Google Project Dragonfly, not dead? *Tinfoil Hat Time*

[Trik'Stari]

So, it would appear that Googles project Dragonfly, (a project to create a censored search engine for use in China) might not be dead, at least according to a group of Google employees who took it upon themselves 

 

Warning: Wall of Text ahead.

 

Quote

Google Employees have carried out their own investigation into the company’s plan to launch a censored search engine for China and say they are concerned that development of the project remains ongoing, The Intercept can reveal.

 

Late last year, bosses moved engineers away from working on the controversial project, known as Dragonfly, and said that there were no current plans to launch it. However, a group of employees at the company was unsatisfied with the lack of information from leadership on the issue — and took matters into their own hands.

 

The group has identified ongoing work on a batch of code that is associated with the China search engine, according to three Google sources. The development has stoked anger inside Google offices, where many of the company’s 88,000 workforce previously protested against plans to launch the search engine, which was designed to censor broad categories of information associated with human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest.

So for those who might have trouble understanding, or simply not know, the Chinese government very much dislikes when people start talking about things like Human Rights, Tiananmen Square, Democracy, etc. In fact talking about these things can land you in prison within China. So the Chinese government decided to simplify the process and get Google to make them a search engine that would simply cover this all up. No doubt that they would block all other search engines (which they probably already are) in favor of this one, via the Great Firewall of China.

 

Eventually, and rather to my surprise, a large number of Google employees decided to protest this, as it is rather morally and ethically questionable, as a result, Google shut the project down, or so everyone was told.

 

Quote

In December, The Intercept reported that an internal dispute and political pressure on Google had stopped development of Dragonfly. Google bosses had originally planned to launch it between January and April of this year. But they changed course after the outcry over the plan and indicated to employees who were working on the project that it was being shelved.

 

Google’s Caesar Sengupta, an executive with a leadership role on Dragonfly, told engineers and others who were working on the censored search engine in mid-December that they would be allocated new projects funded by different “cost centers” of the company’s budget. In a message marked “confidential – do not forward,” which has been newly obtained by The Intercept, Sengupta told the Dragonfly workers:

Quote

Over the past few quarters, we have tackled different aspects of what search would look like in China. While we’ve made progress in our understanding of the market and user needs, many unknowns remain and currently we have no plans to launch.

 

Back in July we said at our all hands that we did not feel we could make much progress right now. Since then, many people have effectively rolled off the project while others have been working on adjacent areas such as improving our Chinese language capabilities that also benefit users globally. Thank you for all of your hard work here.

 

As we finalize business planning for 2019, our priority is for you to be productive and have clear objectives, so we have started to align cost centers to better reflect what people are actually working on.

 

Thanks again — and your leads will follow up with you on next steps.

Quote

Sources with knowledge of Dragonfly said staff who were working on the project were not told to immediately cease their efforts. Rather, they were instructed to finish up the jobs they were doing and then they would be allocated new work on other teams. Some of those who were working on Dragonfly were moved into different areas, focusing on projects related to Google’s search services in India, Indonesia, Russia, the Middle East, and Brazil.

 

“I just don’t know where the leadership is coming from anymore.”

 

But Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, refused both publicly and privately to completely rule out launching the censored search engine in the future. This led a group of concerned employees — who were themselves not directly involved with Dragonfly — to closely monitor the company’s internal systems for information about the project and circulate their findings on an internal messaging list.

 

The employees have been keeping tabs on repositories of code that are stored on Google’s computers, which they say is linked to Dragonfly. The code was created for two smartphone search apps — named Maotai and Longfei — that Google planned to roll out in China for users of Android and iOS mobile devices.

 

The employees identified about 500 changes to the code in December, and more than 400 changes to the code between January and February of this year, which they believe indicates continued development of aspects of Dragonfly. (Since August 2017, the number of code changes has varied between about 150 to 500 each month, one source said.) The employees say there are still some 100 workers allocated to the “cost center” associated with Dragonfly, meaning that the company is maintaining a budget for potential ongoing work on the plan.

Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/03/04/google-ongoing-project-dragonfly/

Whew.

 

Sorry for the wall of text. There is a LOT more to this. Please read the original article as I cut out a couple of paragraphs to try and make it fit as best I could.

 

I would weigh in heavily on this topic, but as it approaches that intersection between politics and technology, I will only say that I think Google should absolutely drop the project and destroy any relevant research or code, and that government enforced censorship is, in my opinion, extremely bad.

[Guest]

Is it more correct to know the truth and not be allowed to be told lies, of for people to believe what they want. 

 

The former is better.

[Arika]

"we promise we stopped working on project dragonfly, we called it something different, but we DID stop work on "project dragonfly" trust us" - Google

[LukeSavenije]

this just wants me to commit duckduckgo

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

21 minutes ago, LukeSavenije said:

this just wants me to commit duckduckgo

Do you Qwant some help with that?

[aezakmi]

"Human Rights" at least where I live are always used to favor criminals or violent radical groups and are a fucking bad joke

 

Judges say giving life sentences to thieves or murderers is bad because "they have rights" so they just give them a few years and when those go out they kill or steal again

 

a cop who killed a guy who stabbed another one to death just got 30 years in prison because he "should've leave the criminal run before shooting and he should've shot him in a leg" well the irony is that the cop let the guy run and fired his hand gun aiming for the leg, but the bullet hit the floor and hit the guy on the head, it was proved but hey who cares give him 30 years because the criminals have more rights than cops or us regular citizens in this shithole. Owning a gun and firing it to defend yourself is prohibited because if you shoot and kill a thief that breaks into your house armed or a scum who raped your daugther (real cases) you're the criminal, there's no such thing as shooting to defend yourself or your family, but if a thief shoots and kills you oh poor little thing he has rights too! and his family will get on national TV crying because he's going to prison for 5 years and might get out in 6 months for "good behaviour" just so he can do it again, a CHILD rapist got out after 1 year because he was deemed "not dangerous" and having him inside for the rest of his life was just too cruel... guess what he did, yup, raped a 7yr old girl the day after he got out of prison.
Terrorists who did several bombings on the 80's walk free and even have THEIR OWN TV SHOW, because the evidence against them "vanished" and the witnesses had strange accidents like falling from a 30th floor naked or the classic suicide by cutting an artery with a sharp knife.

This place needs a purge.

[LukeSavenije]

16 minutes ago, Captain Chaos said:

Do you Qwant some help with that?

no need. it's like my linux migration, slow and whenever needed

[Trik'Stari]

11 minutes ago, aezakmi said:

"Human Rights" at least where I live are always used to favor criminals or violent radical groups and are a fucking bad joke

 

Judges say giving life sentences to thieves or murderers is bad because "they have rights" so they just give them a few years and when those go out they kill or steal again

 

a cop who killed a guy who stabbed another one to death just got 30 years in prison because he "should've leave the criminal run before shooting and he should've shot him in a leg" well the irony is that the cop let the guy run and fired his hand gun aiming for the leg, but the bullet hit the floor and hit the guy on the head, it was proved but hey who cares give him 30 years because the criminals have more rights than cops or us regular citizens in this shithole. Owning a gun and firing it to defend yourself is prohibited because if you shoot and kill a thief that breaks into your house armed or a scum who raped your daugther (real cases) you're the criminal, there's no such thing as shooting to defend yourself or your family, but if a thief shoots and kills you oh poor little thing he has rights too! and his family will get on national TV crying because he's going to prison for 5 years and might get out in 6 months for "good behaviour" just so he can do it again, a CHILD rapist got out after 1 year because he was deemed "not dangerous" and having him inside for the rest of his life was just too cruel... guess what he did, yup, raped a 7yr old girl the day after he got out of prison.
Terrorists who did several bombings on the 80's walk free and even have THEIR OWN TV SHOW, because the evidence against them "vanished" and the witnesses had strange accidents like falling from a 30th floor naked or the classic suicide by cutting an artery with a sharp knife.

This place needs a purge.

I'm guessing you live in the UK, and self defense is a human right in most of the US, unlike the UK. Where now even the right to make jokes is under assault.

 

Your avatar is quite Ironic considering your apparent stance on this subject.

[williamcll]

Keep in mind that Google remains to have offices around China. 

[Bananasplit_00]

11 hours ago, LukeSavenije said:

this just wants me to commit duckduckgo

Already there myself, swapped a month ago when I switched over to Linux and Firefox. Feelsnotdatarapedman

[LukeSavenije]

8 minutes ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

Already there myself, swapped a month ago when I switched over to Linux and Firefox. Feelsnotdatarapedman

i already fully went to firefox and parly to linux

 

so we'll see how far i can come

[mrthuvi]

The thing is to there's no way for google to be allowed in China without party officials embedded inside the company. There's no official list of what is blocked in China, there have been instances of people's websites and blogs (who want to comply with regulations) deleted by the censorship machine and they are never know what exactly they did wrong. The censorship requests have to be processed in real time to kill the unwanted memes from trending as well (they blocked big yellow duck as an euphemism for the tank man for a while).

[RejZoR]

17 hours ago, LukeSavenije said:

this just wants me to commit duckduckgo

I've entirely ditched all Google services months ago except Android which I ditched few weeks ago by going with Apple. I never liked Apple and here I am using it. Look what you forced me to do, Google... Google used to be this cool garage startup that turned into success and became so big they turned evil. Saying "but uh they aren't evil" is an understatement.