Google says China's "great firewall" blocked search

Google Inc blamed "the great firewall" of China for blocking its Internet search service in the country on Tuesday, but said it did not know if the stoppage was a Chinese technical glitch or a deliberate move in their face-off over Internet censorship.

Whichever it was, the incident underscored the vulnerability of Google's business in the world's largest country.

Google said search traffic in China now appeared to be back to normal following its confirmation earlier on Tuesday of reports that many users in China were unable to search on its Hong Kong-based website.

In an unusual development, however, Google provided a new statement about the disruptions to its search service that reversed the explanation it had offered just three hours earlier.

Google said in an updated statement on Tuesday that changes it made to its search code, which it had initially cited as the cause of blocked searches in China, had been made a week ago, and not in the past 24 hours, as Google had first said.

"So whatever happened today to block Google.com.hk must have been as a result of a change in the great firewall," Google said in an emailed statement, referring to China's technology for filtering Internet content.

Asked if the "change" was a glitch or deliberate, a Google spokeswoman replied: "We don't know."

The news comes with Google's Chinese search service already in the headlines due to a censorship dispute with Beijing.

The company shut its mainland Chinese portal Google.cn last week and rerouted searches to its Hong Kong site in order to offer uncensored search results.

Analysts and China experts have been on the lookout for signs that Beijing might clamp down on Google and restrict its services, following harsh official comments in reaction to Google's new approach to offering Internet search in China.

Separately, Google also said its mobile services in China were partly blocked on Sunday and Monday.

Inconsistency in Google's search service to Chinese users could expose a weakness in Google's plan to provide search from Hong Kong, said Pacific Crest Securities analyst Steve Weinstein.

"If that continues you'd imagine that they would slowly over time lose share," Weinstein said.

Since Google made the switch last week, sensitive terms like "Tiananmen" have been blocked by the Chinese government for most mainland Chinese users as was previously the case.

But users in China began on Tuesday to report erratic results on Google.com.hk, saying even searches for non-sensitive terms like "hello" returned blank pages. At other times, sensitive searches returned a normal result, showing links to pages that are then blocked by China's Internet filters.

Earlier on Tuesday, Google explained the blocking by saying that due to a change on its site, "gs_rfai" started to appear in the URLs of Google searches globally in the last 24 hours.

"Because this parameter contained the letters rfa the great firewall was associating these searches with Radio Free Asia, a service that has been inaccessible in China for a long time -- hence the blockage," a Google spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. Google said the problem affected "lots of" users.

Radio Free Asia is a pro-democracy, pro-human rights media channel that China's censors have blocked.

The updated Google statement said that search traffic to China was now back to normal, even though Google had not made any changes on its end.

"We will continue to monitor what is going on, but for the time being this issue seems to be resolved," Google said in the statement.

Google on March 22 said it would pull its Chinese-language search services out of China, citing also a hacking attack late in 2009 that it said originated from the country.

Google -- the world's No. 1 Internet search provider and No. 2 in China behind local search powerhouse Baidu Inc -- has said it intends to retain some business operations in China, including research and development staff and a sales team.

But analysts have said that the Chinese government could make life difficult for Google.

"Most investors I talked to were under the impression that any sort of workaround would not be successful," said Needham & Compan analyst Mark May, referring to Google's move to relocate its search service to Hong Kong.

According to Google, its mobile services were partly blocked in China for two days.

On a website showing the accessibility of Google's services in China, the company listed mobile as "partially blocked" on Sunday and Monday. Prior to Sunday, there were no issues with mobile services in China, according to the site -- www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en.

Some users in Shanghai on Tuesday reported no problems with searching through Google's mobile service, indicating that the outages are intermittent.

Other mobile users have had problems ever since Google stopped censoring search results in China earlier this month.

A Google spokeswoman would not speculate on the cause for the mobile outages.

IBM nurturing nascent tech startups

IBM on Wednesday launched a Global Entrepreneur initiative aimed at helping fledgling startups devoted to putting new technologies to work for traditional business or government operations.

The program is intended to buoy young technology firms that have been all but abandoned by venture capitalists hungry for quick returns on investments instead of waiting the decade or longer it typically takes startups to mature.

"In the climate we have been in since 2008 it is clear there is a bit of a void in terms of nurturing very young companies," said IBM managing director of Venture Capital Group Claudia Fan Munce.

"Our Smarter Planet agenda calls for that pipeline to be bigger while right now it is getting pretty small if not a complete gap."

The IBM Smarter Planet strategy calls for using Digital Age technologies to gather and analyze data to make governments, health care centers, utilities and other enterprise computer operations more efficient.

"Smarter planet is all about the fact that today you can capture a lot more data than was available before and transform that into intelligence you can do business with," Munce said.

IBM will provide selected startups with support such as computer software, feedback from in-house researchers, mentoring, and access to a social network of entrepreneurs and Information Technology (IT) professionals worldwide.

Startups that get IBM's seal of approval will also be introduced to venture capitalists searching for promising new technology firms, according to Munce.

Entrepreneurs worldwide are invited to apply, with IBM choosing startups that the US technology powerhouse thinks are "strategically relevant to the market we serve."

The startups must be privately held and less than three years old.

While Silicon Valley venture capitalists tend to crave Internet firms, IBM said it will be looking for startups using technology to improve performance of key industries from telecommunications and energy to health care and government.

Startups the IBM worked with during a pilot program included Ireland-based Treemetrics that uses satellite pictures and 3-D imaging to determine when forests are in prime condition to be harvested for lumber.

Nanosatellite to rid space of junk

A tiny three-kg satellite or "nanosatellite" will rid the space of dangerous clouds of junk hurtling around in the earth's lower orbit.

More than 5,500 tonnes of junk is believed to be cluttering space around the planet as a result of 50 years of abandoned spacecraft.

The junk opens the possibility of collision with any manned or unmanned spacecraft, the destruction of hugely expensive technology and the potential threat of large debris plummeting back to Earth.

The build-up of debris -- expected to grow at a rate of five percent each year -- is also believed to obstruct satellite TV and other communications signals.

University of Surrey (U-S) scientists, working on the project funded by the European space company Astrium, have devised the "nanosatellite" fitted with a "solar sail".

"CubeSail" is a device that can be fitted to satellites or launch vehicle upper stages that are sent into orbit and can be deployed to successfully de-orbit equipment that has reached the end of its mission.

A five by five metre deployable sail is being developed to fit in a 10 by 10 by 30 cm, three kg, nanosatellite and would be used in a demo mission to be launched in late 2011, showcasing passive means of deorbiting for future satellites.

Vaios Lappas, senior lecturer in Space Vehicle Control at the U-S Space Centre (U-SSC), who led the research said in a U-SSC release: "CubeSail is a novel, low cost space mission that will demonstrate for the first time space debris/satellite de-orbiting using an ultra light five by five (metre) sail stowed and supported on a three kg nanosatellite."

CubeSail is due for launch on new satellites next year, and is expected to be available for shifting existing debris from 2013.

Step ahead in search for God particle

Scientists on Tuesday are stepping up efforts to detect the elusive 'God Particle' by triggering collision of two proton beams in the world's largest atom smasher located on the Franco-Swiss border on the outskirts of Geneva.

The two proton beams, set in motion in opposite directions of two 27-km long pipes of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in November last year, are currently moving at 3.5 trillion electron volts (TeV) with each beam of the protons going around the device 11,000 times every second.

Physicists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), that houses the LHC, will make attempts to collide the two beams at 7 TeV, to create conditions similar at the time of the Big Bang - that is believed to have created the universe.

Indian scientists will join their counterparts from across the world who would observe the collisions as they happen.

When the proton beams collide, 800 million collisions per second would take place and powerful detectors installed at the site would gather data of each of the collisions.

It is the analysis of this data that could lead to the discovery of the Higgs boson, also called as the 'God particle', that is believed to have existed when the universe was born, said Prof Satyaki Bhattacharya of Delhi University who is involved in the LHC experiment.

Researchers will sift through the subatomic debris of proton collisions for signs of extra dimensions that will bolster belief in "supersymmetry", a theory that doubles the number of particle species in the universe.

The LHC is designed to collide two 7 TeV proton beams, but scientists decided in January to operate the machine at half the power until the end of 2011. The machine will then close for a year of further engineering work to ensure it can run at full power in 2013 without breaking down again.

For scientists at CERN and elsewhere, the beginning of high-energy collisions will end a long period of working without any real data. Until recently, many physicists have had to make do with computer simulations of particle collisions.

CERN researchers will sift through the subatomic debris of proton collisions for signs of extra dimensions and hitherto invisible particles that will bolster belief in "supersymmetry", a theory that doubles the number of particle species in the universe. Other results may point to "hidden worlds" of particles and forces that we are oblivious to because they do not interact with everyday matter.