Chinese authorities are satisfied with Google’s tweaks to the Chinese version of its search engine. It might be the end to a long saga, which started with Google’s announcement of possible withdrawal from China in the name of free speech, and culminated with Google killing off its Chinese search engine and redirecting visitors to their uncensored, Hong Kong search engine.
The Google-China saga continues. Now the search giant is taking yet another approach to keep Google.cn up and running while not censoring search results.
After a string of suicides in Foxconn’s China factories, home to some 400,000 workers who manufacture electronic devices for giants such as HP, Dell, and Apple, the management announced it plans to raise workers’ salaries by 20%. Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision Industry, the anchor of Foxconn Technology Group, claims the salary increase has been planned for some time, but doesn’t say when the raise will be implemented. The timing of the announcement is most probably tied to the suicides at the Foxconn factory, as another employee jumped to his death on Wednesday, bringing the total suicide toll in 2010 to ten.
Australia’s communications minister Stephen Conroy isn’t happy with Google’s latest privacy blunders. He called Google’s privacy policy “a bit creepy;” specifically, he said that the recent incident, where Google was caught collecting private wireless data, was the “single greatest breach in the history of privacy.” Google has apologized for collecting WiFi data from private households, and deleted all the data in its posession. Furthermore, Google claims that the entire incident was a mistake.
Chinese website Apple.pro has posted pictures of a purported next-generation iPhone, this time in white! While we’ve seen the black variant of the iPhone 4G in the wild on numerous occasions , the images of the white model are a nice change of pace. While the authenticity of the photographs haven’t been verified, the photos do show what appears to be a complete white faceplate sitting atop the standard iPhone 4G body.
The Dalai Lama, having only been a Twitter user since late February, is already using the platform to circumvent Chinese censorship. Today the Tibetan spiritual leader held a one-hour question-and-answer session via Twitter to respond to questions submitted by Chinese web users.
Google just introduced an app called the Government Requests tool. It’s a Google Maps app that shows how many requests each nation’s government has made for users’ personal information or for the removal of URLs from Google’s search index.
There was a veritable barrage of social media news this week — from various and sundry natural disasters to Steve Jobs’s face-off with Adobe to Conan’s return to TV to Pulitzers to taxes to a whole lotta Twittering. If you had trouble keeping up with all the latest SM-related news this week, never fear — Mashable has compiled a list of the top stories from the past seven days
Although social media channels have been skint in terms of coverage of today’s 7.1 earthquake in China, Google has just launched a People Finder app in an attempt to aid victims of the disaster. A massive earthquake hit northwest China’s Qinghai Province early this morning, killing more than 500 and injuring more than 10,000, according to the American Red Cross.
