I read this morning that Google is threatening to pull out of China in response to what Google says are coordinated attacks against the email accounts of human rights activists. Google has also stopped filtering search results to users of its Chinese site. Word of the changes has apparently spread quickly among Chinese Internet users, many of whom see this as a positive move.

I’ve lost count of how many Internet attacks my website has received from computers in China. It is almost impossible to say for sure who is responsible for the attacks. It could be government-sponsored or it could be independent Chinese hackers. It could also be foreign attackers taking advantage of the language barrier and lazy system administrators who don’t keep their computers patched. If those attacks seem to target activists, however, that becomes a powerful “smoking gun” for implicating the Chinese government.

Some Chinese say this will hurt Chinese Internet users. Personally, I found the so-called Great Firewall of China to be quite porous. I suspect savvy Net users in China will have little problem steering to their favorite Internet sites, regardless of what Google and the Chinese government do.