The Pakistani Government was a ridiculous situation. To me it was an example of how religion would literally cut off it's nose to spite it's face. Youtube offers them way more good than it does bad.
I think the moment Governments got involved in the internet was where things went wrong. It should have been just complete freedom, regardless of what ended up being put on there with all the consequences of doing so.
'The moment government got involved in the Internet' would be from its inception as a government project for a communications network that could withstand nuclear war.
Even if you mean the Web, that came out of CERN, another government project.
Government has always been a part of telecom, it's key national infrastructure.
Consumer level end to end crypto that can avoid government surveillance is a very new development.
A more defensible position, and doubtlessly closer to the parent's original intent, would be amending the statement to "the content of the Internet." I agree that government is becoming too involved in that.
Like the physical borders that separate land, the borders of the internet are also being drawn in the form of applications, IPs, ports, protocols, etc. To me it's sad, it never had to be that way.
You guys in the west have some seriously deep delusions about freedom and the internet. Or maybe I should say the brainwashing is strong from the people who most benefit from it.
Ignorance, fear and corruption has increased despite the internet and some would rightly argue because of it. Just look at Trump, the rising power of the right wing in Europe, Turkey, India etc.
You think debates about modernity and the religious status quo aren't going on within Muslim households all over the world without access to a fucking youtube video? This is the kind of superiority complex that justified Bush's Wars.
Just know this just because they make you sing about freedom like robots from childhood doesn't mean the rest of the world needs to be singing with you. It's your song. It's your way of life and if others want it let them choose it without the "free internet" and all the consequences of it being shoved down our throats. And thank god for the Chinese.
I would like to point out that I'm not American and am well travelled, but yes I am from the "evil" West. I've been to Muslim Countries, I have a rough feel for how the people think.
I understand there was a world before the internet and there will be a world without it. Not sure what your point was.
My point was, with it, it should be free, open and without bias. I imagine your household conversations would be rather different if political/religious leaders were in your house and watching every conversation about freedom you have.
Out of interest, why do you like Chinese way of life?
Did I use the term "evil" west? This is a sign you guys come with your own pre-programming just like we do. And you need to be more aware of it. Delusional is what I said and I stand by it. You guys have elaborate rules governing contact and treatment of indigenous people from the amazon to the serengeti. But for some strange reason you guys are totally incapable of understanding putting people in under developed/mostly illiterate societies in contact with the massive ever increasing noise that is the "free internet" is damaging in the same way as non regulated contact with indigenous people.
And this is why I said thank god for the "non free regulated Chinese internet" cause there is a counter point to the western way of thinking about an unregulated "free" internet which is really irresponsible.
So you are saying that governments are doing their citizens a service by filtering the internet for them? That's an interesting viewpoint, but not an easy sell to a delusional Westerner. We don't let our governments tell us how to think. That's the job of advertising.
> So you are saying that governments are doing their citizens a service by filtering the internet for them?
If it was a service, they would fund an Ad-Block like add-on that their people could install on their browsers by their own choice. They could offer opt-in filtering on an internet provider level. It's obviously not a service.
There seems to be some assumption that just because a majority may or may not want something in Pakistan, that they should suddenly enforce that on everybody.
> That's an interesting viewpoint, but not an easy sell to a delusional Westerner. We don't let our governments tell us how to think. That's the job of advertising.
In the UK, there is an advertising authority to ensure that advertising in the UK remains tasteful. In the UK, if you have some content that is sponsored by a company you have to make it clear from the start that is it so.
I think it's fair to say that in the UK, not even the advertising authorities are aloud to tell the people what to do. And the recent brexit supports the idea that the government doesn't either.
You didn't use the word "evil", I wasn't quoting you. I'm not sure if you can call it pre-programming... I'm not sure how you deduce the rest of what you've said from simply echoing what is often said in non-Western Countries. I don't hold it against you though, a lot of people are the same regardless of where they are from.
> You guys have elaborate rules governing contact and treatment of indigenous people from the amazon to the serengeti.
The difference is, to the tribes - technology isn't beneficial and to Pakistan, it is. The tribes are so far removed from the world that it would take multiple generations to bring them up to speed. Pakistan wants to be more connected to the world but doesn't want to listen to what the world has to say. That's the difference.
> But for some strange reason you guys are totally incapable of understanding putting people in under developed/mostly illiterate societies in contact with the massive ever increasing noise that is the "free internet" is damaging in the same way as non regulated contact with indigenous people.
Pakistan is not underdeveloped - it's at the perfect time for growth, just like India currently is. Lying to the people (which is what you're suggesting) - you think will really help progress people's thinking on the world stage? Or do you think it will reinforce a culture that already hates difference? We're talking about a Country where in the villages, they kill people for "black magic", believe in ghosts and beat their women. I think they've had enough unchallenged thinking.
> thank god for the "non free regulated Chinese internet" cause there is a counter point to the western way of thinking about an unregulated "free" internet which is really irresponsible
Oh yes, I often forget that the Chinese Communist Party actually makes rules to better the world and not just it's own agenda.
By the way, for all that blocking in China - the Chinese are considered highly racist and rude by other Asian cultures, let alone the rest of the world.
Pakistani here, my understanding is that these videos re inaccessible to Pakistan, and does not have bearing on the world as a whole.
I believe Facebook has a system like this as well where certain pages are restricted access to certain geographics
Youtube was banned in Pakistan for many years (I think 3+), the current youtube might not be perfect but it's a whole letter better than no youtube. We get access to global news, analysis and coverage. I suppose a win-win for lack of a better arrangement.
No, the salient point is that Google is not producing special results for Pakistani residents. The censorship is applied everywhere, which is what the Pakistani government wants.
I'm not terribly surprised that once again Stallman understates complexity of something he doesn't understand. To him making sure that incoming data isn't pre-filtered is as simple as making sure that all of the narrowed query results are part of the broader query results. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
I'll try and apply this kind of reductionism to something else: if search engines are this simple, how come there's no viable GNU alternative to Google? Absurd, I know, and so are Stallman's ramblings. It's OK to hold DDG to a higher standards that anyone else out there. But talking nonsense out of lack of understanding violates the same higher standards we should expect from rms.
Even that censorship test understates the complexity of the problem. For example, "how to make playing cards" is not a superset of "how to make playing cards disappear".
Pretty sweet test: Google for "apple" then Google for "apple pie". Observe that none of the results for the second query appear for the first. Conclusion: Google is unamerican and censors information about apple pie.
No, DDG doesn't have its own crawler. And such censorship as described is impossible to distinguish from results being pushed up or down the rankings by more focused terms, without some computation that would slow your search down, as well as more queries to more sources, resulting in more network roundtrips, that would slow your search down even more, doing so causing a massive slowdown on all searches, for a check that is irrelevant 99% of the time. That kind of slowdown is unacceptable.
But then, who was surprised? RMS has long been known to put purity before practicality, and to say that network and computing time is cheap, a very MIT attitude, and one that does not serve people trying to run a service for hundreds and thousands of people, who all expect their response to come back fast.
So you are saying censorship is irrelevant 99% of the time, RMS is impractial to be concerned and the tecnology that is used to search is far more important that the purpose for which it is used. Ok.
No. What I AM saying is that it is uncommon for the results from yahoo to be censored. Implementing the kind of censorship checks that RMS suggests is impractical and ridiculous, given the present limitations of our hardware, and the expectation of fast response.
I am NOT saying that we shouldn't be concerned about censorship. Censorship is an important issue. But the kind of anti-censorship measures that RMS recommends are imparactical and absurd. This is what I meant when I said that RMS all to often puts principles before practicality.
> it is uncommon for the results from yahoo to be censored
Really? How do you know that? Are you simply assuming that or do you actually have evidence?
> impractical
Nonsense. Google implements censorship of various URLs[1]. My friends in China often complained that the Great Firewall would censor not only search terms but also URLs.
I think you're underestimating how much censorship already exists.
> RMS all to often puts principles before practicality
As he should. He invented some of those principles.
More importantly, when practicality has precedence, you've giving up on any principles. Nobody ever said defending important principles would be easy! Defending tomorrow's freedom, might require that you make a sacrifice today. Do you want to pay the cost of that sacrifice now, or in the future when the fight is even harder and much larger sacrifices are required?
Unless you defend principles even when it is inconvenient, they will be stolen or corrupted by anybody willing to "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish"[2] your principles for a profit.
--
[1] Try any search of the form [${popular_copyrighted_work} torrent] and note the links to the DMCA complaints.
>Nonsense. Google implements censorship of various URLs[1]. My friends in China often complained that the Great Firewall would censor not only search terms but also URLs.
>I think you're underestimating how much censorship already exists.
And you completely failed to understand what it was that I called impractical. I said that RMS' suggestion for removing censorship was impractical for a downstream consumer of search results from other providers, which DDG is. Do I think think that censorship is bad, and removing it is good? Yes. But RMS' suggestion is non-viable.
>Really? How do you know that? Are you simply assuming that or do you actually have evidence?
What percentage of your searches list DMCA removals? If your on HN, that's probably higher than average. There is some invisible censorship as well, but even then, how much would you guess that would increase the number? Sure, it is technically easy to censor, but who would have the motivation to go around censoring 90% of the kind of things people search for on the internet. Recipies? Facts? News articles? Please. The thoght police have more important matters on their hands.
>Defending tomorrow's freedom, might require that you make a sacrifice today. Do you want to pay the cost of that sacrifice now, or in the future when the fight is even harder and much larger sacrifices are required?
Fair enough. I would be willing. You know who wouldn't? End users. An extra second or more per search? All but the most hardcore of DDG users - yes, even those who understood why - would go back to google. And DDG has a minute market share already. What do you think is better, I wonder? More protection of freedoms, with reasonable tradeoffs, and maybe even some other advantages (!bangs and instant answers are pretty cool), or absolute protection of freedoms, with unnacceptable performance tradoffs that make everyday activities and excercise an agony? Whichever you prefer, it doesn't matter, because the End User population prefers the former, and they're the ones who drive the industry.
>Unless you defend principles even when it is inconvenient, they will be stolen or corrupted by anybody willing to "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish"[2] your principles for a profit.
I always thought embrace, extend, exterminate had a better ring to it. And actually, you're wrong. If you build a cool thing that is superglued to its principles, to the point of being slow and hard to use, people won't use it. Someone without principles will take your idea, and leave your potential users less secure than if you has just been a bit more practical.
I don't have a problem with defending my principles when it's inconvenient - I run archlinux without systemd - but that's not what this is about. You don't seem to realize that.
When you build something for mass consumption, you have to balance practical useability with your principles, or you will end up like so many FSF projects that nobody uses.
What do I mean by that? When was the last time you used iceweasel? linux-libre? Gnu social? Gnu Librejs?
These are all projects that I can admire for sticking to their principles, but for most people, they are criplingly complex to use, or lack important features, or seem pointless, or create more problems then they solve, or do things nobody wanted, or solve problems that are solved simpler, faster, and better by other software.
For most people "free software," or "open source" isn't a selling point: it's a bonus.
In China the censorship was ridiculous using "Bangol" or whatever it's called there. I couldn't search for western products, animals, videos - anything (, until I used a VPN of course!).
But here in the UK I think it's much less than 1%, although what's worrying is what is actually blocked. It seems as if enough money and/or power will get you any blocks you want.
"I am proud to identify myself when stating my views; I can afford to do that because I am in a fairly safe position. There are people who rationally fear reprisals (from employers, gangsters, bullies, or the state) if they sign their name to their views. For their sake, let's reject any social networking site which insists on connecting an account to a person's real identity." [1]
I guess Stallman considers the celebrities to be in a safe position also. Yet I find it rather incongruous that he is so strident on privacy and firm on the view that he should be able to have a private life (he goes to great lengths to browse anonymously) yet he feels it's ok to allow publications to write about their private affairs (which may or may not have happened).
I don't necessarily blame Stallman for this contradiction, frankly you can legitimately hold that censorship is wrong and privacy is important. Unfortunately there are occasions where they conflict badly.
Stallman genuinely needs to address how DDG are meant to preserve privacy and counter censorship, because there is a genuine conflict and it's not necessarily an easy thing to address.
Slagging off RMS is tedious. In this case there appears to be nothing remotely objectionable about what he is saying. If there is an objection to the issue raised it should be stated. Forcing references to others things he has said just comes off as a diversionary tactic to derail the thread.
Like RMS I am suprised at the effort being put to censor something so trivial raising questions about far more important matters.
Is there any way to decipher the kind of things being censored, is there any system maintained or transparency disclosing broadly the orders received and the censorship operational? This is a slippery slope that we seem to be well into.
Mmm, I'll agree there is a large fanatic user base of DDG here, but I think in relation to this article, the confusion is more the following:
1. It's an older article, from May, and current search results are inconsistent with what RMS was seeing at the time
2. A lot of users (apparently RMS himself initially) misunderstand/misunderstood that DDG doesn't actually crawl on its own, it relies on Bing results, and by extension, they don't understand that the censorship can be inherited; whether this is censorship on the part of DDG or not I am not willing to comment on.
3. Stallman's solution is a sort of half-solution, as someone else pointed out in the comments, insomuch as certain queries that lack keywords from others may not always be instances of censorship, and that determining this would be really difficult. (the example I'll steal from user tagawa is:
"red ford mustang" and "red ford mustang toy",
"wall street 2015" and "wall street 2015 protest",
"photos of jam" and "photos of jam jars", etc.)
That's not so say the fanbase of DDG has never been rabid, but in this instance, I think the confusion and defense is probably applicable - what we see now with DDG is way different than what Stallman saw.
Echoing other comments, my problem is with the framing of it.
DDG is, as I understand it, basically a light privacy-protecting wrapper around third-party search APIs. So while you may be getting "censored" results, DDG is not an active participant in that "censorship" -- since its job is just to go out and see what another service said and relay it back to you, the responsibility for active censorship rests with that other service.
Whether DDG should try to actively determine when results are censored and correct for it, rather than passively relaying possibly-censored results without further work, is a different question than "is DDG censoring", and trying to sensationalize a story by framing it as the latter when what one really wants is the former is... well, intellectually dishonest.
I think it's fairly obvious that the smaller search engines inherit their results from the larger ones, so they're not the ones applying the biases or censorship.
first, ddg has only a single source of data. and it's Microsoft bing. yahoo doesn't have any search and Google gave the middle finger to ddg.
ddg links to many sources. if you add !g you go to Google. if you add !i you go to Bing images. etc. but any search on ddg site is only Bing and nothing else.
lastly, and ironically, Yahoo is the only one still fighting for freedom online. i think it's one of the perks of being an underdog with lots of money. see how recently they were the first to publish several secret government data requests.
How is DDG meant to detect that there are 'missing' bits of information from the returned results, and then 'insert' the missing stuff? Do we really expect a secondary search engine to hit all the returned search result websites and grep them for the terms, as Stallman suggested? How long would it take people to abandon DDG if they implemented that, given that it would make search intolerably long?
This was explained in the article. If some results for keywords "A B C D" do not exist in the results for keywords "A B C", then you know these results have been censored.
Web search isn't that simple. The search engine does more sophisticated work than that. For example, if no one ever clicks on abcd results, it wont show them when you search for abc.
There have been smaller search engines that didn't inherit their results from the larger ones... even privacy-sensitive smaller search engines with their own index. Alas, that ship sailed, uh, sank.
Stallman doesn't seem to know these things, though. Perhaps he's so far removed from society as a result of his arcane computing choices that he's been unable to remain cognizant of the way the Internet works now?
I got so disappointed with ddg when I discovered it's just a wrapper around Bing. With privacy-related AdBlock filters I get the best of both worlds, Google and no tracking. The world needs a non-US based alternate crawler but no one is offering it.
None that I've found, but ixquick.com can perform an anonymous Google search for you. Now, whether you trust them with your search history (they claim they don't record anything[1]) is entirely up to you.
There are non-US crawlers. Of course they have their own governments to direct censorship. But they censor differently, so you get a better chance. Surprisingly, Baidu does index the relevant stuff in this case. For Yandex it is not even surprising (they have aimed to have some English-language presence since long ago).
Well once you get into their markets they'll affect your services. I guess google could've limited censorship to relevant countries, but maybe they opted for a more easier way.
> The company might want to take some steps to detect specific examples of search result censoship, such as when items that appear when searching yahoo for A B C D do not appear at all in a search for A B C without D, and fix them.
To me this does not sound like censorship, but SEO on behalf of D. My guess would be that D paid some web presence management company to cultivate a strong presence of pages containing A B C but not D (since they want to hide their name after all), and that's what the engine is picking up.
There could even be an innocent explanation for this - lots of UK discussion about A B C that does not mention D since they're not allowed to, and very few outside the UK who care. So the {A,B,C}\{D} pages would naturally rise to the top of search results.
This particular case aside, Stallman's test looks like misuse of statistics to me - searching for "washington" gets me lots of pages that don't mention the town in England, whereas "washington england" finds it. Conspiracy? Censorship? No.
You can only find documents that are available in the index you are using. If the index owner has deleted or filtered them there is no way to know, as an API user, if there are missing results. If you are a service that is minimizing the amount of personal information available to the API provider, the API provider would have to assume the worst and pre-filter any results that were restricted in any jurisdiction. No different than returning results to search queries originating on a Tor exit node.
If he's searching for "celebrity threesome injunction" the top results are the most authoritative for that expression. Meaning: they have to be the best sites that have that expression. Which happen to be the ones that are censored (UK based websites)
When you add the name, you are removing those previous results that don't contain the name
"We don't condemn the server operator for being at the mercy of nonfree software, and we certainly don't boycott her for this. Rather, we are concerned for her freedom, as with any user of nonfree software. Given an opportunity, we try to explain how it curtails her freedom, hoping she will switch to free software.
"Conversely, if the service operator runs GNU/Linux or other free software, that's not a virtue that affects you, but rather a benefit for her. We don't praise or thank her for this; rather we felicitate her for making the wise choice."
You would need to search "celebrity threesome injunction", rather than Elton. At the time, people in England didn't know who had the injunction.
I wasn't in England, and didn't have much trouble finding it was Elton John. The English newspaper results were first in the results, without names, but I think that's too be expected -- he's a British celebrity, and of limited interest elsewhere, but those newspaper articles are being widely shared in Britain.
I just searched "celebrity threesome injunction" on Google, and both the 2nd and 4th result contain "Elton John" in Google's little text preview of the page.
In fact it's not a case of infidelity: Sir Elton John has an open marriage so the celebrity threesome would be within the bounds of their promises to each other.
It wasn't like that a few months ago. I think that, in the time between RMS's article and now, someone has quietly given up on enforcing the censorship order.
Well from my UK based attempt it seems to perfectly visible even on google.co.uk using that specific phrase. I seem to remember originally have finding out via order-order.com.
David Furnish, Elton John's husband had an affair on at least three occasions with an employee which involved a bath of olive oil circa 2010-2013.
David Furnish heavily wanted it to be unprotected anal sex despite his work on the Elton John AIDS charity.
Elton himself has been accused of sexual harassment of one of his male bodyguards.
The allegations can't be published in England and Wales due to the distress that it could cause to their two children born from a surrogate mother. David and Elton have been using that injunction to threaten various web sites on the grounds that an article hosted on an overseas server could be viewed by somebody in England and Wales.
This is an article about web censorship, not The National Enquirer. RMS does, in fact, mention one of the names involved, but only when it is relevant to the matter of censorship.
I was thinking it would be some politician, not some '60s musician. Who cares? Besides, Wikipedia has a long section on his sex life. This sounds more like a PR stunt by a has-been.
Google censors the whole world to avoid annoying the Pakistani government and Islamic pressure groups; no injunction required.
http://lee-phillips.org/youtube/