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U.S. Government Wants Google Search Records
JimBridgerBowl writes "According to the San Jose Mercury News, The Bush administration wants access to Google's huge database of search queries submitted by users to track how often pornography is returned in results. This information would be used for Bush's appeal of the 2004 COPA law, targeted to prevent access to pornography by children. The law was struck down because it would have restricted adults access to legal pornography. Google is promising to fight the release of this information." From the article: "The Supreme Court invited the government to either come up with a less drastic version of the law or go to trial to prove that the statute does not violate the First Amendment and is the only viable way to combat child porn. As a result, government lawyers said in court papers they are developing a defense of the 1998 law based on the argument that it is far more effective than software filters in protecting children from porn."
"1998 Law" places this in the Clinton presidency, doesn't it?
I can't help it - I'm a 19D.
It was 1998, remember? Janet Reno was singing its praises, and Bill Clinton signed it into law.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The sting operations by local police forces seems more than adequate enough to catch pedofiles. Boost funding for this and lock up these perverts with the satisfaction of knowing you caught them in the act.
Google pr0n queries?? Probably take the worlds fastest super computer a year to parse!
For example, they could ask for the percentage of searches that returned results with adult material that got clicked on.
The fact that they're looking for raw data clearly indicates that they want to do something with it that they'd prefer others to not watch - which, incidentally, is the only reason that fits for why they decided to evade judicial oversight of domestic wiretaps.
A Nerd Looks At Politics www.blueworksbetter.com
"I have seen this bandied about several times...It is utter bunk. Pray, tell us how keeping track of searches "improve their effectiveness"? The only thing it does is allow for targeted advertising. It has nothing to do with improving anything other than their income."
Of course you need search logs to improve search results.
I worked in my university department on AI algorhythms to improve
search engine performance. We certainly didnt need logs to improve
any monetary income. Based on what generally and currently gets
typed as a query and wich results are in the end taken as good
results by the user, software reranks, reindexes and reevalues
their databases and thus improves future result sets for same
queries. It's as easy as that.
According to prophecy
Here's a recent story by her concerning CP80, the latest attempt to make pornography go away: http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/30342/. *Don't* *miss* the "educational" Flash video by CP80 about pr0n http://www.cp80.org/solutions/CP80-Flash-Overview. html , which is a contender for the title of "The 'Reefer Madness' of anti-porn propaganda". Anybody know of others?
Google could log the MD5 of the IP address
Bad Idea!
A brute attack is trivial here. There are 2^32 IP addresses so building a complete inverse mapping for this data can be done on an ordinary PC in no time.
Why just target Google?
What about Yahoo, Microsoft, Altavista, Hotbot, etc. - every other possible internet search tool?
Besides- you don't exactly need a search engine to find www.sex.com or
http://www.booble.com/
Will the Republicans now go on a witch hunt for other heritic ideas, such as: Evolution and Free Thought?
In Soviet Amerika, Bush indexes You!
My purpose is not to obtain illicit material, but rather to get inside the head of someone who may be a danger to my children. How would Bush or anyone else know the difference based upon a Google search?
Not an idle worry. Peter Townsend of The Who spent 5 years on a registry of sex offenders for just exactly this. Took some fancy lawyering to keep him from being formally charged, too.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
I just reset my Google cookies and logged back into gmail and all cookies set expire at end of session. After I "logged out" of gmail a few were left - S,TZ.GMAIL_RTT from google.com, and GMAIL_LOGIN from mail.google.com - all still set to expire at end of session. I'l lhave to exit this browser to figure out where those go away when I exit Firefox.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Better yet, let's all submit searches for "Bush Twins Porn", "Jenna Barbara lesbian sex", and best of all, "Clinton Bush gangbang". Quick, everyone click on them to increase their ranking!
Actually, it occurs to me that if they are going to be reading searches, we could send them messages directly, like "Chelsea is hotter than the Bush twins". How about "Hey Mr President stop looking over my shoulder at my porn"
The gub'ment just sued them:
Gonzales v. Google Inc
bloomberg
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
If you read the thread, you'll see that the link was eaten on my first post, I replied immediately with information about the gay prostitute at the white house. If you just put in "Jeff Gannon" in google, you'll find the many stories that were in every major newspaper and news network when this ridiculous situation came to light.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.