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Google to stop censoring Chinese search results, will "review the feasibility" of Chinese business operations

Google's been taking bad press about Chinese search result filtering for years, and now it looks like the company simply fed up: it's going to stop filtering Google.cn and it may pull of out the country entirely. The move comes on the heels of coordinated attacks on Gmail, which Google says were aimed at accessing the accounts of prominent human rights activists -- and Google also says that it's not the only company suffering such attacks in China. Only two accounts are said to have been hacked, but many more have apparently been accessed by third parties using malware or phishing schemes to obtain passwords. Google also says that these attacks have forced it to reconsider "the feasibility of our business operations in China," and that it's going to take the next few weeks to talk to the Chinese government and figure out a way to operate an unfiltered search engine in a legal way, and if it can't be done, it'll close Google.cn and potentially leave China completely. A gutsy move, to be sure -- but seriously, Google, what took you so long?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]