The drama between China and Google continues, but Yahoo and Vietnam are getting dragged into the international investigation as new revelations come out of Asia. Google’s search engine was not accessible across most of China late Tuesday. Although neither Google nor the Chinese government has confirmed the source of the disruption, some are assuming Internet censors in the communist nation are blocking the site.
Google has offered mixed possibilities. The Internet giant initially thought the root cause was a change it made to the string of characters that accompanies search requests. That change, Google thought, could have prevented the queries from passing through China’s filters. Later, however, Google announced those changes had been made a week earlier and put the issue back on China.
Yahoo E-mails Hacked
The outages came in the aftermath of Google refusing to censor results on Google.cn. The Internet giant started directing search traffic to Google.com.hk last week. Google is offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese via its Hong Kong servers.
The drama began in January when Google revealed a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on its corporate infrastructure that originated from China in December. That attack, Google said, resulted in theft of the search giant’s intellectual property.
But Google is not the only Internet company experiencing issues in Asia. The Yahoo e-mail accounts of journalists and activists who deal with issues related to China were hacked.
Beginning March 25, some journalists in Taiwan and China could not log into their Yahoo e-mail accounts. According to Reuters, World Uyghur Congress, an exile group that has accused China of ethnic separatism, was among the affected organizations. Yahoo has publicly condemned the attacks.
“China and those promoting the interests of the Chinese government against dissent and criticism are now waging what appears to be a battle against Google and the Internet more broadly,”…