Chinese educational institutions named in connection with cyber-attacks on Google have denied involvement, state media said on Saturday, as differences festered between Beijing and the Internet giant.
The New York Times reported on Thursday that the cyber-attacks aimed at Google and dozens of other firms had been traced to Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School, which the newspaper said had military backing. The paper cited anonymous sources for the report.
Google vowed last month to stop bowing to Internet censors in China in the wake of sophisticated cyber-attacks aimed at the US firm’s source code and at Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world.
A spokesperson for Shanghai Jiaotong University told Xinhua news agency: “We were shocked and indignant to hear these baseless allegations, which may harm the university’s reputation.”
“The report of the New York Times was based simply on an IP [Internet Protocol] address. Given the highly developed network technology today, such a report is neither objective or balanced,” the spokesperson said.
Li Zixiang, party chief at the Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong Province, also named in the report, said: “Investigation … found no trace the attacks originated from our school.”
Li denied a relationship between the school and the military and rejected links made in the report to a computer science class taught by a Ukrainian professor.
“There is no Ukrainian teacher in the school and we have never employed any foreign staff,” Li told Xinhua. “The report was unfounded. Please show the evidence.”
Lanxiang teaches vocational skills such as cooking, auto repair and hairdressing, while the computer science class offers only basic courses, Xinhua reported.
The director of the school’s general office, Zhou Hui, said 38 students had been recruited by the military since 2006 “for their talent in auto repair, cooking and electric welding.”
Following its January comments, Google has continued filtering searches in line with Chinese law, while trying to negotiate a compromise with officials.
Google cofounder Sergey Brin said this month he hoped the Internet powerhouse would find a way to operate in China without censoring Web search results.
“I’m optimistic,” Brin said during an on-stage chat at the prestigious TED Conference in Long Beach, California, on Feb. 12. “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.
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 google.cn 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 [Beijing] Olympics.”
“We intend to stop censoring,” Brin said. “We don’t want to run a service that is politically censored.”
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
RSS