Displaying items by tag: Dragonfly

Google has finally confirmed that it has killed plans for setting up a censored search engine in China soon after US President Donald Trump tweeted that his administration would be looking into claims by businessman Peter Thiel about Google's ties to China.

A Republican Senator from Missouri has written to Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, asking him to address the company's refusal to work with the US Department of Defence while at the same time working with China on artificial intelligence.

Google is quietly continuing to work on a project to set up a censored search engine in China, a report claims, with employees saying that they have been tracking code changes which indicate that work is quietly taking place.

Google's attempts to launch a censored search engine in China appear to have been put on the backburner after the company shut down a data analysis system used for building the engine.

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has told the US House Judiciary Committee that the company currently has no plans to launch a censored search engine in China, while simultaneously admitting that such a project had been underway for a year and that more than 100 people had worked on it.

The leadership at Google considered a project to launch a censored search engine in China so sensitive that they would only talk about it and took no notes during meetings to reduce any paper trail, two company sources have told The Intercept, adding that the privacy team was kept in the dark about the plan.

More than 200 Google employees have published a letter, calling on the company to cancel its proposed censored search engine for China, a project that has been named Dragonfly.

Google's chief economist Dr Hal Varian is of the opinion that his employer should not pay "excessive" tax on its Australian revenue because this money is derived due to its "intellectual capital" which mostly resides in California.

In what are Google's first public comments about its plan to launch a censored search engine in China, chief executive Sundar Pichai has told a conference that what has been developed so far is "very promising".

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has avoided answering pointed questions posed by six US senators about the company's plan to launch a censored search engine in China, instead resorting to broad generalities such as the claim that the move would have “broad benefits inside and outside of China".

Google's plan to launch a censored search engine in China has attracted attention from the US Government, with Vice-President Mike Pence calling on the company to drop the plan.

A former software engineer at Google claims he was taken off a project to write code to censor news articles in China in 2006 when he refused to do so.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has claimed that he had no knowledge of a plan to build a censored search engine for the Chinese market before it was leaked to media. His claim was made during an employees' meeting that ended in an anti-climax after it was discovered that someone was leaking the proceedings to a reporter who was live-tweeting it.

Managers at Google have been trying to shut down access to any material connected to a project to build a censored mobile app for China, The Intercept  reports, citing company insiders.

An independent security consultant has dismissed claims by Symantec that a new wave of attacks is taking aim at energy targets in the US and Europe, saying such probes are "meant to demonstrate capabilities, while offering no real threat to the distributed US energy grid".

Security firm Symantec claims to have evidence that a new wave of attacks is taking aim at energy targets in Europe and North America with the intention of affecting operations.