Chinese news media are skeptical about whether a vocational school known for training bulldozer operators is responsible for hacking Google. If a story published on 18 February by The New York Times is true, rival Microsoft should send recruiters immediately to the Lanxiang vocational school in Shandong Province and compete against Chinese search engine Baidu for value-priced graduates.
Roland Soong’s EastSouthWestNorth blog translated a 21 February story from the Qilu Evening News, a newspaper based in Jinan, capital of Shandong Province. One parody of a Lanxiang commercial, quoted by the Qilu newspaper: “Which is the best place to learn to operate an earth extractor? Come to Lanxiang in Shandong, China.” The new version: “Which is the best place to learn to become a hacker? Come to Lanxiang in Shandong, China.”
A Jonathan Stray story from Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab cites the Qilu report as one of the few pieces of original journalism filed on the latest Google hacking story.
Above, the scene in which King Arthur’s knights face off against the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
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Jiaotong University I can believe, but Lanxiang Vocational? Whatever happened to fact check?
It’s not hard to trace the mistake; someone mistranslated Lanxiang’s blog praising 17 students earning “technical sergeant” (equivalant of our specialist 2nd class) enlistment as “technology officers”. Try Googling this news headline in Chinese:
“蓝翔技校17名学生选为技术士官入伍”
As well as keywords:
“Lanxiang 863”
You’ll find a small circle perpetuating this allegation. For example Washington Times quoted a blogpost from China Digital Times blog, where CDT mistranslated “technical” as “technology,” and ignored the fact all the graduates enlisting were either cooks or mechanics.