing list post by a Google engineer which [...]
January 15th, 2010 at 11:03 pm
[...] a statement on his blog, Ts’o expressed enthusiasm for his new job and pointed to a recent mailing list [...]
January 16th, 2010 at 1:56 am
technology is technology,
politics is politics.
Do not serve as a slave for company.
January 16th, 2010 at 9:30 am
mmm… just freedom mantra stuffs? business is the first thing for concerning.
Congrats though later!
January 16th, 2010 at 9:05 pm
I hope the threat of losing Google will begin some change. The Chinese people may see this as a horrible blow. This may be the beginning of more openness in Chinese society. I can dream, can’t I?
January 17th, 2010 at 2:09 am
You mean you are proud of to be a traitor of the Linux world
January 17th, 2010 at 3:52 am
[...] Google isn’t just using vanilla Ext4. The company recently hired Ted T’so, the well-known Linux kernel developer, who also happens to be the leading Ext4 programmer. I think [...]
January 17th, 2010 at 7:52 am
妈的，看球不懂
January 17th, 2010 at 11:53 pm
I think this is great news, and I hope some change for the better happens form this. Will Eric Schmidt be taking back his statement last month that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”? That seems 180 degrees from this new stance regarding China…
January 18th, 2010 at 5:05 am
@20, @21, @23, et. al:
Hmm, I guess the Baidu (or is it the Chinese secret police
are out in force.
I will have to disagree; there is a strong moral side to technology. Werner von Brown, inventor of the rocket, whose technology which was used by the Nazi’s to kill many innocents in London, was very harshly criticized by Tom Lehrer for having the attitude, “Once the Rockets go up, who care where they come down? It’s not my department, says Werver von Brown.”
In America, I am very fortunate to have many freedoms. One of these freedoms is the choice to choose my employer. One of the reasons why I chose my current employer was because of its strong moral stand regarding, “don’t be evil”, which I’ve always respected. Yes, it has compromised on occasion, including being willing to censor information on behalf of the Chinese government when it launched google.cn. But it was done in a thoughtful manner, with its reasons carefully spelled out. One of those reasons was a hope that it would help ease China into being more free with information, and to become less evil. So I consider Google’s senior management as being very thoughtful, and very willing to admit that perhaps they were naive in their hopes, and that perhaps in retrospect cooperating with the censors with respect to google.cn was maybe a wrong choice after all.
January 18th, 2010 at 5:25 am
@26: Jered,
So I obviously don’t speak for Eric Schmidt, but it seems to me that it’s not mutually exclusive with Google’s current decision vis-a-vis China. Does saying, “Be conservative in what you send” automatically stand in opposition to “be liberal in what you accept”? In fact, both design principles are important, and implementations need to follow bothl.
So yes, protecting user’s privacy is very important, and companies should strive to do as much as possible to protect their users’ privacy. But at the same time, people should be aware that privacy protections are never absolute. Especially with the Patriot Act, the U.S. government can issue a National Security Letter forcing your ISP to hand over data (including stored e-mail) over to the government. And even before the Patriot act, the U.S. government tried to use systems like “Carnivore” which snooped on unencrypted e-mail traffic between unwitting users.
So I view it as a “both/and”. Users need to be conscious of the fact that despite the best efforts of their ISP, a government could try to hack their service provider or a government can issue legal orders which might have to be honored, and sometimes with gag orders attached so the user whose privacy was violated are never told about the supeana.
At the same time, the ISP needs to protect protect their user’s privacy, as much as they can.
January 18th, 2010 at 5:57 am
Free speech and the human rights in China is an impossible dream.
January 18th, 2010 at 11:06 am
[...] a statement on his blog, Ts’o expressed enthusiasm for his new job and pointed to a recent mailing list [...]
January 18th, 2010 at 11:29 am
@28: Ted,
I certainly like your interpretation and hope that’s the case. Some official clarification would be nice given the outrage after the interview, oh well…
January 18th, 2010 at 8:13 pm
I’d like to see you think so, and I personally appreciate that. But you know, I’m from China and I know Google had known that would happen when it decided to extend its business to this country, and it had done many things to make China gov happy in past few years. So I hope you inside guys can do sth to make the search engine giant think more before making similiar decisions in future, so that you can be much prouder to be a Googler.
Thanks!
January 19th, 2010 at 5:38 am
Google se actualiza a ext4…
Hace unos días conocíamos la decisión de Google de migrar su infraestructura al sistema de ficheros ext4, abandonando el antiguo ext2 que venían usando hasta ahora.
Entre los sistemas de ficheros candidatos estuvieron también XFS (de Silicon Graph……
January 23rd, 2010 at 1:04 am
[...] operates “below” the Google File System. Google tweaks are likely with Ted T’so enjoying Odwalla at the [...]
February 16th, 2010 at 11:07 pm
ted, what do you think about the decision of disclosing people’s contact list on gmail to the other people on contact list? with that buzz opt-out scheme.
February 22nd, 2010 at 6:39 pm
@35: Elias,
It’s clear that the Buzz folks made some mistakes in how they rolled it out, and they reacted pretty quickly to fix those mistakes. That being said, there was a lot of confusion and misinformation about what was actually going on. People started seeing other people’s “buzzes” automatically, once it was rolled out to their gmail account. But their contact list was not disclosed until they created a Buzz profile. The way it works is the first time you post a buzz, or respond to a buzz, a dialog box pops up saying that before you can use buzz, you have to create a buzz profile. As part of that process, the user was asked whether or not they wanted their buzz follower list to be made public on their buzz profile.
So gmail contact lists were never automatically exposed as part of the buzz rollout. The user actually had to use buzz, create a buzz profile, and at that point they had an opportunity to make their list of followers (which was pre-populated from their frequest gmail correspondents) private. That was how things were when the Buzz service was initially rolled out.
Now, the default was to make the list of followers public, and some users may have not read through all of the text on the profile creation page carefully. There’s always the risk of someone who says, yeah, yeah, yeah, ignore the fine print, just let me post the darned buzz, and who therefore clicked through the buzz profile page without realizing the consequences of their act. But nothing would have been disclosed unless they first used Buzz and clicked through the buzz profile creation.
So the first fix, which went in very quickly, was simply an HTML or CSS fix that just simply made the “do you want your list of followers to be made public” much more prominent (it may have also included the list of followers; I’m not sure, since I didn’t play with the public Buzz system during the initial rollout, and what we dogfooded internally wasn’t completely the same as the Buzz system). Later fixes added much more fine grained control, and I believe changed the default to be private. So at this point I believe Buzz’s defaults are much more conservative than some of the other social networking sites out there.
I wasn’t involved with the Buzz rollout, so this is just a personal guess, but I suspect that the Buzz team wanted to avoid the mistakes made by the Wave team of doing a very slow and gradual rollout. First of all, with social networking sites, you lose a lot of power unless all or most circle can participate, so if you restrict who can participate to a very tiny number, the initial users don’t get a lot out of the service, and it’s hard to make further improvements because it restricts how people can use it. Secondly, the initial slow rollout of Google Wave meant that people’s expectations got built up way out of proportion of what it was, and that let down also led to a lot of critics complaining that Wave didn’t meant their very heightened set of expectations.
So the Buzz rollout was a bit more tuned down (IMO) in terms of not making people think that this would revolutionize the way we work, solve world hunger, etc., etc., and they decided to roll it out very quickly (over few hours instead of weeks or months as was done with Wave). The downside of doing the latter is that issues that might have been caught in a slower rollout snowball out of control, and then people started extrapolating based on a flawed understanding of the issues involved into horror stories about people who did nothing having their contact lists exposed — something which absolutely did not happen.
I wish they could have done a better job anticipating the potential privacy problem, and I think that’s an attitude that is shared with everyone inside Google. But the problem is while you can intellectually know that you have to keep things stupid simple, stories such as the recent example of the many Facebook users who realized that putting “facebook login” into their Google search bar and who don’t understand what a “URL” means and who can’t distinguish a private blog entry from the Facebook login page still manage to surprise us (and, to be honest, amuse those of us who are computer literate; try reading through the comments to that blog entry!).
So issues such as not realizing that people would click through the Buzz profile creation step without realizing that what they were doing is something that might not occur to someone who is more computer literate and privacy sensitive. At the same time, if you put the warning in 40 point flashing type, you might end up scaring people unduly, especially if it’s something they are doing every day on Facebook when they play games grooming harm animals or whatever. So getting it right is non-trivial.
I am glad that the Buzz team reacted quickly to fix the problems once they discovered. Do I wish that they had gotten it right from the very beginning? Of course!