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back to article Baidu thrives as Google Drive is blocked in China

Google’s chances of challenging old search foe Baidu in the Chinese market look even more remote, after the Chinese government blocked the Chocolate Factory’s much-hyped Google Drive service. Launched to much fanfare on Tuesday, Google Drive is a Dropbox-like service which allows users to upload and share content in the cloud …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why are they even bothering to try to get into China? Have they no ethics? oh wait....

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Do no evil", and Chinese oblige

    sorry, mistyped, should be "see no evil". Or was it hear no evil?

    Anyway, silly Google, don't they see? Chinese are actually _helping_ them to stay clean*. Out of China.

    * For, as the great chairman Eric Schmidt says:

    "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"

    Another day, another successful Google-bashing - done! Now, where's me promised 30 GB silver upgrade to skydrive?! Oy, MS! Pay up!

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  3. HuanChu

    Huh?

    Ummm, actually, DropBox isn't banned in China anymore. It hasn't been for a looooong time. Maybe that needs to be updated? :/

    @Jim - What has providing a service to a certain country got to do with 'ethics'? It's not like they are doing business solely with the Chinese government, as many American firms do. So why criticize them for trying to do business in China, with Chinese people? Do you have something against Chinese people?

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Maybe

    Another issue for China, in addition to censorship, might be that it fears the US getting access to lots of data that Chinese business users might mistakenly reveal by using these services. It might make for great industrial espionage. I believe both Google and Dropbox have the ability to read unencrypted data if they want (and presumably this won't have escaped the notice of the CIA and NSA either). OTOH, other similar services, like Spideroak, seem to leave the decryption key at the client end. That would appear to be more secure (although I'm not an expert).

    Just a thought.

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    1. Fred Flintstone Gold badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Maybe

      I would not submit my operational and archive information to either - you either feed it to the Chinese or the NSA (or any other US acronym du jour), and the US has managed to be perceived even more shifty than the Chinese :)

      I'm not biased - I don't trust either..

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  5. asbokid
    Unhappy

    Google Cloud is in Cuckoo Land

    The Chinese people should consider themselves fortunate to be spared the Great Google Cloud Fiasco.

    We used Google Docs to store several gigabytes of data online - mostly it was large firmware images for internet routers.

    The images were given arbitrary names by the manufacturer. Filenames like V100R102G952S005.bin and V100R102G916S012.bin were common for firmware images.

    To identify the images we stored them in appropriately named Google Docs "collections". That worked okay for a few weeks or months.

    And then suddenly - twice over - the directory stucture of our Google Docs site collapsed in an unedifying heap. All the files from the sub-directories were dumped in the root director. Some files shared the same name, and this caused overwriting.

    All in all an horrific mess. We trawled the Google Products forums for explanations and advice. And it turned out that the problem with corrupted Google Docs directory structures had been known about for 12 months or more. But still noone at Google has bothered to fix it!

    How we wish we had followed the Chinese example of kicking Google Docs into touch.. It's a hopeless service that's dangerously unreliable.

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