China accuses Google of censorship
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1559872/china-accuses-google-censorship
QuoteTHE CHINESE Communist Party's main newspaper has accused Google of keeping searchers away from its website after it reported on a copyright dispute.
The People's Daily had reported on a Chinese group's complaint that Google's planned online library of digitised books might violate Chinese authors' copyrights.
For three days Google searches for the report, in the books section of the website, warned users the site might contain harmful software. The paper argues that the Chinese search engine Baidu did not return a similar warning.
"We thought it might be related to our reporting on the conflict between Google Library and Chinese authors," The book section's manager Pan Jian said. He claims the paper was first alerted to the problem by readers.
An unidentified People's Daily official quoted on the paper's website said the section was "maliciously blocked by Google".
Google responded by saying that these accusations were "absolutely incorrect". Google spokeswoman Cui Jin told the Canadian Associated Press that the warning was generated by software that is "an automatic function without any human interference".
Letter-writing campaign to Google, then?
CHINA WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS CORPORATE OPPRESSION :argh!:
The point about google is that they continually claim that all things are algorithmic and have no human input but they can't give bare these supposed algorithms as that would make it extremely easy to study them and circumvent them I suppose.
People have a point though, from Google's perspective who's stopping them to make some human input? Google too has a point that in any way they can be accused as they really cannot make public these algorithms so they have no way to prove their innocence.
In a case like this the algorithm is actually pretty transparent, if you click down through the links it'll tell you exactly where the malicious code was found. Usually they flag every site on a server farm if one site makes the mistake of hiring a dubious ad service. (And yet, for some reason, Myspace hasn't been flagged yet).
Quote from: Requia ☣ on October 31, 2009, 09:00:48 AM
In a case like this the algorithm is actually pretty transparent, if you click down through the links it'll tell you exactly where the malicious code was found. Usually they flag every site on a server farm if one site makes the mistake of hiring a dubious ad service. (And yet, for some reason, Myspace hasn't been flagged yet).
The point is more, how does it recognise a piece of text or code as malicious?
If it give it away, it's easy to adjust texts so that they fail to be spotted. After all, if you have the algorithm you can just test your site at any moment.
Quote from: Iason Ouabache on October 29, 2009, 08:37:25 AM
China accuses Google of censorship
In Soviet Russia, Censorship accuses you!