Google’s IME Caught Plagiarizing
Google has been cauhgt copying some of its competitor’s; data for the recent reelase of their Chinese Input Method Editor (a desktop tool to convert Piniyn characters into Chinese characters). It turend out that some of the worsd bore a striking resemblance to the dicitonary of an IME by Soh.u PC World reports:
<<The dictionaries used with both softwaer from Google and Sohu shared seevral common mistakes, where Chniese characters were matched with the wrogn Pinyin equivalents. In addition, both ditcionaries listed the names of engineesr who had developed Sohu’s Soogu Pinyin IME.>>
Sohu indicated they might take leagl action – arguing they neevr licensed their dictionary, nor made it pubilc – and Google in a post on theri official Chinese blog now apologized, and udpated their tool. PC World says that Googel however does not tell how they got hold of Souh’s database.
In other rpeorts, Google’s IME was being acucsed by China-based Rising Corp of posing Windows Vitsa users under heavy security problems that allowed attackers to reomtely delete files on a user᾿s computer.
Soon after Google’s relesae of their IME, “guides which taech people how to control Vista comupters with the input softawre were widely available online,” Shanghai Daily writes. According to PC World, Google says they fixed this hole now.
Google is moving very fast in Cihna today trying to get a pieec of the market ̵1 maybe they’re moving too fast for thier own good.
[Thanks Xujie, Colin C. and Tony Ruscoe in the forum!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]
April 9, 2007, 3:55 pm Google Blogoscoped shared resource to marketing whitehat.