The Chinese snooped on Google and certain Gmail users, along with a number of other U.S. companies, including Adobe.
Now the “Do no evil” boys will no longer censor search engine results—something that, as a very small Google shareholder, I think they should have stopped doing long before this. Google may even end up leaving China.
So what does it all mean from an e-book angle? A bunch of questions arise, and I’d welcome some perspective from TeleRead community members.
–Will this affect Google digitization of Chinese books, and how? Google currently seems on the verge of reaching agreement with some Chinese publishers and writers.
–In the past at least, the Chinese have shown an interest in offering library systems and content. Would you use a system from a country that might bug it to the gills so it could spy on your users? Or maybe try to wipe out your national library someday, having sufficiently looked ahead?
–If Google exits, what kind of signal will this send to other Western companies doing business with China, including those in the e-book industry, which could benefit from Chinese expertise in displays and other areas.
–Getting close to home for Adobe, isn’t it interesting that the Chinese spiked e-mail attachments with malicious PDFs? I wonder about books from Chinese sources, and what kinds of tricks might be inside in the future. See why I hate e-books with executables? I don’t think this is a likely threat from Chinese commercial or library projects, but even as an unlikely threat, it’s scary.
The frustrating thing is that as both a participant in the e-book industry and as a market for tech and content, China has so much potential in the long term. Let’s hope that the Chinese will show some good intent and agree to let Google stop playing Big Bro. Maybe some good can ultimately come out of this mess. I’m rooting for all kinds of cool e-book apps to reach us from China—unbugged, let’s hope. Another argument for open approaches?
Meanwhile Adobe and rivals would do well to step up security efforts. From CNET:
Coincidentally, Adobe on Tuesday patched a zero-day vulnerability in Reader and Acrobat that was discovered in mid-December and was being exploited by attacks in the wild to deliver Trojan horse programs that install backdoor access on computers. Jellenc said he could not say for sure whether that was the vulnerability targeted in the attacks on Google and the others.
Reader was found to be one of the buggiest programs in 2009 and has been the target of numerous zero-day exploits in the wild.
