Google to Censor Blogger Blogs on a ‘Per Country Basis’

Via: Threat Level:

Google has quietly announced changes to its Blogger free-blogging platform that will enable the blocking of content only in countries where censorship is required.

Twitter announced technology last week addressing the same topic. It said it had acquired the ability to censor tweets in the countries only where it was ordered removed, instead of on an internet-wide basis.

Twitter’s announcement via its blog sparked a huge online backlash. The microblogging service was accused of becoming a censoring agent.

Yet Google’s announcement three weeks ago — buried in a Blogger help page — went unnoticed until it was highlighted by TechDows on Tuesday.

Google wrote Jan. 9 it would begin redirecting Blogger traffic to country-specific URLs, meaning whatever country you’re in, you’ll get that country’s domain for Blogger-hosted blogs.

TechDows reports that this is now happening in India, for example. So when you’re there and click on a Blogger blog, the URL will end .in.

Doing that, Google wrote, means content can be removed “on a per country basis.”

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Pro-SOPA ‘CreativeAmerica’ Literally Resorts To Buying Signatures

by Mike Masnick

I’ve received very credible evidence, that a consulting firm hired by CreativeAmerica is now offering to pay people to get signatures on CreativeAmerica’s petition. The following email was forwarded to me, with some details redacted to protect privacy…

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Tech Giants Under Fire for Conspiracy to Suppress Employee Wages

Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post

If current events continue in their present direction, seven of the world’s largest and most influential tech companies may have to pay anywhere from 5% to 10% of the yearly earnings of tens of thousands of their employees. Not only that, but these payouts may have to be calculated all the way back to 2005.

As reported by TechCrunch, Google, Apple, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm are now defendants in a class action lawsuit alleging that the tech giants conspired together with the purpose of violating long-standing antitrust laws in order to artificially suppress the wages of their employees.

Essentially, the lawsuit alleges that the tech companies entered into an informal (and illegal) agreement not to hire one another’s employees. In refusing to hire the workers, a cartel was formed that prevented the workers from migrating to the competition for higher wages, thus keeping the cost of hiring from the labor pool down to an artificially low level.

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UK D-Notices to Go Worldwide

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
January 26, 2012

Google and the British government are working together to sweep websites into Orwell’s memory hole. It is a joint effort that will soon go worldwide as the global elite continue to build and refine their censorship apparatus.

Google told The Telegraph today that national security is “the single biggest category” among the reasons cited for scrubbing pages from Google search results. Google’s Daphne Keller flew to the UK to testify before the the Leveson Inquiry and said her company had cooperated with the British government in 82 per cent of cases. PM David Cameron established the inquiry in the wake of the News International telephone hacking scandal last year.

The collaboration between Google and the British government is reminiscent of practices established under the so-called D Notice system, a modernized version of the Official Secrets Act used to censor political speech. Newspaper and periodical editors now routinely check with the government’s D Notice Committee before publishing information, a process that operates as de facto self-censorship.

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Google Admits It Will Track Everything Its Users Do, No Opt Out

January 25th, 2012
In other words, Google now admits doing things that Cryptogon readers have known it has been doing for about a decade: Tracking everything.

Via: Washington Post:

Google said Tuesday it will follow the activities of users across e-mail, search, YouTube and other services, a shift in strategy that is expected to invite greater scrutiny of its privacy and competitive practices.

The information will enable Google to develop a fuller picture of how people use its growing empire of Web sites. Consumers will have no choice but to accept the changes.

The policy will take effect March 1 and will also impact Android mobile phone users, who are required to log in to Google accounts when they activate their phones.

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The Secret Facebook of Power

Via: Register:

“It wasn’t secret, we just didn’t need to tell anyone about it” said Sid Heaslip, Programme manager at Opentext discussing the TOP SECRET FACEBOOK OF POWER that his company made for the G20 summit in 2010, exclusively for the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations to network with.

Despite keeping the network codenamed “V20″ under wraps at the time, Opentext execs are now keen to discuss the world’s most elite social network, not least because the aura of power and secrecy around the summit gives their cloud-based document-sharing software a little more sex appeal than the average cloud-based document sharing software package enjoys.

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Stalinist Stanford “Visiting Scholar” Wants Search Engines to Warn People About Websites That Contain Conspiracy Theories, Browsers Should Flag Information That Does Not Conform to Mainstream Views

Via: Slate:

Well, perhaps, it’s time to accept that many of these communities aren’t going to lose core members regardless of how much science or evidence is poured on them. Instead, resources should go into thwarting their growth by targeting their potential—rather than existent—members.

Today, anyone who searches for “is global warming real” or “risks of vaccination” or “who caused 9/11?” on Google or Bing is just a few clicks away from joining one of such communities. Given that censorship of search engines is not an appealing or even particularly viable option, what can be done to ensure that users are made aware that all the pseudoscientific advice they are likely to encounter may not be backed by science?

The options aren’t many. One is to train our browsers to flag information that may be suspicious or disputed. Thus, every time a claim like “vaccination leads to autism” appears in our browser, that sentence would be marked in red—perhaps, also accompanied by a pop-up window advising us to check a more authoritative source.

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SOPA and PIPA Fully Alive — And a New Bill Joins Them

Heather Callaghan
Activist Post

Many of us breathed a sigh of relief when an overwhelming amount of Americans banned together and voiced their opposition to Congress over both the Stop Online Piracy Act, and Protect Intellectual Property Act.

Sites that dimmed the screen for a day or two have gone back to normal — Facebook users have swapped their anti-SOPA images for their previous profile pictures.

We may have even believed that the postponement of the vote originally scheduled for January 24th was some sort of white flag of capitulation. But that is certainly not the MO of most lawmakers.

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Increased Military Traffic Seen Across North America

Amir Alwani, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Yesterday morning (January 20th, 2012), around 4 a.m. I stumbled upon 20-30 tanks on train cars here in Halifax, Canada (click here to see Google map). Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me at the time and when I came back to film no more than 15 hours later, the tanks had apparently already been transported away. A couple months ago my girlfriend’s co-worker had told her that she also witnessed a similar scene.

Here is a video of the location where I saw the tanks, as well as some of my commentary:

Google Is Already Using SOPA-Like Censorship

Web giant blacklists websites, follows government orders to remove material

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Thursday, January 19, 2012

Despite Google’s much-heralded support for the anti-SOPA movement, the web giant is already enforcing SOPA-like policies of its own, blacklisting legitimate websites from its news aggregator and following government orders to remove material from its search results and You Tube.

As major Internet giants joined forces yesterday to protest legislation that would hand the U.S. government power to arbitrarily seize websites with no legal process under the pretext of copyright infringement, Google slapped a black censorship image over its logo and urged people to sign an anti-SOPA petition that has accrued over 5 million signees.

However, Google’s main issue with SOPA is seemingly not related to their concerns about Chinese-style web censorship becoming commonplace, but rather which entity gets to wield those powers – large transnational corporations or governments.

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Twitter fights Google over “bad” search technology

It’s a battle of the Internet bigwigs in Silicon Valley. Following a change in Google’s search feature format, Twitter has challenged the move as a “bad” one for the Web giants.

Under a new feature for Google, the search engine will filter results for its patrons through a platform called “Your World,” which aims to customize queries by returning content contained within its Google+ social network. ‘We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships,” the site says of its supposed upgrade. Google says the change will make searches more personalized, but Twitter insists that it will instead limits how the public gets its news and what news it gets.

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Related articles

• Twitter fights Google over “bad” search technology (rt.com)
• Will Twitter sue over Google’s new social search? (vator.tv)
• Twitter lambasts new Google search feature (csmonitor.com)
• Twitter is ‘concerned’ about Google’s latest social search features (thenextweb.com)

Reddit Plans To Black Out Site For A Day To Protest SOPA/PIPA

by Mike Masnick, Techdirt

In conjunction with next week’s House Oversight Committee hearing on the technical impact of DNS blocking in bills like SOPA/PIPA, Reddit has taken the huge step of deciding to black out its entire site for a 12 hour period — from 8am to 8pm ET. The guys behind the site admit that this is not a decision they take lightly, and that many in the community disagree with it — but it’s something they feel needs to be done

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Related articles

• In Protest of SOPA and PIPA, REDDIT Plans 12-hour blackout Jan. 18th (pumabydesign001.com)
• Reddit to go dark on Jan 18 to protest SOPA (reddit.com)
• Reddit Plans 12-Hour Blackout To Protest SOPA And PIPA (forbes.com)
• In protest of #SOPA and #PIPA, #Reddit will “go black” on January 18th, and… (dropsafe.crypticide.com)

Google gets personal, searches your world, not just the Web

For Google, it’s personal. The Internet search giant is no longer going to roll out the same search results to everyone.

Starting Tuesday, Google will pluck only the results most relevant to you — and not just from billions of Web pages but from the personal stuff that you and your connections privately share.

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Related articles

• Google gets more personal with ‘Search plus Your World’ (zdnet.com)

Google Fined $65,000 For Defaming Search Suggestion

Published on January 8th, 2012.
Written by Anthony West

Today’s search engine is a mark of sophistication and many would consider easier to use. Google in particular is the biggest innovator in the search space and with things like ‘Search Suggest’, ‘Google Instant Search’ and other canny features, users are finding that there’s little heavy lifting needed. But sophistication is costing Google—albeit not much.

The latest infringement for Google search technology comes with the cannibalizing or ‘defaming’ of a search suggestion in Google France. According to the lawsuit filed by French insurance company Lyonnaise de Garantie, the addition of the word “escroc” which means crook in French to the company’s search keyword, defames the company. A French court agreed naturally with the complaint and decided to fine Google. The amount? 50,000 Euros or around $65,000

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