“Google Inc. defied the Chinese government by saying it will end self-censorship of its search engine and may quit the world’s largest Internet market after attacks on e-mail accounts of human-rights activists.

A series of ‘highly sophisticated’ attacks on Google and at least 20 other companies last month, as well as limits on free speech, led to the decision, Google said in a statement on its Web log. Images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown were among previously censored results visible on Google.cn today. “