If the Aurora attacks were successful, the next thing the Chinese regime would've done is demand from Google all information about the users it found as subversive: in such a case, the attacks were just to get the right usernames from which to request further information on from Google.
http://www.thoughtcrime.org/papers/null-prefix-attacks.pdf
and
http://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-usa-09/bh-usa-09-archives.ht... http://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives/dc-17-archive.h...
Prediction 2: it will die anyway.
When I started reading, I though it was a genius move being done by Google itself, until I got to the word "they" and then scanned down and saw the Eric Schmidt quote. Yeah, confusing.
They might allow it to stay up for a few days to generate some discussion though... we'll see.
A mix net can address that issue, but then we're just talking about something like Tor.
No thank you.