Google tells China to back off

Google threatened it may pull its business out of China and is no longer willing to censor the Chinese version of its search engine. The move follows the discovery of sophisticated and targeted hacking attempts on Google's corporate infrastructure originating from China.

Google claims Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were the primary goal, and that it discovered that at least twenty other companies from a wide range of businesses, including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors, have been similarly targeted.

Google said the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were the primary target of the attack, which occurred in December.

The search engine has now said it will hold talks with the government in the coming weeks to look at operating an unfiltered search engine within the law in the country, though no changes to filtering had yet been made.

Google launched google.cn in 2006, agreeing to some censorship of the search results, as required by the Chinese government.

More info at BBC News. Google currently holds around a third of the Chinese search market, while Chinese search engine Baidu has a marketshare of over 60 percent.