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Chinese minister insists Google obey the law (AP)

BEIJING – China’s top Internet regulator insisted Friday that Google must obey its laws or “pay the consequences,” giving no sign of a possible compromise in their dispute over censorship and hacking.

“If you want to do something that disobeys Chinese law and regulations, you are unfriendly, you are irresponsible and you will have to pay the consequences,” Li Yizhong, the minister of Industry and Information Technology, said on the sidelines of China’s annual legislature.

Li gave no details of Beijing’s talks with Google Inc. over the search engine’s January announcement that it planned to stop complying with Chinese Internet censorship rules and might close its China-based site.

“Whether they leave or not is up to them,” Li said. “But if they leave, China’s Internet market is still going to develop.”

China has the world’s most populous Internet market, with 384 million people online. Google has about 35 percent of the Chinese search market, compared with about 60 percent for local rival Baidu Inc. Chinese users of Google and even some of China’s state-controlled media have warned the loss of a major competitor could slow the industry’s development.

Beijing encourages Internet use for education and business but tries to block access to material deemed subversive or pornographic, including Web sites abroad run by human rights and pro-democracy activists.

Li insisted the government needs to censor Internet content to protect the rights of the country and its people.

“If there is information that harms stability or the people, of course we will have to block it,” he said.

A Google spokeswoman, Courtney Hohne, declined to comment on the status of contacts with the Chinese government or when the company might start stop censoring search results.

Responding to Google’s complaints of China-based hacking against its e-mail service and several dozen major companies, Li said the government opposes hacking.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Wednesday the company is in active negotiations with Beijing and expects some resolution in the dispute soon.

Speaking at a conference in the United Arab Emirates, Schmidt declined to provide specifics or predict how long the discussions would last. He said Google has decided not to publicize details of the talks.

Even if the China-based Google.cn search site is shut down, Google wants to keep a Beijing development center, advertising sales offices and a fledgling mobile phone business, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking.

Google will not say how many employees it has in China, but industry analysts estimate the workforce at 700. The company, based in Mountain View, California, employs about 20,000 people worldwide.

Beijing has rejected suggestions by Western security experts that China’s military or government agencies might have been involved in the hacking.

“You cannot find evidence about who organizes such attacks. The Chinese government has repeatedly opposed and deterred hacking attacks,” Li said.

Source:Yahoo News

Microsoft to pull Facebook, MySpace into Outlook (AP)

SEATTLE – Microsoft Corp. is taking another step toward turning Outlook, its desktop e-mail program, into a hub for information from popular social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

On Wednesday, Microsoft is releasing a “beta” test version of the Outlook Social Connector. The add-on software, which was first discussed last November, adds a new pane to the main e-mail reading screen on Outlook. When a user clicks to read an e-mail message, the new pane fills up with the sender’s most recent social-networking activities. Those could include the addition of a professional contact on LinkedIn or a “what I’m doing now” status update from Facebook.

Microsoft has a mixed record when it comes to Web trends. The company’s free Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger programs are widely used, but its Windows Live blog/social network didn’t pick up much steam in the face of competition from Facebook. In this case, a small startup called Xobni has already built an Outlook add-on that combines inbox search with content from Facebook, LinkedIn and others.

Microsoft’s new software also treats Outlook itself as a social network. If the e-mail sender and recipient are jointly working on a document stored on a company’s Sharepoint server, both will see updates if one logs on to make edits.

For now, the new software doesn’t let people use Outlook to push information back up to LinkedIn, Facebook or other sites.

People using Office 2003, 2007 and beta versions of Office 2010 can download the updated Outlook Social Connector beta Wednesday. LinkedIn, which is primarily used for business networking online, is the first company to make its add-in software available. It can be downloaded from LinkedIn.com.

Microsoft said the Facebook and MySpace plug-ins will be ready for download by the time Office 2010 goes on sale in June.

Will Kennedy, a corporate vice president for the Office group, said some of Microsoft’s business customers have expressed concern that employees will become less productive if they have all this extra information at their fingertips.

But Kennedy sees business-friendly uses for the Social Connector. He thinks it could speed up processes that require a string of people to sign off, because each person in that chain could see when it’s time for him or her to weigh in.

“We don’t want this to sort of be the next great time waster in the workplace,” he said.

Source:Yahoo News

Google’s e-mail gets social in Facebook face-off (AP)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Google is making it easier to socialize on its e-mail service. It’s unveiling a new “Google Buzz” feature that sets up a face-off with Facebook.

The feature unveiled Tuesday will enable Gmail users to create status updates on Google Buzz and read and comment on the updates posted by their friends.

Other tools turn Gmail into a showcase for sharing video, pictures and Web links to interesting stories, just as users can on Facebook and Twitter.

Gmail’s new twists are a direct response to Facebook’s rapid rise since it started six years ago.

Facebook now has more than 400 million worldwide users, many of whom post information that can’t be indexed by Google’s search engine. Facebook’s large audience also threatens to siphon away some of Google’s advertising sales.

Source:Yahoo News

Apple introduces new $499 iPad tablet computer (AP)

SAN FRANCISCO – Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the company’s much-anticipated iPad tablet computer Wednesday, calling it a new third category of mobile device that is neither smart phone nor laptop, but something in between.

The iPad will start at $499, a price tag far below the $1,000 that some analysts were expecting. But Apple must still persuade recession-weary consumers who already have other devices to open their wallets yet again. Apple plans to begin selling the iPad in two months.

Jobs said the device would be useful for reading books, playing games or watching video, describing it as “so much more intimate than a laptop and so much more capable than a smart phone.”

The half-inch-thick iPad is larger than the company’s popular iPhone but similar in design. It weighs 1.5 pounds and has a touch screen that is 9.7 inches diagonally. It comes with 16, 32 or 64 gigabytes of flash memory storage, and has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity built in.

Jobs said the device has a battery that lasts 10 hours and can sit for a month on standby without needing a charge.

Raven Zachary, a contributing analyst with a mobile research agency called The 451 Group, considered the iPad a laptop replacement, especially because Apple is also selling a dock with a built-in keyboard.

But Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said he does not believe the iPad offered enough additional features for consumers to justify buying yet another gadget, or to call it a new category of device.

In an e-mail, he criticized its lack of social features, such as ways to share photos and home video and recommend books.

Sitting on stage in a cozy leather chair, Jobs demonstrated how the iPad is used for surfing the Web with Apple’s Safari browser. The CEO typed an e-mail using an on-screen keyboard and flipped through photo albums by flicking his finger across the screen.

He also showed off a new electronic book store and a book-reading interface that emulates the look of a paper book. That puts the iPad in competition with Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle and e-book store.

Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies Inc. called the iPad a great multipurpose mobile device — and the first tablet with a chance of success with consumers.

But Bajarin said Jobs’ presentation only touched the tip of what the iPad could do for newspapers, magazines and book publishers, three industries struggling in the transition to the digital age.

A new newspaper reader program from The New York Times and a game from Electronic Arts Inc. were also demonstrated during the event. The audience, which included many analysts and bloggers, clapped and even gave Jobs a standing ovation at points as the CEO pointed out various features.

Like iPods and the iPhone, the iPad can sync with Apple’s Macintosh and Microsoft’s Windows computers. Jobs said the iPad will also be better for playing games and watching video than either a laptop or the small screen of a smart phone.

Unlike a laptop, the iPad has an accelerometer, so gamers can tilt the device to control what’s happening on the screen. And the iPad is lighter and easier to hold for long periods of time while watching a movie or TV show.

The iPad comes with software that includes a calendar, maps, and video and music players. All seem to have been slightly redesigned to take advantage of the iPad’s bigger screen.

Still, tablet computers have existed for a decade with little success. Jobs acknowledged Apple will have to work to convince consumers who already have smart phones and laptops that they need this gadget.

“In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks,” Jobs said. “We think we’ve got the goods. We think we’ve done it.”

Applications designed for the iPhone can run on the iPad. Apple is also releasing updated tools for software developers to help them build iPhone and iPad programs.

“We think it’s going to be a whole ‘nother gold rush for developers as they build applications for the iPad,” said Scott Forstall, an iPhone software executive.

The basic iPad models will cost $499, $599 and $699, depending on the storage size, when it comes out worldwide in March.

Apple Inc. will also sell a version with data plans from AT&T Inc. in the U.S.: $14.99 per month for 250 megabytes of data, or $29.99 for unlimited usage. Neither will require a long-term service contract.

The iPad models that can connect to AT&T’s wireless network will cost more — $629, $729 and $829, depending on the amount of memory — and will be out in April. International cellular data details have not yet been announced.

Shares of Apple rose $2.04, or 1 percent, to close Wednesday at $207.98. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company’s shares have more than doubled over the past year, partly on anticipation of the tablet computer. Shares in Amazon rose $3.27, or 2.7 percent, to $122.75.

Jobs, 54, a pancreatic cancer survivor who got a liver transplant last year, looked thin as he introduced the highly anticipated gadget, though he seemed to have more energy than at Apple’s last event in September.

Apple had kept its latest creation tightly under wraps until Wednesday’s unveiling, though many analysts had correctly speculated that it would be a one-piece tablet computer with a big touch screen.

Source:Yahoo News

New York Times to charge for Web access in 2011 (AP)

NEW YORK – The New York Times says it will charge readers for full access to its Web site starting in 2011, a risky move aimed at drawing more revenue online without driving away advertisers that want the biggest possible audience.

The potential pitfalls have made most other major newspapers hesitant to take a similar step. But after months of deliberation, the Times said Wednesday it will use a metered system, allowing free access to a certain number of articles and then charging users for additional content.

Shares in The New York Times Co. fell 4 percent in afternoon trading.

The Times did not disclose how many articles will be available for free or what it will charge to read more. Subscribers to the printed version of the Times would still have free access to the Web site.

It would not be the first time the newspaper has asked readers to pay for its online articles.

It charged for its Web site in 1996 but attracted only about 4,000 subscribers. Another experiment called Times Select, which required a $50 annual subscription to read Times columnists, drew 221,000 customers but was scrapped in 2007 because it dented ad sales. Advertisers generally pay more for higher Web traffic.

The goal of a metered system is to draw casual readers with free articles while getting fees from people who want to go deeper on the site.

The plan would not stop search engines from cataloging the newspaper’s Web site, so its articles could still benefit from the traffic generated by search results.

The Times said it will use 2010 to build a new online infrastructure for charging readers on different platforms, not just personal computers. For instance, the newspaper can be read for free through an application on Apple’s iPhone. But the Times did not specify its plans for mobile editions.

In a statement, New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson said the company is “guided by the fact that our news and information are being featured in an increasingly broad range of end-user devices and services, and our pricing plans and policies must reflect this vision.”

The push for subscription revenue is happening because online advertising hasn’t grown enough to offset declines in print ads. The recession brought on a painful slump in ad spending as publishers were already facing new competition on the Web.

Overall advertising revenue fell nearly 30 percent in the first nine months of 2009 for the Times Co.’s business unit that includes the Times, the International Herald Tribune and their Web sites. The company reports fourth-quarter results Feb. 10.

One of the Times’ biggest rivals, The Wall Street Journal, already charges for access to its site. Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the Journal’s owner, News Corp., has vowed to impose a similar system at the company’s other titles, which include The Times of London and the New York Post.

The New York Times is contemplating a different approach than the Journal, however. On the Journal’s Web site, some articles are free to anyone, and some require a subscription.

The Times’ site would function more like the one run by The Financial Times. The London-based newspaper allows anyone to view one free article per month, and people who register on the site can get 10 free articles per month. Subscribers who pay $186 a year get access to most material on the site. A premium subscription for $299 comes with extra material. Or for $397 a year, FT subscribers can get the printed newspaper and read the Web site.

Rob Grimshaw, the managing director of FT.com, said the site has struck a successful balance between ad revenue and subscription fees. He said the newspaper has roughly 121,000 people who subscribe exclusively to its digital edition, up 22 percent from a year ago. By comparison, the print edition has about 400,000 subscribers.

And though he did not disclose specific figures on ad revenue, he said the newspaper makes up for the loss of advertising volume by charging each advertiser more. It can get this premium, he said, because FT.com knows more than other online destinations about its users and their interests.

Source:Yahoo News

Text service resumes 6 months after Xinjiang riots (AP)

BEIJING – Text messaging services restarted with some restrictions Sunday for cell phone users in far western China, more than six months after deadly ethnic rioting prompted the government to shut them down.

Users are once again able to send text messages throughout China, but sending texts to overseas numbers remains prohibited, a staffer with the information office of the Xinjiang provincial government said. She declined to give her name as is customary.

Calls to a service hot line for state-owned China Mobile in the western region were answered with a message that said texting had resumed but “in order to prevent this service being made use of by lawless persons, each person will be allowed to send a maximum of 20 messages a day.”

Last July riots in the provincial capital of Urumqi between Xinjiang’s native ethnic minority Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese residents left nearly 200 people dead.

The government blamed the violence on overseas groups pushing for broader rights for Uighurs in Xinjiang, though the groups denied it.

Authorities accused organizers of using text messages and the Internet to organize the protests and promptly shut down cell phone lines and Web sites to “calm the situation.”

An operator for China Mobile said roaming services for mobile phone users coming from outside of Xinjiang would remain blocked. A China Telecom operator said that residents who wanted to make international phone calls would have to provide identification at a local branch office.

In late December, the Xinjiang government allowed limited Internet services to return, with access available to approved Web sites such as the state-run Xinhua News Agency and the People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper.

Many Uighurs resent Beijing’s heavy-handed rule in Xinjiang, and ethnic tensions there occasionally turn violent. China says it respects minority rights and has spent billions on boosting living standards there.

Source:Yahoo News

Alibaba says Yahoo ‘reckless’ on Google stance

BEIJING – China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba turned on major shareholder Yahoo Inc. on Saturday, calling the American company’s support of Google in its standoff with China “reckless.”

Google has promised to stop censoring its search results in China, threatening to pull out of the country altogether if it can’t operate an unfiltered search engine. Yahoo has said it was “aligned” with Google’s position, though it’s not clear what that means.

“Alibaba Group has communicated to Yahoo! that Yahoo’s statement that it is ‘aligned’ with the position Google took last week was reckless given the lack of facts in evidence,” Alibaba spokesman John Spelich said Saturday. “Alibaba doesn’t share this view.”

Yahoo closed its own offices in China several years ago when it sold much of its business there to the Alibaba Group. Yahoo retains a 39 percent stake in Alibaba that represents one of Yahoo’s most valuable assets.

Yahoo spokeswoman Nina Blackwell has declined to say whether the company would consider selling its holdings.

Google hopes it can persuade the Chinese government to agree to changes that would enable its China-based Google.cn site to show uncensored search results.

A Google spokeswoman, Jessica Powell, said by e-mail Saturday that Google has not closed its offices in China and that “it’s business as usual.”

Google’s threat to end its China operations has alarmed an Internet-connected public that is the world’s largest at 384 million people.

Beijing requires Internet traffic to pass through government-controlled gateways that block access to material deemed subversive or pornographic. Google’s China-based site excludes from its results any foreign Web sites to which access is blocked.

Source:Yahoo News

AP Exclusive: Network flaw causes scary Web error

SAN FRANCISCO – A Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place: strangers’ accounts with full access to troves of private information.

The glitch — the result of a routing problem at the family’s wireless carrier, AT&T — revealed a little known security flaw with far reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users.

In each case, the Internet lost track of who was who, putting the women into the wrong accounts. It doesn’t appear the users could have done anything to stop it. The problem adds a dimension to researchers’ warnings that there are many ways online information — from mundane data to dark secrets — can go awry.

Several security experts said they had not heard of a case like this, in which the wrong person was shown a Web page whose user name and password had been entered by someone else. It’s not clear whether such episodes are rare or simply not reported. But experts said such flaws could occur on e-mail services, for instance, and that something similar could happen on a PC, not just a phone.

“The fact that it did happen is proof that it could potentially happen again and with something a lot more important than Facebook,” said Nathan Hamiel, founder of the Hexagon Security Group, a research organization.

Candace Sawyer, 26, says she immediately suspected something was wrong when she tried to visit her Facebook page Saturday morning.

After typing Facebook.com into her Nokia smart phone, she was taken into the site without being asked for her user name or password. She was in an account that didn’t look like hers. She had fewer friend requests than she remembered. Then she found a picture of the page’s owner.

“He’s white — I’m not,” she said with a laugh.

Sawyer logged off and asked her sister, Mari, 31, her partner in a dessert catering company, and their mother, Fran, 57, to see whether they had the same problem on their phones.

Mari landed inside another woman’s page.

Fran’s phone — which had never been used to access Facebook before — took her inside yet another stranger’s page, one belonging to a young woman from Indiana. They sent an e-mail to one of their own accounts to prove it.

They were dumbfounded.

“I thought it was the phone — `Maybe this phone is just weird and does magical, horrible things and I have to get rid of it,’” said Candace Sawyer.

The women, who live together in East Point, Ga., outside Atlanta, had recently upgraded to the same model of phone and all used the same carrier, AT&T.

Sawyer contacted The Associated Press after reporting the problem to Facebook and AT&T.

The problem wasn’t in the phones. It was a flaw in the infrastructure connecting the phones to the Internet.

That illuminates a grave problem.

Generally Web sites and computers are compromised from within. A hacker can get a Web page or computers to run programming code that they shouldn’t. But in this case, it was a security gap between the phone and the Web site that exposed strangers’ Facebook pages to the Sawyers. Misconfigured equipment, poorly written network software or other technical errors could have caused AT&T to fumble the information flowing from the Sawyers’ phones to Facebook and back.

Fortunately, Hamiel said, the vulnerability would be of limited use to a hacker interested in pulling off widespread mayhem, because this hole would let him access only one account at a time. To do more damage the criminal would have to pull off the unlikely feat of gaining full control of the piece of equipment that routes Internet traffic to individual users.

AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said its wireless customers have landed in the wrong Facebook pages in “a limited number of instances” and that a network problem behind those episodes is being fixed.

The Sawyers experienced a different glitch. Coe said an investigation points to a “misdirected cookie.” A cookie is a file some Web sites place on computers to store identifying information — including the user name that Facebook members would enter to access their pages. Coe said technicians couldn’t figure out how the cookie had been routed to the wrong phone, leading it into the wrong Facebook account.

He also said AT&T could confirm only that the problem occurred on one of the Sawyers’ phones, possibly because they had logged off Facebook on the other two before reporting the incident.

Facebook declined to comment and referred questions to AT&T.

Some Web sites would be immune from this kind of mix-up, particularly those that use encryption. A Web browser would have trouble deciphering the encryption on a page that a computer user didn’t actually seek, said Chris Wysopal, co-founder of Veracode Inc., a security company.

Sensitive sites and those used for banking and e-commerce generally use encryption. But most other sites, including some Web-based e-mail services, don’t use it. One way of checking: The Web addresses of encrypted sites begin with “https” rather than “http.” Facebook uses encryption when user names and passwords are entered, to cloak the sign-on from snoops, but after the credentials are entered the encryption is dropped.

It’s unclear how many people were affected by the problem the Sawyers discovered, and whether it was limited to Facebook.

The reason all three women experienced the glitch is a function of the way cellular networks are designed. In some cases, all the mobile Internet traffic for a particular area is routed through the same piece of networking equipment. If that piece of equipment is misbehaving or set up incorrectly, strange things happen when computers down the line receive the data.

Usually that means a Web site simply won’t load, said Alberto Solino, director of security consulting services for Core Security Technologies. In the Sawyers’ case, “somehow they got the wrong user but they could keep using that account for a long period of time. That’s what’s strange,” he said.

The AP tried to contact two of the people whose Facebook pages were exposed to the Sawyers, but the calls and e-mails were not returned. It’s unclear whether they are also AT&T customers, though security experts said that’s likely the case.

Indeed, it was the case in a similar incident in November.

Stephen Simburg, 25, who works in marketing, was home for Thanksgiving in Vancouver, Wash., when he logged onto Facebook from his cell phone. He didn’t recognize the people who had written him messages.

“I thought I had gotten really popular all of a sudden, or something was wrong,” he said. Then he saw the picture of the account owner: A young woman.

He got her e-mail address from the site, logged off and wrote the woman a message. He asked whether he had met her at some point and she had borrowed his phone to check her Facebook account.

“No,” she wrote back, “but I was just telling my family that I ended up in your profile!”

Simburg and the woman figured out they were both using AT&T to access Facebook on their phones. (AT&T had no comment because the incident wasn’t reported to the company.)

“I felt like I had been let down by the phone company and by Facebook,” he said.

He says he has put the incident behind him. But one piece of it remains: He and the young woman are now Facebook friends.

Source:Yahoo News

China tries to limit Google dispute fallout

BEIJING – China tried Friday to keep its censorship row with Google from damaging business confidence or ties with Washington, promising good conditions for foreign investors but giving no sign it might relax Internet controls.

U.S.-China trade and economic ties will not be affected by any Google Inc. decision to withdraw from China, said Commerce Ministry spokesman Yao Jian at a regular briefing. However, he insisted foreign companies must obey Chinese law.

“China will still strictly adopt a policy of openness and offer a good investment environment,” Yao said. “We emphasize that foreign companies including Google should all follow international standards and respect local law and regulations and local culture and customs to shoulder social responsibility.”

The loss of such a high-profile company would be an embarrassment to communist leaders, who want to make China a technology leader. But the ruling party sees control over information as critical to maintaining its monopoly on power.

U.S.-Chinese ties are periodically strained by disputes over trade, human rights and U.S. support for self-ruled Taiwan, claimed by Beijing as its own territory. But the two sides maintain dialogue in a series of forums and say they want constructive relations.

The White House applauded Google’s announcement that it would stop censoring search results in China and might close its China-based Google.cn site after hacking attacks on its Gmail e-mail service. But other companies appear unlikely to follow suit and challenge China’s Internet controls.

Yao said the Commerce Ministry has received no formal notice that Google plans to leave China.

Some employees of Google’s Beijing development center were at work Friday after the staff were given a day off following the announcement. Employees declined to talk to reporters.

Google engineers in Beijing were cut off from its internal development network based at company headquarters in Mountain View, California, said someone at another technology company who talked with Google employees. He spoke on condition he not be identified to avoid damaging relations with Google.

A Google spokeswoman, Jessica Powell, said by e-mail that it was “business as usual” on Friday at the Beijing office but declined to comment on possible curbs on computer access.

Google bought 200 tickets for idle employees to watch the movie “Avatar” on Friday, the newspaper Beijing Youth Daily said. The National Business Daily said some employees were moved to Google’s Hong Kong office.

Google hopes it can persuade the Chinese government to agree to changes that would enable its China-based Google.cn site to show uncensored search results. “We are optimists,” Google spokesman Scott Rubin said Thursday.

Beijing requires Internet traffic to pass through government-controlled gateways that block access to material deemed subversive or pornographic. Google’s China-based site excludes from its results any foreign Web sites to which access is blocked.

If a compromise isn’t worked out within the next few weeks, the company intends to shut down Google.cn and pull out of China. Rubin said Google hasn’t set a deadline for breaking the impasse.

Google has been in touch with the Chinese government to alert officials about its plans, but Rubin didn’t know whether the two sides have scheduled additional meetings yet.

Images from the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests cropped up in Google.cn’s search results Thursday, leading some Web surfers to conclude Google had begun to defy censorship rules. But Rubin said Google.cn is still censoring its results to comply with China’s law and protect its employees there.

Google is prepared to abandon the Internet’s biggest market because of computer-hacking attacks that pried into the e-mail accounts of human-rights activists protesting the Chinese government’s policies.

The assault also hit at least 20 other publicly traded companies, according to Google. IDefense, the security arm of VeriSign Inc., issued a report saying the attacks hit at least 34 companies, including Google.

In a separate report Thursday, computer security experts McAfee Inc. said its investigation determined the hackers exploited a flaw in Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft confirmed the weakness in a Thursday advisory and said the security hole can be closed by setting the Internet zone security to “high.” The company did not immediately issue a software fix, though.

Google traced the attacks on its computers to hackers in China, but so far hasn’t directly tied the chicanery to the Chinese government or its agents. IDefense says its anonymous sources in the intelligence- and defense-contracting industries have determined the attacks originated from “a single foreign entity consisting either of agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof.”

The White House applauded Google for confronting China about its censorship after discovering the hacks.

“The United States has frequently made clear to the Chinese our views on the importance of unrestricted Internet use, as well as cybersecurity,” White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said. “We continue (to) look to the Chinese for an explanation.”

The State Department tried to get some answers Thursday. David Shear, a deputy assistant secretary of state who deals with China, met over lunch with a high-ranking representative of China’s U.S. embassy. The Chinese ambassador to the United States is likely to be summoned to the State Department in the coming days, agency officials said.

One of the human-rights activists whose e-mail was hacked said she was notified of the intrusion on her account in a Jan. 7 call from David Drummond, Google’s top lawyer. Tenzin Seldon, a Tibetan rights activist and sophomore at Stanford University, said she allowed her laptop to be inspected by Google’s security experts, who found no viruses on the machine.

Seldon, 20, has a new Gmail password and a new hope for free speech in China now that Google is taking a stand against the Chinese government.

___

Liedtke reported from San Francisco. Associated Press researcher Bonnie Cao in Beijing and Associated Press Writers Chi-chi Zhang and Vincent Thian in Beijing and Eileen Sullivan and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

Source: Yahoo News