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Google Blocks Porn In Base, Patches Appliance
An anonymous reader writes "The search giant has moved to fix a problem in Google Base which didn't properly block pornographic material in their search results. According to Google, the filter was broken for 'some period of time' but the company didn't elaborate. Nathan Weinberg could have been one of the first to report the incident on his blog, Inside Google, writing: 'Holy crap, there is a lot of porn at Google Base! Looks like, just like Google Images, Google Base could become a huge source of porn, and eventually a place where porn will be sold. I even noticed some movie reviews.'" They've also recently corrected a problem with their search appliance. geo_2677 wrote to mention a Securityfocus.com article discussing the rapid patching of the Google search boxes in response to a vulnerability.
You can still get all the pr0n you want. The problem was that SafeSearch was including pr0n in the results. Some dad uploaded pictures of his two-year-old daughter to share with family. But, when he searched for those pictures, he found a hell of a lot more than he was looking for.
Considering the society we live in, SafeSearch is a good default--after all, you wouldn't want something that could easily get you fired popping up on your monitor just for doing an innocent search. It's also good of Google to offer the simple ability to tell them not to be your nanny.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Sure. You are free to use a different company. Using a different government is not always possible.
This is corporate entity who isnt a monopoly, so it well within their rights to do this.
Once you talk about government censoring free speech ( its debateable if porn falls under that category in the first place ) then we an issue to discuss.
However, even with your example, China is an sovereign country. It has a right to declare a type of questionable speech illegal if they wish, as long as it doesnt deprive people of basic human rights in the process.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Regarding the sample boxes they couldn't determine the status for, they may be firewalled by companies who don't want to risk unforseen vulnerabilities. Regarding the ones that are accessible but not patched, is it possible the owners are also blocking updates? If you have a dedicated search appliance in a situation where you can't really afford it going down for an unknown period of time, would you risk patching until you'd heard from others that the patch didn't introduce any new instabilities? Especially since it's a black (or blue) box, so a hard crash might mean having to send it back?
Win2000 and WinXP have autoupdaters, also. Many of them are not completely patched, either. The users have either never enabled, or disabled, that feature. The administrative interface on Google appliances could allow that level of control, also.
From TFA:
"Todd Ripley, a real estate investor in Asheville, North Carolina, noticed the problem on Tuesday morning after he uploaded photos of his 2-year-old daughter Jasmine onto his Google Base page. He planned to direct his family to the page but decided against it after a search for "Jasmine" turned up some unsavoury results despite the use of the SafeSearch filter."
If he'd just named his daughter Phyllis, or Martha, or Gertrude...
And why did he need to search for "Jasmine" to tell his family where to find photos? Couldn't he just use a URL? And did he think that there was any chance that a search for "Jasmine" would actually find his daughter's photos from the mounds of other info out there???