Google's shock announcement that it may quit China has refocused attention on internet censorship in the country and raised the issue of industrial espionage there.
Most of the attention in the standoff has focused on human rights and censorship, but little attention has been paid to Google's claim that it was the victim of cyber-crime. David Drummond, the company's chief legal officer, said:
In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.
Someone, allegedly traced to China, broke into Google and stole corporate secrets. Furthermore, the search engine's investigation revealed they weren't alone. Drummond continued:
As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least 20 other large companies from a wide range of businesses ?including the internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors ? have been similarly targeted.
Google has refused to implicate the Chinese government. However, in March 2009, security researchers announced that a cyber-espionage network it called GhostNet had broken into government, corporate and private computers in 103 countries. The computers used in the attacks were almost exclusively in China.
As Thomas Crampton, the Asia-Pacific director of Ogilvy PR, pointed out, Google mentioned both the GhostNet report and a public source security review by US defence firm Northup Grumman of China's “Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation”. (You can download the 88-page report in the PDF format and read it for yourself.)
The report was written for the The US-China Eco/> [...]
This week, Google released a new Google Labs project - App Inventor for Android. The product is designed to let anybody (as in non-developers) create Android Apps. This could go one of several ways. It could fade away into the graveyard of Google Labs projects that never became full-fledged products, it could get a handful of users, or it could change the web, the mobile industry, and user interaction with both very significantly.
Would you create your own mobile apps if you didn't need developer skills to do so?Let us know.
It's a simple concept, with enormous implications (even for non-Android users). The introduction of App Inventor has provoked a great deal of discussion around the web and with good reason. The product basically puts app creation into the hands of everyone (though you will still have to learn how to use App Inventor itself, as Jason Kincaid points out. Think Dreameaver for apps.) Businesses will be able to create apps on the fly. Consumers could be able to create apps that cater to their personal preferences, and therefore make their devices more useful.
"To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer," says Google. "App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior."
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