Google accuses China of hacking Gmail, again

In 2010, Google bolted from the Chinese market, after what it said were attempts to hack into Gmail accounts of some Chinese dissidents. On Monday, Google again accused China of attempting to hack into the popular email service.

At the same time, however, apparently China is trying to diss Google by making it appear an issue with the service itself. Google said,

"There is no technical issue on our side; we have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail."

After the fallout from 2010, when Google stopped censoring its results in response to the hacking at that time, by diverting users of its .cn page to the uncensored .hk page, relations between Google and China have been tepid at best.

In July, Google announced that it had seen its Internet Content Provider (ICP license renewed by Beijing. It was a close call, as Google had been in danger of losing that license. In late June, Google made changes to its Chinese search page, no longer automatically redirecting users to Hong Kong (and uncensored search results) in a move to appease Chinese authorities.

China's efforts to prevent its citizens from accessing parts of the Web has been dubbed the "Great Firewall of China." It extends far beyond just Gmail, with other services like YouTube being blocked.

This slowdown with Google services has apparently been going on for weeks, with one source in Beijing saying that "Gmail has been slower, definitely. By far. Sometimes we've been unable to connect, and many times unable to use GChat."