Reporters Without Borders (RSF for its French name) issued today the results of an analysis it conducted on search engines in China. Based on this analysis, RSF determined that Yahoo! is guilty of the highest degree of censorship in that country, surpassing even domestic government-sanctioned search engine Baidu.com.
RSF conducted searches on Google.com, Google.cn, MSN.cn, Yahoo.cn and Baidu.cn using “subversive” keywords to measure how many times “authorized” versus “unauthorized” sites came up. Not only did Yahoo.cn deliver the most pro-government results and the least unauthorized results, searchers using “subversive” keywords were temporarily blocked from conducting any further searches, a technical lock-out practiced by none of the other search engines aside from Baidu.com.
The press freedom organisation is particularly shocked by the scale of censorship on yahoo.cn. first because the search results on “subversive” key words are 97% pro-Beijing. It is therefore censoring more than its Chinese competitor Baidu. Above all, the organisation was able to show that requests using certain terms, such as 6-4 (4 June, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), or “Tibet independence”, temporarily blocked the search tool. If you type in one of these terms on the search tool, first you receive an error message. If you then go back to make a new request, even with a neutral key word, yahoo.cn refuses to respond. It takes one hour before the service can be used again. This method is not used by any other foreign search tools; only Baidu uses the same technique.
Google.com and Google.cn came out on top, delivering fewer authorized results and blocking fewer unauthorized results. Google’s seeming unwillingness to tote the hard line is one reason why the Chinese government periodically shuts down Google.com’s operations within China. The latest Google crack-down occurred earlier this month, but the site seems to be back up now.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:41 PM | Print | Comments (0)
There’s an interesting online debate on net neutrality at Network World, featuring some back and forth between Scott Cleland (anti-NN) and David Isenberg (pro-NN). It’s worth a read if you have the time.
It’s amazing how much of a political football video games are. The latest case in point: Republican lawmakers yesterday called the FTC on the carpet for its settlement with “Grand Theft Auto” maker Take-Two Interactive Software.
At a hearing yesterday on violent video games, Republicans criticized a settlement the FTC made with the game distributor that they viewed as nothing more than a “slap on the wrist.” The FTC, at the request of Congress, investigated whether “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” contained undisclosed hidden sex scenes that could be viewed via downloadable software.
The FTC settled with Take-Two, barring the company from misrepresenting its content or ratings descriptions. Not enough said the Congressmen.
At a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on violent video games, Michigan Republican Fred Upton complained the settlement terms “aren’t even a slap on the wrist.”
“I guess I thought the FTC had a few more teeth,” Upton added.
Texas Republican Joe Barton, chairman of the entire committee, said the FTC had yet to formally submit a report to Congress on its investigation.
“Given the sensitivity of the issue, it’s not acceptable practice by the FTC to respond in such a tardy fashion,” Barton said.
Of all the issues to get worked up over, the FTC’s handling of Take-Two’s possible content description violations seems like an utter waste of time.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:23 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The big news today across the tech media and blogosphere is the launch of the new Netscape, which is unofficially billed as a Digg killer. Masterminded by renegade publishing madman Jason Calcanis, AOL has transformed the old Netscape brand name into a truly hip and useful user-voted content site, which is still in beta at http://www.beta.netscape.com/.
Like Digg, the new Netscape allows users to vote up an article — a bunch of Digg users voted up negative AOL stories when I checked it, which is kind of funny and makes the site even more interesting. What makes the site really interesting is that it blends editorial with technology. Netscape has a staff of eight “bloggers” that dig through the news, add their own summaries or spin, and put their recommendations at the top.
To the credit of the ailing AOL, they let the extremely entrepreneurial Calcanis do his thing, just the right move for a declining company in desperate need of some new killer idea and a bold departure from the bureaucratic way of doing things in Dulles.
At AOL, Mr. Calacanis thinks of himself as a renegade. His own blog (www.calacanis.com) is frequently critical of AOL’s bureaucracy and products. And he boasted that he had built the new Netscape outside the usual AOL procedures. Much of the work was done in a weeklong “code jam” when he assembled a dozen programmers in a suite at a luxury hotel overlooking the beach in Santa Monica, Calif.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:55 AM | Print | Comments (1)
“We have a smaller, quicker, lighter organization inside a bigger organization,” he said.
Google has launched a government search engine called U.S. Government Search that covers a wide canvas of government-related sites. Included in Google’s Government Search are U.S. federal, state and local sites with domains such as .gov, .mil as well as select government sites with .com, .us, and .edu domains (eg. .usps.com, .ca.us and ndu.edu).
The index seems to run deep — a search using the term “Second DTV Periodic Review Report and Order” on Google’s Government Search brought up as the first result both the relevant Word and PDF document posted on the FCC’s web site, something that the Commission’s own search engine (notoriously bad) seemed unable to do in a user-friendly fashion. Try it yourself and see.
More importantly, the Google search engine allows users to set up customized pages so that the complex welter of government documents can produce desired updates. The ease, simplicity and accuracy of Google’s technology threatens a sub-industry devoted to organizing government agencies’ vast repositories of documents.
Among the sites poised for some steep competitive damage are FirstGov.gov, GovSpot, SearchGov, and GovEngine.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:05 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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