NightBlogger

“[…] The world looks very different through the window that Google provides, in China, than through the window on the world that you have available to yourselves here. In fact, it’s not the picture window on the world, it’s a distorted lens that has been built, custom-built by Google to Chinese specifications.

Now how did that happen. Google is the company, whose mission is to organize the world’s information, and to make it universally accessible and useful. How did it come to be in the business of creating the distorting lens, rather than the picture window on the world. Well, in 2004, Google was entering the international market, it wanted to be the number-one search engine in the world, it started to do business in China. And the Chinese said, we don’t want you to show our citizens the world as it really is, with all of its complexities, and its contradictions, and its inconsistent sources of information. We want the Chinese citizens to know the world the way we want them to know the world. And, Google said, okay, we’ll give them that world instead of the world as it really is.” More

HERALDSUN
Australia will join China in implementing mandatory censoring of the internet under plans put forward by the Federal Government. The revelations emerge as US tech giants Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and a coalition of human rights and other groups unveiled a code of conduct aimed at safeguarding online freedom of speech and privacy. The government has declared it will not let internet users opt out of the proposed national internet filter. The plan was first created as a way to combat child pornography and adult content, but could be extended to include controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy revealed the mandatory censorship to the Senate estimates committee as the Global Network Initiative, bringing together leading companies, human rights organisations, academics and investors, committed the technology firms to “protect the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users”. Mr Conroy said trials were yet to be carried out, but “we are talking about mandatory blocking, where possible, of illegal material.” The net nanny proposal was originally going to allow Australians who wanted uncensored access to the web the option of contacting their internet service provider to be excluded from the service.

Human Rights Watch has condemned internet censorship, and argued to the US Senate “there is a real danger of a Virtual Curtain dividing the internet, much as the Iron Curtain did during the Cold War, because some governments fear the potential of the internet, (and) want to control it” Groups including the System Administrators Guild of Australia and Electronic Frontiers Australia have attacked the proposal, saying it would unfairly restrict Australians’ access to the web, slow internet speeds and raise the price of internet access. EFA board member Colin Jacobs said it would have little effect on illegal internet content, including child pornography, as it would not cover file-sharing networks.

“If the Government would actually come out and say we’re only targeting child pornography it would be a different debate,” he said. The technology companies’ move, which follows criticism that the companies were assisting censorship of the internet in nations such as China, requires them to narrowly interpret government requests for information or censorship and to fight to minimise cooperation. The initiative provides a systematic approach to “work together in resisting efforts by governments that seek to enlist companies in acts of censorship and surveillance that violate international standards”, the participants said. In a statement, Yahoo co-founder and chief executive Jerry Yang welcomed the new code of conduct. “These principles provide a valuable roadmap for companies like Yahoo operating in markets where freedom of expression and privacy are unfairly restricted,” he said. “Yahoo was founded on the belief that promoting access to information can enrich people’s lives, and the principles we unveil today reflect our determination that our actions match our values around the world.” More

TechCrunch
The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over massive amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle. Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, issued the opinion and order…That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over copies of every video removed from Youtube for any reason (DMCA notices or user-initiated deletions). Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely “speculative.” More

Facebook, the burgeoning social network, abruptly withdrew its support for Google’s Friend Connect, meaning that none of Facebook’s tens of millions of members could sign in to Web sites using Google’s new service. In the common social networks, people communicate, organize and socialize largely within sites — such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn — but not outside of them. This model, referred to in geek parlance as the “walled garden,” ensures that social networking sites get immense traffic and screen time from members, and the revenue that comes with that.

Many in the industry are proposing a different model, however, in which every Web site will have a social aspect. In this scenario, there will be no need for a person to confine socializing to MySpace or Facebook. People could tap into their information — contacts and pictures — as they roam the Web. The social networking sites would function more like a utility, storing a person’s contacts, photographs and other tidbits. More

Timothy B. Lee
ars technia
Google on Monday stood its ground against demands from Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) that videos by Islamic radicals be removed from YouTube. Google was responding to a letter in which Lieberman suggested that by allowing such videos to remain on the site, Google was assisting in terrorist recruitment and training. But while Google did remove some videos depicting violence and “hate speech,” the company reiterated its support for free speech and refused to remove videos espousing radical ideas but not depicting or advocating violence. Read more

John Oates
The Register
Google is under fire again today for cooperating with Indian police trying to track down an Orkut user who had been rude about a politician.

Police asked Google for user information for the person behind a post called “I hate Sonia Gandhi” - Gandhi being a Congress party politician. Google provided an IP number and email address which were used to identify Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid.

On Friday Vaid was arrested at home and charged with uploading obscene and derogatory text in breach of section 292 of the Penal Code and section 67 of the Information Technology Act, according to ExpressIndia.
Read more

Associated Press
Google Inc. is now offering the general public electronic access to their medical records and other health-related information.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Web search leader announced the public launch of Google Health during a Webcast on Monday. It lets users import records from a variety of care providers and pharmacies.

Google tested the service by storing medical records for a few thousand patient volunteers at the not-for-profit Cleveland Clinic.

“It’s a really exciting day for us. We’re really happy to be able to offer this service to all our users,” Marissa Mayer, the Google executive overseeing the health project, said in the Webcast.

Photo ausiegall

Glenn Derene wrote an interesting piece titled, “How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It”. He suggests that “with the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Second Life, LinkedIn and even Google’s own Orkut, the next generation of Web users may find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm”.

He points out that because we are already “meta-tagging ourselves through our social networking memberships, shopping habits and surfing addictions, it’s conceivable that the information could attempt to find us…it could tumble through the various filters you set up around your identity and then show up on your home-page news feed, or in your in box, or pop up on a ticker that follows you around as you browse from page to page.”

I don’t think there’s any question about it; that’s exactly what’s going to happen. What comes to mind is the science fiction film, Zardoz. I don’t refer to the plot, but rather the technological device employed by the film’s characters.

Each character in Zardoz wore a ring that served as a communication device connecting all of society’s members audiovisually, much like our camera phones today. Issues and decisions were presented and voted on simultaneously by each member of the film’s futuristic society whose structure was horizontal (like social networking sites), not vertical as in today’s corporate structure outside the Web. Add talking billboards to the scenario, as was depicted in the film Blade Runner, or a talking medicine cabinet with a voice asking “What’s wrong?” when the cabinet door opens like in THX1138, and that’s Western culture in 10-20 years.

In the future, upon opening my car door in the morning, I could here a speech engine try and sell me something through my car’s GPS navigation system, or a targeted radio add based on my prior evening’s Web searches.

Read Glenn Derene’s article here

Produced by Steve Anderson

One recent study showed that only 20 domains (websites) capture 39% of all time spent online by US users. Considering that the Internet is technically an open medium, this is an amazingly high level of user concentration. Myspace.com, which is owned by a News Corporation, commands an astounding 11.9% of US users time online. Bearing in mind the USA has well over two hundred million Internet users, this kind of concentration of online website usage creates huge vectors of power.
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