The last round felt like more of a marketing gimmick by Google though this round is probably more about the China that everyone knows. This is a very paranoid government, so it would be no surprise that they might want to stop Google from letting any information slip out about any public discontent.
In the wake of the catastrophic earthquake in Japan, Google set up an application to help people find relatives and friends lost in the disaster. This service too seems to have been compromised.
"Relating to Google there is no issue on our side. We have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail," said a Google spokesman. China's embassy in Washington was not immediately available for comment.
The announcement follows a blog posting from Google on 11 March in which the firm said it had "noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target." The posting said the attacks were targeting a vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser. The two firms have been working to address the issue. At the time, Google declined to elaborate on which activists had been targeted or where the attacks had been coming from.
