Computers: Your rights online

[mrwiseman]

Post news and insight on your computer-related rights.

I'll start pointing to news that Google (whose slogan is "do no evil") officially endorses censorship and personal data mining. It's time to start finding Google alternatives, and of course Microsoft and Yahoo! aren't two of them ? they are all in on it.

Realistically, I don't know of any alternatives to Google that give barely useful results and that don't suck even more. But in a few years we may see new web search services with better policies than to unique-ID you with all your searches in their database and censor your search results to make your government happy.

All this said, Google isn't by far the greatest evil. I can think of dozens of corporations who do more evil and piss on your rights even more. Microsoft invented organized digital crime (DRM) and is the single corporation who hurt computing the most in History. Apple is the company that invests the most on DRM, despite what Steve Jobs may say to make them look cool to geeks. Sony... well, Sony. Intel fuels the worst DRM solutions today. AMD jumped on the treacherous computing bandwagon and wants to prohibit you from accessing your own framebuffer that exists in your video cards inside your home. AOL supports DRM, installs malware on your computer and considers P2P malware. Everyone in Hollywood wants to infest your home with overpriced DRM crap and spy on what you do to charge you if you hum a movie song while sitting on the loo.

?????

Saying DRM manages your rights is like saying jail manages your freedom.

<font color="#345E81" size="1">[ May 12, 2007 06:00 AM: Message edited by: -Wiseman- ]</font>

[mrwiseman]

Posting links to pr0n in an adult forum, illegal in Hong Kong.

[Cataferal]

Wow. I didnt know those search engines were censored at all. It may sound a bit naive on my part, but im sure most of the time this kind of censorship works for our benefit (ie. protecting us from spware, viruses, and anorexia/paedo cult websites etc..). That said, i would like to hear more about what gets filtered and what doesnt; i can imagine the general public might want a say in the matter as times and political standards change. There are things on the internet i just dont ever want to see, but i do want to maintain my power to see it.

Meanwhile, as far as liberal rights are concerned, things have always been difficult in the east, but we can hardly expect Microsoft or Google to oppose Hong-Kong or Chinese law. The best they can do for the situation is obligingly offer a censored version, and hope their respective governors come to appreciate that the internet is an infinitely more powerful resource when left uncensored.

[mrwiseman]

Unfortunately, they don't necessarily censor malware or CP. (If they censored malware, they'd have to remove Microsoft.com from their index!) They censor politics and free thinking.

For now, Google censors their versions for China, Thailand, India, and poorer countries, always according to what the government demands for them. For example, if you search "tiananmen" in Google images, you'll see the first page is full of pictures of military tanks taken from the Tiananmen Square protets in 1989. However, if you searched through a Chinese proxy, you'd see pictures of the nice square, and information on how the government massacred its own citizens. You'll also find big differences in results returned when you search for "sensitive topics" such as democracy, freedom, communism, capitalism, liberalism, and Tibet. Furthermore, Google attempts to hide the fact it censors, so I'm not surprised you hadn't heard of it. If you browse to google.cn from outside mainland China, you're immediately redirected to google.com. Even if you set your language to simplified Chinese, you won't be able to obtain censored results from western countries, just so you don't realize it censors them in China. But you can use a Chinese proxy to test it.

Right now, I haven't heard of much censorship outside countries under dictatorships or poor countries, but it's a matter of time before a shitty leader in rich countries asks Google to do the same. In fact, I already saw a video mocking Spanish terrorist president zapatero magically disappear in YouTube, and I had it bookmarked.

If Google kept to their motto, "Don't be evil", as set by Sergey Brin, they would never have engaged in self-censorship. It was so popular China hadn't dared to ban google.com, it just banned its results. Chinese people were able to see at least the titles of the pages they were prohibited from viewing by the communist government. But no, Google thought they would profit from keeping a good relationship with the dictatorship, and did the dirty job for them. (After creating google.cn, the Chinese government censored all other Googles, but until then, mainland Chinese had access to a free Google.) They didn't have to do this, but they wanted the easy buck, and they didn't care for anything else. This makes them almost as bad as every other large corporation in my book, the only advantage being offering a lot of quality free services.

[mrwiseman]

More shit patents from Microsoft. Not only patents are harmful and wrong, but look at what they patent. Be ready to switch to Linux.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/14/043200
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/13/2028204

[mrwiseman]

Good news for a change. If you were misinformed enough to buy a Microsoft Zune (inferior product, full of AIDS, can do the same with any cheap Taiwanese hardware for half the price), at least you can now disable its ass penetrating feature preventing you from using your privately owned files as you wish. FairUse is the name, and I encourage everybody to remove digital restrictions management with it.

http://www.zunescene.com/zune-drm-stripper/