Google co-founder Sergey Brin said on Friday he is hoping the Internet powerhouse will find a way to operate in China without censoring Web search results.
“I’m optimistic,” Brin said during an on-stage chat at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California. “I want to find a way to really work within the Chinese system and drive more information.
“A lot of people think I’m naive, and that may be true, but I wouldn’t have started a search engine if I wasn’t naive,” he said smiling.
Brin declined to place odds on the chances of Google working out a compromise that would allow unfettered online searches in China, saying only that while it wasn’t likely to happen now it might “in a year or two.”
He defended Google’s decision to launch a filtered search engine in China in 2006, saying the company’s presence in that market “made a big difference but things started going downhill after the Olympics” there.
The situation “took a turn for the worse” with Web services such as YouTube being blocked, Brin said.
Google vowed a month ago to stop bowing to Internet censors in China in the wake of sophisticated cyberattacks aimed at the US firm’s source code and Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world.
Google continues to filter searches as per Chinese law while trying to negotiate a compromise with officials there.
“We intend to stop censoring,” Brin said. “We don’t want to run a service that is politically censored.”
Google’s investigation showed similar attacks on dozens of other companies, said Brin, who declined to point a finger at the Chinese government.
“It turns out a number of companies were aware of attacks on their systems and didn’t come forward with respect to these security issues,” he said. “If more companies were to come forward with respect to these security issues I think we would all be safer.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained