Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Tuesday, December 18th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, Google presses pause on that Chinese search project, what's delaying Facebook's clear history project,

AT&T's 5G goes live and Audi unvails its autonomous vehicle ambitions.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Late yesterday, The Intercept reported that sources were telling it that Google's plans for a censored search project for China

had been quote effectively ended after internal disputes about the product.

It's a little complicated but go with me for a second on this.

In 2008, Google purchased the Beijing-based website 265.com, which is a web directory service which claims to be China's most used

home page. The search on 265.com redirects to Baidu, Google's main

search rival in China, but Google engineers apparently used

265.com as a honeypot to keep track of search trends in China before they were

handed over to Baidu.

Quoting the intercept,

according to two Google sources,

engineers working on Dragonfly obtained large data sets

showing queries that Chinese people were entering

into the 265.com search engine.

At least one of the engineers obtained a key needed to access

an application programming interface or API

associated with 265.com and used it to harvest search data from the site. Members of

Google's privacy team however were kept in the dark about the use of 265.com

end quote. It was

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