Google has failed to renew its internet content provider licence in China, which expired at the end of March. This will not affect its Google.cn search engine, which has already redirected its traffic to servers in Hong Kong. Other services, such as Google Maps – which are still held on mainland servers – are expected to be transferred over to its Hong Kong operations shortly.
A publisher should not be held responsible for a libel created by the out-of-context publication of material by a search engine, the High Court has ruled. Even if a snippet has a libellous meaning neither the search engine nor the publisher should be liable, the Court said. Sam Budu took the case against the BBC over articles published on a website in 2004 which detailed his dealings with the Cambridgeshire police. A first article on the BBC’s website said that a person had been denied a job when it was discovered he was an illegal immigrant. The second and third articles named Budu but detailed his counter-claims that he was in the UK legally. Budu sued over both stories, and the snippets which appeared in Google, arguing that they constituted a separate publication of the articles.
Google’s Security blog has revealed that a number of malicious malware attacks on Vietnamese computers have been specifically designed to spy on and target “blogs containing messages of political dissent”. Google described this example of internet hacktivism as a direct attempt to “squelch opposition” to a Chinese-backed bauxite mining project in Vietnam which has divided public opinion.
Yesterday Chinese users of the Google.cn search engine faced problems accessing results for normal terms such as “dog” or “home”. Although Google has redirected traffic to its uncensored servers in Hong Kong, internet users in mainland China still face the Great Firewall, which bans access to sites containing sensitive information. The glitch was caused by Google’s new coding which incorporated “gs_rfai” into certain search terms. The letters “RFA” was mistaken to be an acronym for Radio Free Asia, a site banned by the Great Firewall.