When money trumps ethics
I just read this story over at Computerworld Outback (it’s not actually called that, but it IS in Australia). It looks like there is another initiative for vote by their shareholders to get Google to quit censoring the Internet at the request of pinko-commie regimes like China. There was a similar initiative last year that was voted down by shareholders. Basically, this comes down to the simple fact that Google and the shareholders will do anything to make money, even if that means doing the bidding of the evil Chinese government. I think I am finally going to switch search engines. This makes me sick.
Something else I noticed the other day when I was at a product demonstration of Palo Alto Networks. Part of the functionality is showing top traffic origins and from what countries those came from. Pretty standard. But Taiwan was shown as "Taiwan Province of China". Hmmmm…. One of the Accuvant account managers is from Taiwan, and she also thinks China’s government is evil. She raised a stink before I could (we waited until the clients had left). Of course, one of the guys was a simple local SE and the other a simple local AM. But the other guy was a product manager. He really didn’t have much of an explanation other than it came from some database. We urged them to move that up their chain, but my guess is that it won’t happen. I like their products, but this is just not right.
People, I know this is a security blog, but I think this falls in line pretty well. China is a threat to our security, both in the physical and the cyber world. They don’t keep their people from wreaking havoc across the world by cyber attacks, but they won’t let their people express themselves in any way counter to the Chinese dictatorial, malicious, abhorrent, evil regime. But are spending money, so no one gives a crap. It truly makes me ill.
Vet
