Skip to main content

Over 400 Google employees sign letter opposing censored Chinese search app

By

More than 400 Google employees have signed an open letter urging Google to cancel an in-development Chinese search app, on the grounds that it will enable censorship and human rights violations by the Chinese government. The letter was published yesterday with 11 signatories; as of this afternoon, it has 407, most of which are from software engineers. It follows an internal letter circulated earlier this year, which garnered 1,400 signatures.

The letter opposes Project Dragonfly, a China-focused version of Google search that would reportedly block certain search terms and make it easy for the government to surveil users’ searches. Google has repeatedly declined comment on Dragonfly, saying that its work is “exploratory” and that it is “not close to launching a search product in China.”

Dragonfly has drawn criticism from outside Google; among others, Vice President Mike Pence condemned it last month. It’s also garnered opposition internally, among employees who say Google executives have ignored their concerns. “Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be,” the letter says. “Dragonfly in China would establish a dangerous precedent at a volatile political moment, one that would make it harder for Google to deny other countries similar concessions.”



from The Verge - Teches https://ift.tt/2Slo8gh
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The PlayStation Classic has a secret debug menu that can be reached with specific keyboards

By
Just a day after the release of the PlayStation Classic , the Retro Gaming Arts YouTube channel has discovered that you can access the emulator’s settings menu by plugging a keyboard into a free USB slot and hitting the Esc key. Doing so reveals a host of settings for the built-in open-source PCSX ReARMed emulator, potentially allowing access to options, including save states, controls, and cheats. The discovery has raised hope that some of the criticisms of the retro console , such as a limited game library and poor image quality, could soon be addressed with third-party modding. In the discovered menus, an option to “Load CD Image” is clearly visible, which suggests it might be possible to load additional games or perhaps just the better-performing 60Hz NTSC variants. An option to enable scanlines, the horizontal lines that allow an LCD screen to emulate the look of a traditional CRT monitor, is also present. Despite the discovery, it’s unlikely that the hardware limitations o
Post a Comment
Read more

With Toys R Us gone, Amazon wants to send out a holiday toy catalog of its own

By
Now that Amazon has helped kill off Toys R Us , it wants to borrow the retailer’s iconic print holiday toy catalog . The online behemoth is interested in creating its own print catalog to mail out and also be handed out at Whole Foods (which it owns), according to Bloomberg . Toys R Us was plagued with billions in debt when permanently closed last month — in part because of competition from online stores like Amazon . For many kids, its “Big Book” toy catalog was a staple of fall. The 100-page catalog would arrive near the end of October for kids to look through and create a wishlist before December. Now that the retailer is done, various companies are trying to scoop up the customers that headed to their shelves every December. Party City, for example, will open 50 pop-up toy shops for the holidays. Target will have more store space for toys . It’s just especially amusing that Amazon, having helped kill off these physical retailers, is trying to learn from them to make even mor
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazon’s plans for a New York office are under new scrutiny

By
A month ago, when Amazon announced that it would build regional offices in New York and Virginia at great expense to the taxpayers there, I wrote that it had misunderstood the moment : Perhaps the furor over Amazon’s regional offices will blow over. But it’s hard not to feel today as if the company misread the room — overestimating the public’s appetite for a billion-dollar giveaway to one of the world’s biggest companies, and underestimating the public’s ability to raise hell on- and offline. Amazon may yet feel that pain, in the long run. Today, Amazon met the room: 150 protesters who showed up to the first New York City Council hearing about the plan. According to reports from the scene, demonstrators’ concerns start with the $3 billion in incentives that New York plans to give Amazon in exchange for locating there — and, it says, creating 25,000 jobs. Here’s Leticia Miranda in BuzzFeed : ”You’re worth a trillion dollars,” New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson told the
Post a Comment
Read more