In a just published blog post, Google strongly suggests that it is holding the Chinese government responsible for a recent spate of hackings of Chinese dissidents’ GMail (and other non-google services) accounts. As a result Google is changing its policy vis-a-vis its relationship with China. It will no longer serve censored search results.
The post further states that Google realizes and is prepared to accept that this may be the end of its business within the country.
Purely from a user’s perspective, it’s great to see the internet behemoth making an effort to stick to its principles. Whatever the motivation, and even if Eric Schmidt still doesn’t understand the importance of privacy, this is a reassuring point towards the “don’t be evil” tally.
Edit: Laughing Squid reports that Google has already stopped censoring google.cn.
Edit: Some Chinese reactions.
As part of setting google apps up to work with the zethrae.us domain, I had it offline for a couple of days. This happened because I changed the connection between the godaddy situated domain and the bluehost hosted site from being linked by nameservers to being linked with an A record. This way, only my actual site is dependant on bluehost. Email sticks with google and godaddy, two rather more reliable companies.
Setting up google apps was really easy actually. I simply had to add a Cname redirect to them in the advanced domain manager at godaddy, and add a couple of rules for email redirection.
Now I just wish that google apps had google reader attached to it so i could mover everything away from limpingforsympathy at googlemail to adam at [this domain]. It would anny me to have my email, calendar and docs in one place (apps) which didn’t function as a proper google account in other ways. Does anyone know a bit more about how that works?