The New York Times actually ran the story about Google ending its participation in Chinese Internet censorship as its lead story on Wednesday morning, even ahead of its story on the Haitian earthquake. (The Washington Post ran it second, after the earthquake.) Within a short time of the story breaking on newspaper Web sites Tuesday evening, my Chinese teacher in Boston told me she had gotten a message from a friend in China about a "rumor" about Google's threat to leave China. By Wednesday morning U.S. time, according to my Chinese teacher, half the status updates she saw on Ren Ren, the country's Chinese-language Facebook knockoff, involved the Google story. None of them, she said, defended the Chinese government; all sided with Google and criticized Chinese net censorship.

Two days ago, Google dropped a bomb by announcing its intentions to cease censoring its search engine results in China, partly because the search giant claimed that attempts were made to crack the GMial accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The Chinese government has officially replied to these allegations. Update: More on the infrastructure of the attack. The Chinese government states that companies, domestic or otherwise, have to abide by Chinese laws. "We welcome international Internet companies to do business in China in accordance with the law," said Jiang Yu, a spokesperson for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She didn't deny Google's allegations of cyber attacks directly, but did state that such attacks are illegal under Chinese law. Jiang Yu further stated that "the Chinese government administers the Internet according to law and we have explicit stipulations over what content can be spread on the Internet". Of course, this case isn't about the censoring in and of itself - Google has been active in China for years, and just like many other Western companies and governments, had no qualms about catering to China's censorship and other totalitarian practices.

Reporters Without Borders hails US Internet giant Google’s announcement yesterday that it will stop censoring the Chinese version of its search engine, Google.cn – a move that could lead to Google.cn’s closure and Google’s withdrawal from the Chinese market. The company said it took the decision following sophisticated cyber-attacks on Gmail accounts coming from China. “We can only welcome the courage shown by Google’s executives,” Reporters Without Borders said. “A foreign IT company has finally accepted its responsibilities towards Chinese users and is standing up to the Chinese authorities, who keep clamping down more and more on the Internet.

Reporters Without Borders deplores the way the authorities continue to persecute Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, a jailed blogger better known by the pen-name of Kareem Amer. For the third time in a row, one of his lawyers has been denied the right to visit him in Borg Al Arab prison although he had the required permits from the Alexandria attorney-general’s office. The lawyer, Ahmed Omar, one of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information’s lawyer (ANHRI), was told on arrival at the prison on 10 January that the security services had imposed a permanent ban on visits for the blogger. The ANHRI filed a complaint with the Cairo prosecutor’s office in May 2009 after the first refusal, but no investigation was carried out.