A short while ago I saw an article on a DARPA challenge, in which the first team to submit the locations of ten red weather balloons win 40,000$. An interesting experiment, I thought.
Today I learn that my ex-colleague Riley Crane, who worked in the same building as I until October last year, has actually won the challenge! Congratulations, I did not even know that he was taking part in that. He is at the MIT Media lab now.
He was interviewed in this Colbert Show.
A post on the official google blog states that there have been systematic attempts to read gmail accounts from Human Rights Activits.
As a result(?), they have decided to stop censoring stuff in their Chinese search engine, even if that means they need to withdraw from China. The crucial bit is:
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
Wow, Google has balls in the end. Congratulations to that decision.