In a most bizarre development, the alleged online attacks on Google was said to have been launched from a vocational school in China.  Cited in February 18’s New York Times, anonymous security investigators traced the attacks to Google’s computers located at Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong Province as well as Shanghai Jiaotong University.

One could not identify a cyber attacker by merely tracing an IP address, as the hacker can use Trojan horse or other vicious techniques to remotely control a computer and stage attacks on a specified target behind it.  But one with slight knowledge about education in China would make fun of the ignorant experts and their theory as well as the message carrier – the New York Times.

Indeed, the New York Times allegation is way off the charts.  It is true that Shanghai Jiaotong University is one of China’s elite engineering schools and its computer science majors might be capable of the alleged activities.  It also is true that the university maintains close ties with the Chinese military, especially in shipbuilding, which dates back to the early years of the People’s Republic.  The university has been part of China’s national defense establishment.

But at the low end of China’s educational hierarchy, vocational schools mainly enroll students who barely finish nine-year schooling.  High school graduates in these schools, if any, usually fail in the annual nationwide college entrance examinations.  In other words, they are the most disadvantaged group among Chinese youth.  Their faculty also is not sophisticated and highly educated.  As a whole, the education in vocational schools is not comparable to that of community colleges in the United States.

Lanxiang Vocational School is best known, locally but not nationally, for its training in cooking, auto repair, hairdressing, and welding.  Although it claims to have the world’s largest computer lab with the most computers, a “Guinness World Record,” the school just offers classes in basic computer skills.  It is likely that some of the students first touch computers in Lanxiang.

Therefore, it is beyond comprehension that the basic computer skills that these students acquire in Lanxiang could enable them to hack into Google in such a leapfrogging way.  If so, Google’s computer system would have been just crappy and the hacking would have given it a wake-up call.

And the school built on a piece of land donated by the Chinese military also does not necessarily mean that its computer classes have turned out hackers working for the military.

What has surprised me most is that how the New York Times would have made such a careless mistake, which is unprofessional.  The irony is not that the coverage has made a virtually unknown Chinese vocational school world famous over night.  Moreover, the newspaper has crippled its reputation and credibility in the coverage of China when it rushed to report a sensational story without even suspecting the sources to be credible.

No wonder some Chinese have asked rhetorically: “Are you kidding that Google was attached by a vocation school in China?”