Serious question: what happens if say Wikileaks or Snowden or the next important whistleblower uses this service, and then the head of DHS, FBI, DOJ, etc (not a Court) "gives a call" to Google? Will Google "protect their free expression", or comply with the order within hours, like Amazon did [1]?<p>Google may have great lawyers and a lot of money, but what if they tell them "hey, you know that tax-free money you're sending to the Bermuda [2]? Yeah, FTC will be knocking on your door tomorrow to ask you about that".<p>So I guess what I want to know is if Google will actually stand their ground and protect their users till the end by doing the <i>right thing</i>, or they'll "compromise" if the potential cost to their business is too great. Maybe in the past it was easy to believe Google would actually do the right thing, but it's becoming increasingly harder to believe that.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website-cables-servers-amazon" rel="nofollow">http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-websi...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/101104483" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnbc.com/id/101104483</a>
On an unrelated note, I had never seen the withgoogle.com domain before and I did some searching and found all these other projects, initiatives, landing pages, and even online courses:<p>- Chromebook mobile site: <a href="http://us.chromebook.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">http://us.chromebook.withgoogle.com</a><p>- Developer Bus: <a href="http://developerbus.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">http://developerbus.withgoogle.com</a><p>- Full Value of Mobile: <a href="http://www.fvm.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.fvm.withgoogle.com</a><p>- Google Analytics Academy: <a href="https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com</a><p>- Google Expert: <a href="http://expertbrasil.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">http://expertbrasil.withgoogle.com</a><p>- Google Wallet Instant Request Form: <a href="http://getinstantbuy.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">http://getinstantbuy.withgoogle.com</a><p>- Mapping: <a href="https://mapping.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">https://mapping.withgoogle.com</a><p>- Online Marketing 101: <a href="https://onlinemkt101.withgoogle.com/preview" rel="nofollow">https://onlinemkt101.withgoogle.com/preview</a><p>- Royal Baby Congrats Card: <a href="https://royalbabycard.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">https://royalbabycard.withgoogle.com</a><p>- Tour Builder: <a href="https://tourbuilder.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">https://tourbuilder.withgoogle.com</a><p>- Web Accessibility: <a href="https://webaccessibility.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">https://webaccessibility.withgoogle.com</a><p>- YouTube Creator Academy: <a href="https://creatoracademy.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">https://creatoracademy.withgoogle.com</a><p>- Your Tour (Tour de France): <a href="http://yourtour.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">http://yourtour.withgoogle.com</a><p>Non-English:<p>- <a href="http://vpered.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">http://vpered.withgoogle.com</a><p>- <a href="http://docchinogame.withgoogle.com/pc/" rel="nofollow">http://docchinogame.withgoogle.com/pc/</a><p>- <a href="http://minchizu.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">http://minchizu.withgoogle.com</a><p>- <a href="http://ennovate.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">http://ennovate.withgoogle.com</a><p>- <a href="http://brasilfreewifi.withgoogle.com" rel="nofollow">http://brasilfreewifi.withgoogle.com</a>
Seems like its just a straight up competitor to Cloudflare.
There doesn't' appear to be any direct revenue gain from this, maybe this is more of a mafia protection kinda thing (as in protecting its interests, the websites hosting its ads).<p>Does anyone know what it takes to mitigate DDoS, at this kind of scale?
Based on the wording, technology used is going to be a mixture of IP Anycast (traffic sharding) and cache proxying (serve content through), which is what CF does. Except google has all the cash and resources to throw at the problem without putting a dent on their bottom line.<p>But the interesting tidbit coming out of this project's going to be the internal packet/traffic scrubbing system they've developed. Will it be commercialized or will it spawn a new startup. So many positive outcomes however it ends up.
Isn't it a clear that they set this up to track users to those kinds of sites and feed NSA with that information? Also, they get to control what information they want to let out. Call me paranoid, but I don't trust Google a bit here.
Whoa, interesting Captcha (sorry to go on a tangent). Looks a bit like crowd-sourcing their street-view work (though could of course be sourced from all sorts of other things).
> Project Shield is an initiative to use Google's infrastructure to protect free expression online<p>How peculiar. The tech is DDoS mitigation, but the PR focus is on "free expression online", Syrian gas attacks, and evil Iran.<p>Wonderfully executed. The internet crowd is cheering the "free speech", the government approves of the Middle East angle.<p>Meanwhile, PRISM keeps working and very few care about it.
Hopefully this project will come with increased openness about Googles complicity in the PRISM scandal. It would be rather ironic if this ends up protecting free speech everywhere except in America.