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Google Agrees to Censor Results in China
neutralino writes "The Associated Press is reporting that Google has agreed to censor results in China. According to the article, 'Google officials characterized the censorship concessions in China as an excruciating decision for a company that adopted "don't be evil" as a motto. But management believes it's a worthwhile sacrifice.'"
be evil.
sulli
RTFJ.
What people need to realize is that Google doesn't really have a choice in the matter. I don't believe this violates the "Don't be evil" motto, as Google is simply trying to follow Chinese law. I don't think Google should be scrutinized for this, considering every other company (Microsoft, Yahoo, etc) has been forced to do the same thing. What people should be scrutinizing is Chinese law, not companies that follow said laws. Of course, the entire political situation in China is horrible and always has been.
google.slashdot
I clicked on "Read More" as soon as the article came up and I got the message
"Nothing for you to see here, please move along"
Chinese censorship on slashdot too? 8@
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Management decided.
You mean the suits decided.
I think the next year will see whether Google is true to the original DNA of the company, or whether they will become the next Microsoft, with all that implies.
. . . unless it makes money.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
an excruciating decision for a company that adopted "don't be evil" as a motto. But management believes it's a worthwhile sacrifice.
That statement is bullshit. The 'worthwhile sacrifice' mentioned is clearly meant to work against the clear contravention of the 'do no evil' motto. However what is being sacrificed? The ethics of Google. What is being gained by the sacrifice? Access to China == profit. So they're sacrificing ethics for profit - that isn't exactly original for a corporation.
More from the article: "We firmly believe, with our culture of innovation, Google can make meaningful and positive contributions to the already impressive pace of development in China," said Andrew McLaughlin, Google's senior policy counsel.
Again, bullshit. Google is an informaiton company. Their entire existence is justified by making access to and use of information easier. If they censor that information based on the petty politics of nationalists (or any other political concern) then they are not serving their purpose. They are in fact reinforcing the policies of censorship and repression in China. If everyone, every company goes along with these policies then what motivation is there to change them?
Here's a real sacrifice: lose profits from lack of presence in China and be ethical and further the cause of free speech. That's a sacrifice, something you'd like, for something better. Not the other way around. Really the way these PR droids use language makes me want to have them lobotomised... and PR school doesn't count.
// It had been Fat's delusion for years that he could help people. --Philip K. Dick, Valis
Didn't google used to stand for free information for all? Now its, free information for all, but if someone asks, we change the information. If I ask google about 'revolutions in China' I bet I get some answers that would be filtered in China. What ever happened to the 'WHOLE' Truth? I understand this company must abide by local laws, but why not just disable service to someone who does not wish to follow YOUR "don't be evil" strategy? How much money does Google really make in China? Is it worth selling out?
--sig fault--
I have no problem with selling China cars or airplanes or other stuff like that. But to actively collaborate with the regime in stifling dissent is just too much. After this, I don't think anyone should have any faith at all in their claim that they will stick up to the US Government's fishing expedition.
Google is dead. Someone new will take their place. Someone who doesn't kowtow to dictators.
sulli
RTFJ.
Nothing says they have to do business there. It seems, after some soul searching, they are putting profits ahead of 'do no evil'. If that were truly the motto, then they might tell China to insert it where the sun don't shine, and forgo that market.
Considering their censorship will likely be much less draconian than any implemented by Microsoft, they're doing the Chinese population a favor. If you consider that their other option is to not censor anything and have China block their entire domain, thus depriving the entire country of Google, they're at least giving them something.
"Don't be evil" can't work for any public company due to the laws of physics.
I would be pissed off. Then again, I probably wouldn't be reading about this.
This is analogous to an alcoholic having "just one drink." Not only is it a slippery slope, but this one action has forever branded Google as a company that is willing to relinquish its core values for profit. The stock may be riding high, but my stock in Google just took a nose-dive.
I have always believed in the motto:
Greed is Good(TM)
It is gratifying to know that even Google cannot overcome its inherent Greed and has finally succumbed to the profit motive.
Greed is the lifeblood of human societies. It drives humanity to realize its unlimited potential and it is probably the best of all virtues found in humanity.
Greed is responsible for the progress that Americans have made since independence. Without Greed, Americans could not have used slavery, manifest destiny, atomic bombs, financial markets, railroads, and other means to achieve its rightful place in the world.
What is good for Greed is good for America. What is good for Google is good for America.
Greed is Good(TM)
This merely underlines that everyone has a price.
At least Google's management are in touch with the Chinese people, the make the same wage: $1. That's really taking into account the culture of the country!
please excuse my apathy
It is local law, and google has no chance of changing it. Either they come, or someone else will, simple as that. No matter how unjust, or how much I disagree with a law, it is still the law. Google has almost no choice in the matter.
Its basicly be there and do something you don't want to, or watch someone else do it, to the exact same effect, except you don't get the money. Sound business tactics, but the situation is hardly their fault.
DYWYPI?
Long answer: We want every bit of our money foo!
I am sick and tired of the West sucking up to China. It seems China gets the best end of the bargain - they get the benefits of capitalism and trade with the west - but they get a free pass on democracy, and the West even helps them with their dictatorship and censorship needs.
So, I guess totalitarianism is bad, as long as a small, weak country is doing it. But "China very big" so, we have to do what China says.
Motherfuckers. Screw Google and all the other apologists.
... and then they built the supercollider.
This is Google we're talking about here. They typically find more than one way of delivering the same information. Are you telling me Google won't find a way around their agreement? If they get access to China (which I grant they sort of have already) they can work from within to foster change. Lastly, This is a business. If China intends to shut you out, do an end-run around. Agree without agreeing, and go do what you want to do, while putting on a good face.
It's not like Google doesn't have some of the smartest people in the world working for them right now.
Last I heard, Microsoft was ordered by China to give them the source code to Windows...did they ever comply? I seriously doubt it. Regardless they still make money in China. Google can do the same.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
While I understand that Google's just a business, this seems to mark a fall from grace. It's kind of a pity. I respected them for their moral positions, not just for their products & services.
It also calls into question their motivations for resisting the Bush administrations requests. (reminds me of the old joke: Man asks a woman to have sex with him, she says forget it. He says "how about for a hundred thousand dollars". She consents, so he says "how about for ten dollars". She says "what kind of a girl do you think I am?". He replies "We've already established that, now we're just negotiating about price".
O.
Just increased their salaries by 130,000,000,000 percent.
"If dying were anything special, they wouldn't let everyone do it."
Half a google is better than none!
And you can bet your ass they'll do it to those of us in so-called "free" countries so long as the money's right. "Don't be evil" indeed.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Same _exact_ reasoning will apply to handing over search queries and associated user data to the US government.
New motto:
Do no evil unless governments compel you to if you want to stay in the market.
Maybe they could toe the line very closely and repeatedly attempt to slip things past the Chinese government. It might be risky but "do no evil" isn't far off "try to undermine evil"
I like muppets.
We need to realize that China is developing faster and faster because their government is slowly allowing free market business to thrive. If google can get in on the ground floor, they will be sitting on a goldmine down the road when the country will open up more (I wouldnt quite call that evil, just good business practice). Believe me, China is about to explode into every market of the global economy. Unfortunately, its up to the government to decide when to open the floodgates.
Each year thousands of Chinese citizens are put to death under a legal system plagued with corruption and secrecy. While the rest of the world moves toward abolition, Chinese authorities only continue to expand the application of the death penalty. According to reports, an average of 15,000 people per year were executed, judicially or extrajudicially, by the government between 1997 and 2001...
I totally agree. When I first read about this on Drudgereport.com, I about choked up!!!
Google has just commited major crimes against humanity, and as such I vow to never use them again. No, I'm serious!
Google, could have decided to pull support all togeather. They didn't. They got greedy at the expense of 1.3 billion.
Life is not for the lazy.
An absurd statement - of course they have a choice. Google does not have to provide its services in China. In fact, not providing service would be a clear message that Google will not sacrifice its ethics for profit. Its nice Google uses "Don't be evil", now lets see them practice it.
The way I see it, this isn't Evil, but it's not Good either; it's somewhere in the middle. If Google didn't agree to censor results, China would just do it for them and China would probably do a much more diligent job. This way, there may be holes such as the Google cached page or whatever that will allow people in China to get around the restriction which they wouldn't be able to do if China just blocked Google at the Great Firewall. China isn't going to change its political system any time soon, but the more Western culture and business that manages to get into China the more it will (slowly) change.
Bravo to Google for going against the conventional wisdom. Don't you think that the Chinese people are going to see how much information there is out on the net, and how important it is, and then get seriously PO'd that a few topics are off-limits? I can think of no better way to stimulate someone's interest in something than to try to prevent access to it.
Eventually the Chinese officials will become less vigilant and information will start to flow through. This will happen sooner the more search engines there are for the authorities to keep an eye on. A search engine company that has revenue sources outside China will be in a better position to push the envelope.
People's search behavior will be very interesting to the authorities. If I were Chinese I would be a little more inclined to use a foreign search engine that would be less likely to hand over that information to the government. Google's recent action in the US along those lines sends the exactly right message.
Again, bravo to Google.
does anyone know? to all Chinese: elegoog! http://elgoog.rb-hosting.de/
next you going to tell me the next windows will be named after a popular lunch sausage!
So, the enlightened folks at Google have a problem cooperating with the US government in pursuing lawbreakers, an arguably principled stand, but they have no problem cooperating with the Chinese dictatorship in suppressing the human rights of the Chinese people. Go figure.
Oh noes! You mean 'Don't be evil' was just a marketing campaign? I'm shocked, SHOCKED I SAY!
As the article goes on to state, when an item is censored Google will tell you it has censored the searched item to comply with local laws. This sort of censorship where you know something is being kept from you is much less scary than the type where you simply don't know what is being kept from you. Simply providing their search engine to China in censored form, and admitting to users they are being censored isn't evil. What is evil is the Chinese governments restrictions on free speech, but Google can only choose to provide a censored search engine or not provide one at all.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
...well, if they comply with German and French censorship, it's not such a big deal to comply with Chinese censorship too.
At least they're not giving into the US government crackpots.
Personally, I don't think censorship isn't automatically a bad idea. For example, suddenly allowing people access to huge amounts of information could be a bad idea - especially of those same people have been used to believing everything they read. I mean, most of the information on the internet is *at least* biased (written from a westerner's 'head-up-arse' point of view), if not plain incorrect.
Increasingly allowing access while people get used to being able to descern crap from cosha is probably a very smart thing. No one can deny that access is being increased, rather than decreased.
Yes, access to google has been crap here (in China) for a while; most notably, Firefox's quick search does not work at all, and www.google.com is all Chinese and returns Chinese results. A little while ago, they even removed the 'Google in English' link too, but it was put back yesterday.
While the rest of the world moves toward abolition
What world do *you* live in? In the last 5 years since December 2000, the USA has been totally lost toward secrecy, corruption and breaking our own laws.
Wow what a choice, be evil or be cut out of the defining market of the 21st century. China will not always be under communist rule its certain that there will be a government change eventually (although it will take alot longer with these controls in place) and Google needs to be there.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
If you want to spread democracy, is it better to simply not to business in anti-democratic countries or to do business on their terms?
That is a question that every pro-democracy person, company, and government has to make when it comes to anti-democratic countries like China.
The answer, as with much of life, varies with the individual circumstances.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
*pant* *pant* OK, I'm better, now. Had a flashback to my punk-rocker Anarchist cookbook days, there. Still I'll be damned if the rest of us should stand by with our thumbs plugged and do nothing.
As the article goes on to state, when an item is censored Google will tell you it has censored the searched item to comply with local laws. This sort of censorship where you know something is being kept from you is much less scary than the type where you simply don't know what is being kept from you.
To use your own analogy this would be like Poland Spring putting lead in their water, and then putting a bit notice on every bottle that said "To comply with Chinese law we have put lead in this water."
If you know the water is posion you can choose to drink elsewhere if you wish.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Google now censors it's search results for things that the Chinese government doesn't want it's people to read, just as it has been doing the same thing to comply with laws in France and Germany.
0 .html6 38n sorship.php
Here is some more information:
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-01-15-n5
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050117-090
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/general/google-ce
So the question is, why are people so offended when Google censors for China, but think the same behavior is fine for Europe?
I think Google should be scrutinized for allowing censoring. I don't doubt that Google was not the source of this evil, but it is willingly propogating evil. The reason the Chinese gov't can get away with this is because so many companies give in to this. Google needs to use its vast amount of wealth and clout to prevent the spread of evil, not be a participant in it.
I think the subversive power of having Google (even censored) is greater than the other option which is no Google at all.
Of course it all depends on how cooperative Google is with ye ol thought police. If they build interfaces which let them track individual users then they can certainly be considered evil. If, on the other hand, they hand over zillions of terabytes of interwoven binary data and tell the chinese police to have fun searching it then they might still be on the borderline.
In any event there are different levels of cooperation.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
~~~
The question is whether or not doing business with such a government and censoring is, in fact, "evil". I would argue it's not... in the sense that it's not immoral. It may be somewhat unethical, but since they are informing users of the censorship, at least that's somewhat absolving of Google. I don't fault Google for this decision; it's just good business, and potentially good public policy, if it helps the society advance in the long run.
Is any form of government censorship automatically "evil"? It's easy enough for us to denounce China's censorship as being "too much", but although some of us here also object to, say, Germany's anti-Nazi censorship laws, I don't think anyone would claim that was really "evil"; at least, not in the same category. Misguided, perhaps, but evil?
It's ironic that many of the posters here are of a Liberal stripe who think certain things like censorship and capital punishment are absolutely wrong. So Google shouldn't do business with China because China is "evil"? And yet it's the Liberal politicians these people support who have urged engagement with countries like China, Cub, etc., not judging the morals of other countries but rather doing business with them in any way possible, making whatever concessions necessary, to avoid confrontration and to work for change slowly from within. Meanwhile, they ridicule Conservative politicians who use such "simplistic" terms as "evil" when it comes to radical islamic terrorists.
The bottom line is, even if what China is doing is evil, it doesn't make Google's complicity evil, and you can't go to war over every dispute over morality. At this stage, slow cooperation with China seems to be the better course of action; we've been doing it for 30 years now and there has been substantial change. We revisited the debate 15 years ago and decided to continue engagement and we've gotten further results. The day may come when we draw the line and tell China it's time to shape up, but that day is not today. We don't have the resources for such a conflict.
Bruce
Is there a search engine that doesn't do this shit? Let's hasten the rise of the next google, if they can no longer be trusted.
Consumer goods have gotten cheap because they are being "engineered" for cheap production.
Compare today's $7 widget to the $10 widget you bought in 1996. The newer widget weighs half as much, is made from inferior materials, and won't last nearly as long. You're not saving $3, you're being ripped off.
With the exception of consumer electonics, most of the retail goods have gotten significantly more expensive in the past 10 - 20 years... when you hold quality constant.
They never said "don't let anyone else be evil." Just "don't be evil."
Google should uncensor the results on April Fool's day. "Hey, we were just kidding, China!"
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Google has almost no choice in the matter.
Sound business tactics, but the situation is hardly their fault.
But they did have a choice, and their choice was to cave in. It is not sound business tactics if you make it your business to do no evil. They are burning their karma to keep themselves warm.
You can't follow two masters: you can't serve both (good) and Mammon.
$META_SIG_JOKE
Some things Google has been doing lately seem pretty sneaky. I don't have proof, but it all seems to fit: they gave in to AOL with special ads, then some link-tracking advertisers pressured mozilla.org to include a new "ping" attribute to links to facilitate tracking (I don't know of any large advertising firms with employees in mozilla.org), and finally they are censoring search results for China. At least in my mind the question is settled: as long as you have shareholders it's not possible not to be evil. It's too bad. I guess we'll have to wait for the next Google to come along and hope they don't sell out.
So what other search engines are there? Is Teoma a viable alternative? What others are there? Sure, they might all keep too much information, but spreading it around would at least make it harder to get a dossier from one place.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
I think the moral high ground isn't to get into bed with a facist country for the sake of money. But I can see why Google fans would want to spin that in a positive way. Yes, Google could have done worse. But they're still aiding and abetting the Chinese government.
Google will censor search results in their new google.cn site, which is required by the Chinese government to run a search engine in their country. Their other sites, like google.com, are still as open as they were before (which means that the Chinese government is blocking some stuff anyway).
Whereas a google.com search yields this
wikipedia article as its first hit with quotes like this:
I think you have to look at it pragmatically. If Google don't do what the Chinese Government asks then the whole of Google will be blocked/filtered so what Google is doing doesn't have an "evil" effect that wouldn't be happening anyway.
Liberalisation of China is probably going to be something that happens in a creeping fashion. A position based entirely on principal (ie Google refusing outright) might actually be worse in practice because it would actually mean more isolation for the Chinese people, not less. Whatever blocks are placed it isn't going to be 100% effective.
If Google put's up a "Some results have been omited due to local legal requirements" message like they do with some other blocks all the better, at least the people will know they are being filtered and why.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Why are people acting like anything is odd here. We are on the brink of authorizing one of the most powerful censorship tools ever created and mandating that every device in our country respect it. Doesn't anyone here realize that by combining VEIL and the Broadcast Flag it is possible to flag and mark something as Play only Once and Cannot be Recorded. That means we can be stopped from making any proof something ever happened and we have created a way to command us that we can never prove occurred. How? Simple, if you want to broadcast a message that you want know one to record you set the no copy flag. If you want to commit a atrocity you turn on your VEIL light device and now no device can record what is happening. Someone tell me how a camcorder will know it is recording a film or a real life scenes that someone wants to prevent from being recorded when it sees the VEIL light. It seems to me we have created the ultimate tools of control. No information goes anywhere unless someone other than yourself permits it.
Has Google ever claimed to represent freedom of speech, or that they are the be-all, end-all resource for true and factual information?
Goodies like mail and maps aside, all they really are is a business that facilitate indexing the web. They aren't "good" and they aren't "evil", they're a corporation that performs a service for profit. They didn't turn over the search records to the DoJ because that would be suicide in the freedom (and soft-core porn) loving American market-- no one would use Google if they thought their queries were being tracked by some mysterious government agency.
On the other hand, they will not be allowed to operate in China at all unless they comply with the government... So they do.
I don't know where this comes from, the idea that Google should be making a stand for free speech in a foreign country. If such a stand doesn't come from the populace themselves, it isn't going to happen (and it just might, as even with filters in place they will have more access than ever to the rest of the world.)
What if this were Microsoft?
Would you be so willing to understand?
I fail to see how this is evil. Google had two options. They could either censor some of their results, or China would censor all of their results. If censoring is bad, logically more censoring is worse than less censoring. Google thus is not doing evil, they are making the best of an inherently evil situation. If this is evil, then "doing no evil" is impossible, because no matter what they did, evil would have been done.
Some might argue that Google could have simply held their ground and China would have eventually caved. I doubt this. There are plenty of search engines out there, and although they might not be quite as good as Google, they're not bad or anything. If popular demand for Google is big enough to make China give up their censoring, then China's censorship laws can't be that strict if something as trivial as Google versus Yahoo is willing to make them cave.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Totalitarianism is ok in:
a) any country with a useful resource and a friendly-to-us government (see: Saudi Arabia)
b) any country that would be kind of a pain to invade with no clear benefit (see: most totalitarian countries)
c) any country that would be a total bitch to invade (see: N. Korea) despite possible security benefits for us and our allies/helpers.
I am speaking of US policy hear, but generally, governments in the west follow these policies. I hate that people think that China gets a blind eye. The human rights and legal situations in China are probably the most talked about and scrutinized in the west of any non-democratic country (besides Iraq). But what the hell do you expect countries to do?
There's a goodly amount of international pressure on China as-is, and while I wouldn't be against ramping that up, I think an invasion there would be pretty much 130% Grade-A insane.
While this has been a bit off-topic, it does apply. Google has to deal with the country the way it is (as our national governments do), and the other choice is to let some other non-blocked IP become China's Google. The real test of their principles will be whether they use their market share there, once gained, to try to stand up for greater freedom of information. 'Standing up' to the government on this issue now would provide nothing besides a little bit of good PR here in the west, no substantive gain for the Chinese people.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Bunch of hypocritical morons. THANK YOU Google...
Thank you for being so much like the United States : the single greatest betrayal of the human spirit in recorded history.
You brought to the net the simplest and best search engine, and then elaborated with genuinely useful tools to make the web a better place. When it came time to IPO, you did it on your own terms, and you have been rewarded for your efforts. When the jackbooted thugs from the Bush Junta kicked at your door asking for identified searches, you told them to go stuff it.
But when the biggest bunch of shit-eating fascist scum sucking pigs on the planet - that corrupt collection of power mad douchebags - the repressive grab-asses from china.gov tell you to censor your searches and WHAT DO YOU TELL BIG BROTHER IN BEIJING? Did you tell them to kindly go take a flying fuck in a rolling donut? Did you tell these butt munching freaks they could lick the dingleberries out of your butt? Did you remind them of their past and continuous disregard for all that is human and decent and say "I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE?" DID YOU? DID YOU DO NO EVIL?
Fuck no.
You FELL ON YOUR KNEES and said "Yes, massa - just don't send me back to da fields!" and did some corporate cock-gobbling.
You people have lost ALL credibility. You have jumped the shark. We thought you were diffferent. You're not. You suck. What a money shot this is. You will be destroyed. It was cool while it lasted. Nice knowin' ya. Don't let the door hit you on the ass when you leave. Buh Bye!
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Google is aiding everyone by trying to provide the information.. the problem is Google doesn't have guns.. The Government does.
Even the mighty News Corporation (run by Rupert Murdoch) have bowed down to the chinese government.
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=tiananmen+S quare++&btnG=%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&meta=
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Chinese users are used to Internet censorship. A lot of educated users know about it and simply surf via overseas proxies. Google will most likely filter results based on Chinese government advisement. It *IS* a business and instead of not being present at all in China, they have decided to provide part of their services in a restricted way. Every country has their own laws, for their own reasons, China is no different. Would it be better if Google didn't enter the Chinese market and users have less choice in search engines? If anyone thinks the Chinese government will adjust their policies for foreign businesses, they don't know the Chinese government at all.
I grew up in Hong Kong and I have been to China several times. I have relatives in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the states. I don't claim to have a deep grasp of Chinese history or even its culture, but censorship is a touchy issue in Chinese politics. There are a lot of illiterate and uneducated people in China, especially in the country side. Censorship was first put in place as the government is worried about civilian revolutions and strikes due to misunderstanding of government policy. Not speaking the same dialect and not being able to write at all makes for some heated debates between people. This was and still is, to some extent, the reality of the situation in China. If you understand the way some terrorists misquote and misunderstand US policy and statements, its somewhat similar.
China is still very far behind the western nations in terms of education and technology. It is slowly improving its ability to educate everyone, but its no where near adequate yet. The fact that the Chinese ruling party is made up of so many politicians (1000+ from memory) means that changing long standing laws require a lot of time, as there are so many from the old guard still around. In short, just like China opening its trade borders and becoming more liberal, especially in the big cities like Shanghai, censorship will be gone in a decade or two. We just have to be patient, as the Chinese government does not like fast changes, and it has a lot of past incidents of revolutions that it does not want to repeat.
I think the main issue here is whether a US business should be allowed to operate in a way that would be illegal in the states. Personally, I don't see a problem with this. Different countries and cultures have different views on information freedom. Absolute freedom is not always a good thing, whilst government censorship is always biased and abusable. One can easily argue that leaving Neo-Nazi and bomb making information easily accessible on the web, especially to teenagers, is not the right thing to do, even in order to provide freedom of information.
In summary, good decision made by Google, over-blown censorship new stories by the media.
If I can do it, its probably not worth doing... probably
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Google could be, for all we know, censoring OUR search results, as a result of pressure from our overlords.
All animals are equal ... Some are more equal.
( 2b || !2b)
There is a deeper lesson here, of course: Never try to create a Reality Distortion Field if you don't have fruit in your logo. Companies should realize that only The Steve has that sort of power.
Hello, I have just read very disturbing news of Google agreeing to filter thousands of search terms for the Chinese government. I am curious how Google management sees this as a 'worthwhile sacrifice'. Google promised free, pure information for ALL. A company that sought to unite the world, to help change it for the better and to 'do no evil.' I see the recent agreement with a tyranical government as a spit in the face of all those principles and values I thought Google stood for. I am hereby cancelling my Adsense account, removing Google ads from my home page, abandoning my Gmail account, and changing my homepage. I no longer want to support a company that trades its principles for marketshare and cuts freedom of information for profit. I do not want to wait wondering when I will be next and beleive it to be only a matter of time for limitations to be set on my freedom as well. Shame on Google management for this terrible decision. I only hope that you will reconsider and void this disgusting agreement. Sincerely, (my name)
Blog via SMS text messaging
I am of the view that most of these "low cost" electronics and other products are simply DUMPING. Where the goods are subsidised (though paying no wages or direct subsidies) so the goods are low cost purely to put everyone else out of business in the aim of building a monopoly over the market.
What if the law is evil?
"He who throws mud, loses ground." - proverb
...de when to open the floodgates. Fortunately, I'd say, as floodgate can't be opened too quickly.
You do know that most of the world is not composed of the territory known as the United States of America, right?
> the USA has been totally lost toward secrecy, corruption and breaking our own laws.
He was talking about abolition of the death penalty, in "most of the world". Please pay attention.
- sigs are for wimps.
This won't stop unless their shareholders make it stop, and their shareholders will hear "...untapped market of over a billion of people will triple our stock prices overnight..." and will start to think that maybe it is OK to be accessories in the oppression of all those people if in fact the stock prices triple overnight. After all, if a billion people in China don't know what their government is up to, it doesn't really affect anyone on this side of the pond. Does it?
So what can you do? Well... pretty much nothing, really. Your righteous indignation is no match for their money. I'd be willing to bet that you can't look around a single room in your house without spotting something that was made in China, so forget the boycott. You could try boycotting Google or Microsoft but the 3 people who get worked up enough to actually do it are no match for the billions of Chinese customers. Best thing you can do is go eat Chinese food and leave them an extra big tip so they can sooner afford to bring more of their family over here and expand their restaurant. Oh yeah and you might consider learning Mandarin pretty soon now. Call it a hunch...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If a government wants to censor content for a region then it seems ok for google to comply as long as the content doesn't simply disappear quietly. If Google puts a 'This result is CENSORED by your region's government.' in big red bold letters then maybe that's something. Maybe another push for the government to relax censorship .. if Wikipedia is blocked, and Google is sporting red text disclaimers equating to "your government is holding you back", while the rest of the world using both happily moves on. Wholesale dissatisfaction leads to the most rapid of changes. OTOH, if it IS censored without constant disclaimers saying it is censored then I can't understand how this wouldn't fall squarely into the evil column.
You always have a choice, such as not to ship poison gas precursors to Iraq, nuclear technology to Iran, or computer parts to Nazi Germany. All it takes is the concept that there is something more important in the world than profit. Unfortunately, that is the hard one for the type of people that run these corporations. Not to sound like the Pope here, but greed is king, and since Google's shareholders don't give a damn, watch their stock rise again tomorrow. The only amazing thing is that they were able to fool people into believing this "do no evil" crap for so long. Note how the people who work at Google are not voting with their feet, either.
Our companies will support China until it crashes. Then they will act surprised and hurt when the new, democratic government sues their asses off in U.S. court for aiding human right violations and tells them to take their products and shove them.
If this were Microsoft, the slashdot crowd would have shouted from roof tops about how the EVIL empire is collaborating with well... the other empire, and how microsoft products are crap and the discussion will consist of :
1) 20 replies detailing how microsoft should be censured, fined, closed, split, etc., 2) 15 replies on what crappy search engines they produce,
3) 10 replies on root-kitting Vista and XP,
4) 5 jokes on on Soviet russia,
and last of all the number of responses would number around 1,300 now.
Satisfied ?
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
So much for do no evil. If they want to make that claim, they have to actually follow through and refuse to do a corrupt government's dirty work.
Google doesn't have a choice in this matter. China can use other search technology if they have to and google doesn't want to risk losing china. There's only so much you can do.
You have to be careful with such arguments...
What if someone gave you a choice:
A) Kill 1000 people
B) Kill 2 people
Do you pat yourself on the back for choosing "B" since killing a few people is less bad than killing a lot?
Despite the options available, I would be inclined to create my own "C) Find a better alternative"
Yes, this argument is a bit extreme and slightly idealistic..., but such ideals are powerful source of social change....
The concept of "non-violent protest" seems insane (and highly idealistic) when it is directed against a powerful armed & dangerous entity... But recent (world) history shows it has been extremely powerful in many different circumstances.
Google appears to have chosen the lesser of two evils... But it still directly choose to do some evil...
Consider the purpose of a "search engine" -- to help people find information. It seems highly ironic that a "search engine"'s business model would rely on making a fair amount of information unattainable by the customers.
What doctor would purposely refuse patients that he was capable of treating?
What cable television operator would choose not to make available highly desirable channels/content?
What newspaper would exist by not reporting the news?
What book publisher would exist by not publishing important/desirable books?
Well, ah crap, considering the last three items, we really do live in *interesting* times.
and Google is greedy. Of course Google'll bend over for the commies, they represent how many 10's of millions of web users able to click Google ads?
dont be evil, unless it affects profits
Remember, Google's search results are in ENGLISH. They'll never figure out how to use the damn thing! ;)
---- I have nothing more to add.
Nearly three billion people live (and die, as often happens) on less than two dollars per day of equivalent income.
The alternative is to be shut out of China entirely. This would be WORSE for the Chinese citizens trying to break though their government's tyranny. Google isn't sacrificing anything at all. It is giving its Chinese consumers the best product that the government will allow them.
If you disagree, please explain how Google refusing to participate with China would help a Chinese dissadent. Remember, China's filters have holes, and there will be even more of them if they have to watch every darned google search.
For all those out there believing that Google has made a pact with the devil (and possibly so), consider this:
Mr. China (the government) walks up to a businessman named Mr. Google (the company). Mr. China askes Mr. Google for a high-quality piece of the world's best rope, just so long as no manuals are included featuring hangman's knots. Mr. Google gives a thoughtful look at this opportunity, weights the moral and economic consequences, then smiles knowingly and hands Mr. China the rope.
It's only a matter of time before Mr. China's customers figure out how to tie their own hangman's knot around Mr. China's neck.
Google is led by some of the most intelligent and thoughtful people around. They know exactly what they're doing with this business deal. Oh, I doubt there's any outright attempt to "hang" the Chianese goverment, but Google knows full well what just a little bit more freedom of information will do for people over there--if they make a profit doing it, well, so much the better. The fact remains that regarldess of being villified by some, Google knows that this will make a positive influence on the Chinese people. I applaud their efforts in this.
United States Google China
This is the search results at www.google.cn if you search for "Falun Gong". It comes up with a long list of articles about Falun Gong atrocities, "How I escaped the evil cult of Falun Gong", a story about how Falun Gong hijacked a Hong Kong company's satellite (not joking), etc.
But the google.com search highlights articles headed with "Why China is terrified of Falun Gong".
Google is participating in the censorship program of a totalitarian state.
The Chinese government has had Google completely censored before this. By doing this Google offers the Chinese people more access to information on the web than they had before.
Microsoft wasn't acting to comply with local laws. They wanted to PLEASE the chinese government by doing something they weren't FORCED to do. They deleted a webpage OUTSIDE China, and they did it by their own initiative.
I'd have kinda agreed if the only thing Microsoft did was blocking access to the chinese blog from China. But they DELETED the blog. They had ABSOLUTELY NO OBLIGATION, heck, not even the RIGHT to do that.
I want to vote with my feet, er eyeballs. What are some good alternatives to Google Search and Google Maps that regardless of their motto, actually DON'T do evil? What are some really good search engines that have refused to censor their results in China and not just because they are too small for China to have bothered to ask them to?
Microsoft SHOULD have been split up. However, when they were the #3 highest donor on the campaign contribution list to G Dubbya, you cannot really expect that ANYONE would dare touch them. (both elections mind you).
Also, with Alito getting setup on the supreme court, you've now got majority conservatives in EVERY branch of the government... I guess there go the "checks and balances" eh? As Yoda would say here, "fucked, we are being".
~D
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
People who have worked at Google have pointed out that Google has gone into the Deja News usenet archive and snipped away stuff that they decided they didn't want there.
They've also made some sensitive searches return bogus results.
Don't think that the people at Google are a bunch of fucking angels. They are human.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Oh please. That's just Google knowing they are being evil and trying to get away with it, just to be able to say "But we are doing all we can to avoid being evil!"
Google has financial guns, which in many ways can be far more powerful than physical ones.
That said, I don't blame them for doing it. They would be missing out on one of the biggest potential markets in existence, and who knows - maybe the "your results are being censored" text will wake some people up to the truth when they would have just remained clueless using another search engine.
Then the solution is obviously for Google to get guns. Take that, fascist governments.
For someone who is currently living in China and using it daily, I am very glad they made this particular decision. For those condemning Google for not sticking to "Don't Be Evil" or for selling out, consider this - which is the greater evil, to filter out some information (and let people know it _is_ being filtered), or to deny them access to information altogether?
It is easy to talk about sticking to principles and refusing censorship from the comfort of a (relatively) uncensored computer. But have you ever considered what life would be like for those without Google? When _every_ single search engine out there, including Yahoo, MSN or others, are all filtered? All this means is that the most effective information resource out there is gone and we have to rely on substandard competitors that cave in far more easily to any pressure (e.g. DOJ request for info). Finding _any_ information becomes harder. What good has it done anyone?
It is easy to paint every decision as black and white, good or evil. But life really isn't that simple. Google had to choose between bad and evil and they came up with a solution that was better than any of their competitors. At least they tell you that something is filtered out. At least a smart and curious person still can go out and find out what it was that was filtered. The alternatives (international or chinese) do not even do that.
Among my workmates, information is well shared. Everyone knows what happened in the square. Heck, a couple of them were there. They knew about the benzene spill in Harbin long before it came out in news. Don't worry. Information of this sort gets around fairly well through various means. Censoring it from Google really won't hide anything. All blocking Google means is that when we hit obscure technical problems, we can no longer find solutions quickly. When we want to learn about the latest technology, we must scan through pages and pages of listings to find a decent resource. Oh yes, we'll also make Overture rich cause sooner or later, we will click through one of their sponsored links.
Google is probably complying with Chinese law for one simple reason. If Google does not comply with the law, they will probably be blocked by the Great Firewall, which would cause them to lose valuble business in the Chinese market.
Because France and Germany are democratic countries - hence those laws are the choice of the people, if they don't like them they can change them (in theory anyway). The Chinese people on the other hand have no say in those laws (well, there's always revolution but that would probably involve lots of death)
That's the first result for google.com too: Here
For the correct spelling:
English results
Chinese results
Yes, that is censorship. Fuck! Now I have to get rid of my Gmail account? Fuck you Google!
I agree with this post
Yeah, who cares about those pesky ideals. Keep the piles of cash coming!
Vote Libertarian
Basically, Google is building and maintaining a world of illusion for the Chinese people who would expect, from any search engine that does no evil, that it will show them the world as it really exists. That is freaking scary. It should make anyone afraid to use Google now. Google's new public motto is "What you do not know cannot hurt you (therefore we are doing no evil)". Time for this company to hire real philosophers and ethicists. This kind of issue is best left to people who are competent in the matter, not pure geeks.
if google wasnt there it would be some other company who would be blocking searches that chinese officials do not approve of silently. at least with google users are getting a notice about the censorship.
Google doesn't have guns.. The Government does.
Google has a far stronger weapon than any gun... the ability to make easy the free exchange of ideas and knowledge.
Can you imagine the buzz and notoriety that Google would have received from this news if they had stuck to their guns. They would have made Microsoft and Yahoo look like fools and unreliable. Not only that the Chinese netizens would have respected google and found ways to search on google.
The censorship will not last on the internet and Google would have been legendary in refusing to compromise.
This is the same shit that allowed Switzerland to remain "neutral" during WW2 yet help the Nazis and kill jews...
"can only choose to provide a censored search engine or not provide one at all"
The moral would walk away, especially if your moto is do no evil. If evil is the only option, do you do it?
Who's got the guns now?
Given that Google News already omits banned news sources, thereby casting them down Orwell's memory hole.
Similarly, if the U.S. censors something, it is bad. If China does it, it is good. If Bill Clinton starts a war, it is good. If George W. Bush does, it is bad. If the economy has 5% unemployment under a Democratic president, the economy is doing well. If it has 5% unemployment under a Republican president, it is doing poorly.
Are you beginning to understand?
Shame on Google.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's interesting how Google can't do wrong. First they are applauded when they delay their answer to China. When they cave in, it's suddenly OK because it's done "The Google Way"
Google can't do wrong, because Slashdot defines whatever Google does as "the right thing" - because "they do no evil"
I just wait until the day Google requires a rectal probe for all users. Because Google's probe is two degrees warmer than others, it's less uncomfortable than the competitors. The Slashdot community will hail Google's way as "the right thing", and the stock will increase.
When will the Google fanboys admit that it's just a company. It wants to do business. It could have said no, but their slogan is "do no evil (so long as it's more profitable)"
The motto is "do no evil", not "prevent any evil from being done."
As it stand now, Google is doing evil in China. If they didn't do business in China, they would not be doing evil. Yes, evil would still be done there by someone. But it wouldn't be Google.
It's easy to build justifications around what everyone else is doing. But if people and companies pay close attention to what they themselves are doing, and less to what everyone else is doing, the proper way forward becomes clear. The corporate poster child for this way of thinking is Patagonia.
"Change starts with you."
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Seriously. This is one instance where it's our government's business to step in and say, "Whoa!" Google won't toe the line if MSN and Yahoo! don't, and vice-versa. It's simply unwise from a competitive standpoint. But if Congress passes a law forbidding such censorship by an American company, the playing field will be level again -- but on a higher plane. Will they? Good question. China holds billions in U.S. notes and bonds. Can we, as a nation, afford to piss off such an indispensible creditor? I doubt that Congress has the spine for it, lofty principle or no.
Compared to the size of the market in China, Google's financial guns amount to about a pea shooter.
Chinese Google
US Google
I see two very different results, and no notice of censorship.
Except when the government says they can't. I guess that means their guns aren't quite so strong.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Money Grubbing Assholes - zig heil (click click)
Don't be evil ... to Americans.
-Shaunak
I think the moral high ground isn't to get into bed with a facist country for the sake of money. But I can see why Google fans would want to spin that in a positive way. Yes, Google could have done worse. But they're still aiding and abetting the Chinese government.
Big deal all companies aid and abed governments
Filtering Pron is done because governments want it done
I dont care if it my searches arent filtered but the government does.
Removing Copyright Infrignment information is a Government order.
Removing links to sites that glamourise hatred/terrorism against a nation namely US is filtered
Not allowed to have sex in public
Why? Government Law tells you it isnt approriate
Google is a publicly traded company. They would be derelict of their duties to their shareholders if they missed this opportunity. What they are doing in China is not illegal or even unethical; they are just complying with the local laws.
China, France, and Germany all claim to be Democracies. So in theory, if people don't like the laws in any country, they can change them through the legal process.
If you want to argue that China isn't a democracy, that is fine... but I would argue that Germany and France are no longer real democracies either. But that is beside the point. The point is, Google shouldn't have to judge one country "superior" to another country. The U.N. doesn't say "China isn't a Democracy, and therefore shouldn't get a vote in the Security Council", does it? If the U.N. tried to get rid of China because it wasn't a "democracy" (which is a pretty subjective term), the world would be outraged.
If it is wrong to censor, then yes, it is wrong for Google to do buisness in China and help them censor... but then, it is also wrong for Google for to do buisnes in Germany and France.
If it is OK for Google to censor (which you seem to be claiming it is), then it is simply a subjective decision to decide if China is a legit government and it's right to exercise power in its own country is valid. The U.N. seems to think so. And, if China is not Democratic enough for Google, shouldn't it not be democratic enough for the U.N.?
I mean, where to begin?
This is very old news, chosen to be dropped right now because of Google's recent refusal to properly respond to the US government in favor of the people. It's an interesting double standard.
Google would have gained SO MUCH respect if they had simply said, screw you China and not done business with them. Instead, they've shown their true colors finally and lost the immense amount of faith I had in them.
Tienanmen square is the tip of the iceberg. I have conversations with people in China all the time via Skype, and they don't even know that Mao killed more Chinese than Tojo! They know that their parents lost a sibling during the cultural revolution, but they have no idea that Mao's body count is well into the tens of millions. A few of them have been stunned when I sent them the wikipedia pages on the Cutural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward.
Communism is on the way to the ash heap of history, and when companies like Google, Microsoft, and Cisco help the thugs, they're just helping in delaying the liberation of China. I hope that the Chinese people make their displeasure known when they become a free country.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
search term: "falun gong"
Using google.com
Using Google China
Press Release:
**** Censored ****
And that makes it okay? "Shareholders" and society in general need to grow a conscience and learn there is more to success than money. That there's more to LIFE than money.
Random and weird software I've written.
Personally, I think the Chinese have this search engine censorship backwards. If I were in charge of the country, I think I'd WANT a massive easy to use search engine that spends its days and nights toiling away finding links to dissident web sites. After all, it would make my job of finding and... uh... reeducating those unhappy people MUCH easier.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I don't believe it is necessary for companies from the democratic world to aid and abet the rule of such dictatorships.
However, if a company like the formerly 'do-"no"-evil' (now where's strikethrough when one needs it!?) Google feel it is morally justified to help the CCP in China to keep its own Chinese population and its occupied peoples under a massive censorship and propaganda machinery, it should at least use that opportunity to highlight the dire situation it's in by prominently displaying a notice on each served page:
Did IBM know that they were aiding the genocide of the jews by collaborating with the unelected Nazi regime in Germany? Would IBM do it the same way all over again?
Today anyone doing business in China under the nazi regime there must be aware that China is brutally occupying its neighbors with a Lebensraum policy of wiping out their neighbors as separate nations and peoples. Too bad that today's multinationals and their political cronies have such selective and short memories. What the largest post- and neo-colonial "democratic" powers do, even the smaller democracies must follow thanks to the inter-connectedness of the new global economy. So thanks USA, UK, France, Japan etc. for your "moral leadership" in this neo-colonial game of wink-nudge. (The Russian Federation is of course among the biggest backers of the regime in China, but Russia's neither western nor a democracy...)
And thanks Nixon for your Cold War policy move intending to isolate the Soviet Union by befriending another murderous dictator in Mao Zedong. The policy of economic isolation of the Soviet Union seems to have given some positive results (at least if you ask the Baltic States and the now-free Eastern European countries) so why is the West now helping the remaining expansionist super-dictatorship through massive investments and the relocation of "democratic jobs" there?
If the West really holds Freedom and Democracy as dear as it claims, why not direct that investment to struggling but democratic developing countries instead? Help the Chinese choose: either it's the current genocidal dictatorship and no outside business, or it's the end of the genocidal dictatorship and friendly trade and cultural relationship with the rest of the world will follow. Including with their free Tibetan and Uighur neighbors who would rather trade their national natural resources instead of watching in fear while the Chinese continue ripping them off.
Too bad that the Chinese populace won't learn about their regime's crimes through Google though. If Google wishes to be seen even as merely semi-evil, they should support other efforts aimed at bypassing the censorship machinery they're now part of in China.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
How many of us have clothes/laptops/radios/dvd players/televisions that were made in China? Does this make Slashdot readers evil and supporters of communism and censorship? From the tone of the posts, I assume every Slashdot reader has a "Buy American" bumper sticker on the back of their Ford pickup truck.
Every website censors results in the United States. The Government declares it illegal for child pornography to be displayed on websites. Granted, this is an extreme example compared to censoring political articles about Tiananmen Square, but the basic premise is the same; Governments make law, and business must follow those laws.
I do not support censorship of political speech in China or anywhere else, but at least Google (as opposed to Yahoo, MSN and others) says that it will at least indicate in its results where it has censored the results. The Chinese people may get 10 results, and two of these might say "This result censored by your Government". At least the Chinese people will be faced with the obvious, that their government fears free speech which could help spur change.
I never thought I would see the day that Google panders to the Chinese Communists by deceiving an innocent Chinese citizen with a biased or incorrect search result. I can't imagine a more boneheaded maneuver.
It's time for Google management to pull their heads out of their asses.
Larry, Sergei, Eric -- as politely as I can put it, you guys can go fuck yourselves.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
There's a notice at the bottom of the "Chinese Google" page you linked to:
Google translate says this means:
According to the local law laws and regulations and the policy, partially searches the result does not demonstrate.
My guess is that a more accurate translation would be:
According to the local laws and regulations, some of the search results are not being shown.
Modulo poor translation, that sure looks like a notice of censorship.
Perhaps you can't read the notice, but is there, in Chinese, at the bottom of the search results on Google.com.cn:
"Ju dangdi falü fagui he zhengce, bufen sousuo jieguo weiyu xianshi."
"According to local laws, regulations and policies, part of the search results is not being shown."
It does have a notice of censorship at the bottom: Roughly: "According to local laws and regulations, some search results are not shown."
If they do, it's only for one sentence...
t m
http://www.china.org.cn/english/Political/26143.h
Nowhere does it say it is a Democracy. But it does say right up top:
I. Major stipulations in the Constitution in regard to China's political system
1. Major political principles in China
(1) The Communist Party of China is the country's sole political party in power.
(these are subpoints, the bottom one could be called I.1.(1) if you'd like).
One political party in power is not Democracy. So I think that China doesn't claim to be a Democracy.
There are multiple parties in Germany and France, so that makes them a heck of a lot more of a Democracy than China where other parties are not allowed.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Do you think by moaning about your leaders you have any real power?
Yes. In fact that's the very essence of democracy. The only reason why things have gotten so bad over here is that we've stopped criticizing our leaders. Well, at least the media has.
Human......angels? Human angels, you mean...right? Because I need something to believe in..
That's an argument against the existence of publicly traded companies, not an argument in favour of what Google's doing. A law that requires people to act immorally for the sake of money runs contrary to the oldest principles of both morality and law.
...with Nazi or some sites considered pornographic see http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/67716 ( German) for an example, of course unlike Chinese users German users can still use google.com to get unfiltered results but it's still the same priciple.
Can onion routers and web anonymization softwares (such as tor/privoxy) be blocked by PRC, are they doing it?
Google won't turn over search results to the US Gov't to help fight terrorism but they'll bow to the Chinese gov't and censor people. How cowardly. To stand up against the US gov't when you're protected by tons of ACLU type lawyers isn't brave at all. What would take real cajones would be to flip the bird to the Chinese governtment. Of course, we all know what happens when you oppose a Communist government.....
You say that following the law was equal to being moral. So if the Chinese law said you had to punch people in the face if they said something nice, that Google would be obligated to have its employees do that, or else they would be immoral?
I don't agree. Sometimes obeying a law is immoral. Sometimes breaking a law is moral.
and if the local law is to kill a certain race of people?
Just don't use google then.
use another search engine. they all give the pretty much the same results for the top queres anyway.
we shouldn't be letting one company monopolise all the time, it's bad for end users and competition
It's at the bottom.
Hmmm. Tried copying and pasting the actual string. Guess Slashdot doesn't like Chinese characters. Any way...
Qouth the babelfish...
"According to the local law laws and regulations and the policy, the part searches the result not to demonstrate."
It would probably be better to put the disclaimer at the top IMHO.
A friend showed me this.
:)
b tnG=??&meta=cr%3DcountryCN
If you switch to Chinese mode and do a search for "Democracy", you get some interesting links. Be sure to check out the adwords link on the right
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=democracy&
Chinese internet access to Google:
BEFORE
1. Google.com: Crappy, intermittent censorship caused by Chinese officials blocking the site.
AFTER
1. Google.com: Crappy, intermittent censorship caused by Chinese officials blocking the site. AND:
2. Google.cm: responsive, fully functional web site with high availability, which tells you "some results have been censored" when you search for Tiananmen square massacre.
RESULT: (1+2) > 1
More information is available in China.
Very bad in fact. Let me humbly explain why.
Dressing in Muslim garb and reading aloud from the Koran in the Washington Mall is not illegal, and won't get you arrested.
Furthermore, fundamentalist Muslims (aka the jihadis) aren't a threat to Americans in power, they are simply a threat to Americans and non-Muslims period.
As far as I know, Tai Chi practicioners in China aren't executing daily suicide bombers, beheading people and sending the videos to sympathetic journalists, and don't subscribe to a philosophy advocating that Tai Chi take over the world. Now, I'm a little ignorant about Tai Chi, so maybe I'm wrong about the above. Maybe the evil US government has censored that information from reaching me.
Oppressing people who like to stretch in parks for stretching in parks because they scare you is not the same as arresting terrorists because they are planning to blow up more citizens.
This is the problem when people who don't understand morality try to argue moral equivilence.
and if the local law is to kill a certain race of people?
Uh huh, sure... can you give us an example of such a local law? Failing that, maybe you should just cut back on the hyperbole a little, because it doesn't seem to be working for you.
And that makes it okay? "Shareholders" and society in general need to grow a conscience and learn there is more to success than money. That there's more to LIFE than money.
Quite true, but you can buy a whole hell of alot more stuff to enrich your life with money. For example, time. Each of us has a limited amount of time on this earth, some more than others. If you dont need to trade your time for money (working) then you can spend more of your time with LIFE.
To ignore that money is really the currency of time and freedom is to shortchange yourself time.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
If they refuse to provide any service at all, China doesn't care. They have Baidu.com, which is perfectly willing to kowtow to the government under which they operate completely. Most Chinese people haven't even heard of Google. If Google shuts them out, they'll keep on using the censored services available and not even know they're being censored.
How about one who lose his license for treating certain conditions the government feels are the fault of the people who have them or which should not be treated, making it harder for him to provide treatment for everything else?
How about one that will be shut down if he transmits those channels, because they offend the totalitarian government under which he lives?
How about one whose reporters will be thrown in jail if they report on stories their government doesn't like?
How about one who would be burned alive by a politically-powerful church that has deemed those books heretical?
The point is that governments are big and can generally kick your ass, even if you're a large company. Trying to defy them directly is suicide, quite possibly literally. Sometimes, you just have to do all that you can do under their restraints, and settle for trying to lift those constraints.
You know, somtimes I can't tell if the people who make analogies like that are just bad at making analogies, or actually retarded.
If the rest of the world can get the censored version by using google.cn, can China get the uncensored one by using google.com for the search? Anyone from .cn around?
Connection closed by foreign host.
I hate slippery slope arguements. You never know if you truely are on a slippery slope or on a plateu in the fog.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
But they're still aiding and abetting the Chinese government.
:P
Yeah, and virtually every computer and electronic device sold in the world has parts made in China, which means that every purchase sends money to China, which is aiding and abetting the Chinese government in one form or another.
But self righteous bastards will always try to spin how they aren't part of the problem.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Tiananmen+Squ are+&btnG=Google+Search
S quare++&btnG=%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&meta=
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=tiananmen+
The bulk of the English results refer to the massacre. Not oe of google.cn's hits refers to this. Nor is there a reference to the vast omission.
And they say this is not censorship.
What they are doing in China is not illegal or even unethical; they are just complying with the local laws.
In 1940s Germany, it was illegal to shelter Jews. According to the local law, those co-operating with Jews were to be shot. And according to your logic, this was quite acceptable, as the executioners were just complying with the local law, while the Jew-helping dissidents were not.
Though instinctively I am led to dissent with Google's move, rationally I can't help thinking that it is not their job to oppose the Chinese regime. It is the Chinese people's job.
What makes you thinking that in western countries things goes differently? At least chinese google has notice that informations are being censored. Here, in western world, most of really important informations are hidden, masked and we are distracted by what the want us to see on TV, just like China..they are just doing that deliberately.
Now reply to this post will be "how can you support your statements?", well to answer directly, take as an example what is happening in Iraq, from the begin, take those US soldiers who shoot an italian intelligence agent and they say it was an accident..
Googles changes motto to "Don't be too evil."
Though, one can't help but wonder if Google can't help out a bit.
Information is power, after all.
So google are letting us know when they are censoring results?
s quare&meta=s quare&meta=+ square&meta=a re&meta=a re&meta=
Shouldn't the chinese google results look the same as the others, but letting you know which links are censored?
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=tiananmen+
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=tiananmen+
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=tiananmen
http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&q=tiananmen+squ
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=tiananmen+squ
What, exactly, is Google sacrificing some poor Chinese citizen on a chef's chopping board for by providing a self-censored search engine, anyway? They never, ever, EVER made any serious dedication in any of their numerous FAQ's that they'll supposedly provide the world's information uncensored to all peoples, no matter which region from whence they hail. They've self-censored their content in both France and Germany for political reasons; same *should* go for them or *any* company which will deal with the citizens of the PRC in like manner and for similarly political reasons. In the process, they're not sacrificing the lives, liberties, or opium trip (oops, I mean, "pursuit of happiness") of any Chinese citizen within the matter of censoring the content on their own servers from public view if deemed necessary by the ruling government of said sovereignty. Google's a business entity, and It's their own servers, so its their right.
If Google set up servers behind China's firewall and only indexed what is accessible via routes available to be followed from those servers, then they aren't censoring anything and would not know what to flag as being censored. More to the point, this is the same as Google indexing what is available on the public servers of news outlets, and news organizations are censoring information all the time. For example, today I was the 619,996 person who saw an "Incredible Video of George Bush Drunk???" at http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2685392?htv=12&ht v=12
My first impression was that this was a digital spoof. I imagine most others would think the same. Consequently no one could blame a news organization for not covering such items. Imagine the cognitive dissonance if they did. When Google doesn't index what is not there, how can it know that censorship took place? But what if the film was more authentic? Who's to know?
What about the real case of a young Bill Clinton dressed in a Russian uniform shouting, "You're out numbered 10 to 1". The old cold war propaganda-era 16mm film, "No To Silent Death", made by the Russians, was discovered in an abandoned trade office when the Soviet Union failed. Thousands of news people have seen the detailed forensic evidence at http://ingridx.dyndns.org/ but none will publicly acknowledge its existence. Instead it is left alone for the spies to get their rocks off.
Argumentum ad Probabilitum
First: Google is choosing between the lesser of two evils. Either they withdraw from China completely, or they allow censorship -- and we all know how great current censorship software is. Slick move, Google.
...until everyone knows.
Second, not to trivialize it or anything, but, as Princess Leia said, "the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers".
The information is there, whether or not there's a search engine. One person will find it, and they tell two friends, and they tell two friends and so on, and so on...
Here's to a bloodless revolution, as all revolutions should be, in China's near future.
And freedom of information for all.
(Disclaimer: Never been to China. Never known anyone from China. I hope all the stories I have heard about government oppression are wrong, and I'm talking out of my ass, and I get modded down. I hope we aren't at war with Eastasia. I hope we haven't always been at war with Eastasia...)
1984: In Bhopal, Union Carbide decides not to bother with maintenance, safety routines etc. Some peoople disagree but management believes it's a worthwhile sacrifice. 15000 Indians die. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_Tragedy
1930: In West Virginia, 700 mineworkers die of silicosis because management wouldn't give them protective masks. Thankfully, management believes it's a worthwhile sacrifice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk's_Nest_incident
1800: In Georgia, a slave fails to work fast enough and gets his back whipped till it bleeds. Sure, it stings a little but management believes it's a worthwhile sacrifice.
Actually, I'm not sure it's the corporation's fault - maybe it's the system?
As an individual company Google has no choice but to comply. If they don't, the huge Chinese market will simply be taken by their competitors, and the Chinese still get censored content only, so noone gains except Google's competitors.
The only way to keep western companies from assisting the Chinese dictatorship is to make it illegal for them to do so.
As it is, the west is helping China become more powerful by doing business with it on their terms, rather than using business to make China more democratic. In a decade or two the most powerful country in the world will be a dictatorship, and we'll have helped it rise to power.
Google used to be the 'good guys' of tech companies who made you believe that techie good would overcome techie evil. I will no longer use google. I think theyre going to lose a substantial portion of their young/techie knowledgeable market becuase of this and that a new 'good' company will gain popularity. google stopped being the underdog awhile ago but now theyre not even good.
anyone have any suggestions for a good search engine as an alternative? one that faced with the same decision, wouldnt cave to china?
show google youre pissed. dont use them.
Actually, it's the People's Republic of China that is not complying with their own laws. Their constitution talks about freedom of speech and that people are allowed to criticize the government.
Yeah, ideals often conflict with reality.
I'm an ex-pat that lives in China 10 months out of the year, and the USA the other 2 months, and I'd much rather have a censored Google than no Google at all. I moved here about 3 weeks ago, and people make things out to be so much worse than they really are. Besides, I can just use an SSH tunnel and view all of the websites I normally couldn't.
Simply put, China has laws that violate human rights, but Google complying with Chinese laws does not mean that Google is helping China violate human rights. Grow up kids.
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=tiananmen+S quare+protests&btnG=%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&meta=cr%3Dc ountryCN
And who was it that told the government to stop you from having sex in public? Hey--it was the PEOPLE! Believe it or not, most people don't want you humping on their sidewalks. I don't care if you like it or not, but a free society is allowed to have standards of modesty.
Please don't try to confuse self-censorship with suppression. The "People's" "Republic" of China is not a free society. If people in China wanted to find certain information about Tibet, Taiwan or Tiananmen Square, they can't get it because the Party doesn't want them to have it. It's not that the Chinese find these subjects offensive, it's that the government doesn't want them to know anything. Knowledge is power.
And by the way, I don't think there's a law that says search engines have to filter sexually explicit results, it's just that people wouldn't tend to use a search engine that shoved sex in their face when they weren't looking for it, especially at work: it's a market-based decision, and the US government had nothing to do with it.
"Removing links to sites that glamourise hatred/terrorism against a nation namely US is filtered"
Who are you accusing of doing that? If it's anyone but the US government, then they have a right to do so, it's called freedom of speech: read the first ammendment. If it's the US government, then they have no right to do that, and you should take them to court: it's called freedom of speech: read the first ammendment.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
it was google shareholders, not me who said "do no evil".
you own google stock?
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=site%3Agov. tw&btnG=%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&meta=cr%3DcountryCN
t =0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozi lla:en-US:official
vs.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agov.tw&star
How's that for censorship?
1. Pretend Nietzsche never wrote "Beyond Good and Evil"
2. Create a meaningless bullshit motto that presupposes absolute ideals of good and evil really exist
3. Join forces with oppressive regimes to deprive people of alternative points of view
4. Profit!!!
On closer inspection, "&meta=cr%3DcountryCN" simply removes non-China sites.
It is only matter of time before they give to Bush what he wants. If nothing, then for non-Americans, who cares for them (us).
Just wondering...
If someone, from China, choose to use google.com instead of google.cn, the results will be censored too?
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
"Don't be evil" -- Google
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke, English statesman and political philosopher (1729-1797
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Yes, it is quite suprising the amount of cencorship in many coutries. At least the Chinese people you talk to were receptive, I talked to some Americans about Guantanamo, and they dished it out large about how I was "anti-american", and they didn't even want any of the links I offered to give them. Tells alot about which government does more brainwashing ...
How easy is the cesoring to get around? Is it proxy filering?
If so coulnd't google then relase their own version of Tor (gTor or Gonion) so that it will serve google adds on every page?
Would that be evil?
Corporations exist to make money. They are motivated not by morality, decency, ethics, but only by what is profitable. The documentary The Corporation captures this insight perfectly. A corporatation, to the extent that it is a virtual, legal "person," is a psychopath. Psychopaths are motivated by their own profit and convenience, and morality is a lesser, largely irrelevant concern. This doesn't mean that they are always evil, only that they are good when and only when it is financially profitable to be good. Nor does this mean that the profit motive is evil, only that elevating it to the dominant value makes conventional morality irrelevant. Do you want to live in a world where morality is irrelevant next to profit? If so, then applaud Google's decision loudly.
If this type of attitudes were the norm in the
80's, the soviet union would still
be on subjugating its citizens and its neighbours.
Well, actualy they area actively trying again.
I have conversations with people in China all the time via Skype, and they don't even know that Mao killed more Chinese than Tojo! They know that their parents lost a sibling during the cultural revolution, but they have no idea that Mao's body count is well into the tens of millions.
Or maybe they just don't tell you, in the case someone is listening?
AccountKiller
Or maybe they just don't tell you, in the case someone is listening?
No, they're willing to talk about things that would get them in trouble. They ask me about their own history, because they are quite sure that they're being lied to.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
But supporting a regime that oppresses the masses in evil, not to forget Google is supplying tools to the opressive and dictatorial government of China. This is worse than prostitution or selling one's soul to the devil, think about it an Amercian company supporting communism so that it can make some money(that's got to be the height of capitalism though), the same goes for CISCO too.
No Black or White only shades of Gray
Tells alot about which government does more brainwashing ...
Actually, I find that many Chinese have a great deal of emotional investment in the idea that Mao was a good man, and that the millions of people he killed were actually done in by the "gang of four" and other evil parties operating without Mao's knowledge. It's very hard for most Chinese to accept that the god-figure they're fed every day of their lives is actually a demon.
The brainwashing we're subjected to in the USA tends to be about things like why federal supremacy is better than state jurisdiction, why an income tax is "fair", and other BS along those lines.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Hmm... some certain CEOs and managers might say there's more to money than life...
Alas for Google, they are now a publicly traded company, and their rules instantly become "Don't be evil, except of course where not being evil would represent a lack of fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders".
Which essentially boils down to "we don't care how evil it is,if it's profitable, then you must do it.."
You'd probably have to do http://www.google.com/ncr - 'no country redirect'... still worth a shot.
"If Bill Clinton starts a war, it is good. If George W. Bush does,"
Mmmm Bill Clinton didn't start a war. The US military intervened in a war which was already being waged after being asked by the UN.
You can tell the difference between a war on which the entire world is in agreement and one which is waged for fun and profit right? Unlike Clinton Bush did indeed start a war.
Oh and it's wrong to torture no matter who does it.
I hate to inject actual facts into your fantasy world but I thought I should anyway.
evil is as evil does
Hello? China is a communist country.
Global warming is a cube.
How about they censor things by putting a big "censored by commies" image over whatever they censor? I thought t'internet was the last bastion of free speech? Mind you, I guess America is just as bad with the MPAA/RIAA telling us what we can't download and people getting sued/fired for writing in blogs. Anyone fancy a non-Communist, non-Capitalist internet?
#include <sig.h>
Google for democracy on the CN google!! Shite man! The only entries are official chinese and any article dealing with failures of democracy! Google has become an accomplice to a crime against humanity in my not-so-humble opinion!
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
That there's more to LIFE than money.
There's also the award-winning photography.
Thank God there are still people who believe that we shouldn't all be allowed to do whatever we want whenever we want, for the sake of a greater public good. We do have to give up freedoms that we would have in a state of anarchy to protect our private property or our values, children, etc. The difference in China is the prohibition of free speech and access to information even when it is not harmful, in order to keep a tyrannical government in power. So Google is aiding the Chinese government in the repression of free speech, and they're entitled to do so, but i and others may stop using their services because of it.
Google may be attending to shareholders by entering the Chinese market, but they should realise that US profits may drop as a result, because knowledgeable users may cease to use their services, causing Google to lose advertising revenue, which i'm guessing would not please shareholders.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: That averages about 660,000,000 of each kind.
Woah buddy, what the fuck are you talking about? Not unethical? Surpressing an entire nation's speech and learning is ethical?
Where do you come from, Soviet Russia?
You have to consider this over a longer period of time then a couple years. That government in China can not last, none do. Being told that your government hates you is a good way to encourage people to change their government sooner rather then later.
The notice might as well be "If you lived in a free country you would be seeing all sorts of neat stuff right now".
Let's boycott Wal-Mart, thereby depriving China of much needed military funding...
I would say that he comes from USA.
Did you see NBC or CNN lately?
Compare the news there with international sites. You don't even need to learn a new language.
BBC is in english, Deutsche Welle has a huge english portal, just to give some examples.
Your news are being censored as effectively or more than in China. Sorry to say that.
maybe the "your results are being censored" text will wake some people up
How long until that text is censored?
Sid
... because it's unlikely anyone "disappeared" by the secret police will have the opportunity to ask why the Google millionaires dropped the dime on them.
FYI: China is a communist country. Not a fascist one.
And whatever it's called, too many companies turn spineless for money. In recent years look at how many canpanies are still being called to task for participation in slavery and with the Nazis. I hope that sometime in the future all these companies are brought to judgement for the same sort of activities in China.
Too lazy to create a sig...
The february issue of legal affairs happens to have an interesting feature on this topic: "The latest American technology helps the Chinese government and other repressive regimes clamp down." Ofcourse there's nothing new under the sun here, since during the second world war when Hitler had a problem, IBM did it's very best to provide the solution (IBM and the Holocaust). Only differnce is, that back then, it was illegal to do so...
What annoys me is that this seems like selective censorship... If Google were either to stay out of China altogether, or prevent any results being returned for 'banned' topics then it'd not be so bad. But specific results are hidden, which leads to a sort of misinformation - you only see the side of the story that the Chinese government wants Google to show.
t ml
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"
http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/corporate/index.h
Well, I'd certainly not call this making the world's information universally accessible!
is in the eye of the beholder.
Don't be evil does not mean anything without the definition
of evil alongside it.
But it is hard to judge when only seeing half of your search results:)
Do you have an Ipod ?
Or any other fancy device for that matter ?
Do you live in today's world ?
Well then, YOU are aiding the chinese evil government !
Google filters search results in US as well. Just read this statement:
http://www.google.com/dmca.html
The difference is that in China they block results by goverment requests. In US, they do the same by requests of private companies. I'm not sure which is worse.
I recall that much of Europe was very much against the US intervention. I was in Europe just before we (the US) began any military action, and I saw protests in Vienna and got an earful in Munich about their disgust with our intended actions. I don't recall what the European governments' reactions were, but there was a lot of popular protest against US involvement.
Not that I disagree with most of your points, but I had to correct your notion that the entire world was in agreement with Clinton's decision. I often hear this point raised, and it's just not right.
I'm pretty sure most Chinese realize they are being censored by their government.
Google does this and you guys clamor to find valid reasons. Anyone else does this and they are evil or have no ethics. Fanboys...
Now Google China only returns hits to sites that have crackZ for CAD software instead of all of that other useless information.
'Google officials characterized the censorship concessions in China as an excruciating decision for a company that adopted "don't be evil" as a motto. But management believes it's a worthwhile sacrifice.'"
Heh, heh. Should be posted above the gate of every corporation.
Sacrifice for whom? The sociology of group dynamics -- window into the root of most evil.
'Google officials characterized the censorship concessions in China ...'
as an excruciating decision for a company
Don't worry. It will be less painful next time.
The contribution of first bend toward fatiguing the ethical structure
is no different than the last, though the final bend is more obvious
because of the loud snap.
So do you think it was right for certain companies operating in Germany before and during WW2 to use Jews (and other disfavoured groups) as slave-labour?
The West is sucking up to China?
What planet do you live on? On this planet, the West is a bunch of hypocrites who tell the Chinese how to run their government while failing to adhere to pretty much all of the principles they espouse. On this planet, China is a rapidly growing economic, military, and political power that will have to be negotiated with and not fought. On this planet, the West has ended up with far more than its share of the world's resources and is under the delusion that this is its perpetual right.
If we can't come to terms with these realities, we're all eventually going to be in for a very painful reality check.
Something that has not been discussed in the media is that, as of about two months ago, access to any website with the evil word "blog" in it's URL is blocked in China. Blogs are dangerous because they contain the banned substance --opinions.
http://georgiadis.googlepages.com/
There's one missing point in this discussion: Google is not abiding to local law. Rather, it is following the illegitimate orders of chinese authorities.
The chinese constitution states, that everyone has the freedom of expression and the right to critizise the chinese government. Even the communist party itself is not abiding to the constitution.
Google can choose to be evil and I can choose to go elsewhere for my search needs. Altavista may or may not have already sold out to China but then again, they didn't pretend to do no evil.
Seems to me a bit coincidental that the founders sold $160 million worth of shares just before this announcement was made. Maybe I'm overly cynical but selling just at that particular moment seems like insider trading to me. Looks to me like they didn't know if the market would reject or approve the move and so hedged and sold some of their stock. If the stock dives, I wouldn't be surprised to see the SEC, and a few lawyers, knocking on their door.
"That there's more to LIFE than money."
Our system is capitalism.
By DEFINITION life under it is indeed all about money.
Yes, but there is a cutoff. $2 billion dollars doesn't buy you any more time than $200k, it just buys you a lot more caviar.
That's just it though, they don't have that ability. Not in China. If they tried, the government, with guns, would come and take away their servers. If they continued to try, the government, with guns, would come and take away the people trying. If they tried from outside the country, they'd get blocked by the great firewall of China.
Google have two choices - agree to the Chinese demands, or don't have a presence in China at all. There's a case to be made for going with either choice in the name of "don't be evil". I think the people saying otherwise think that Google somehow have a choice to remain unfiltered in China.
I find it interesting nobody has mentioned the other times Google got censored by oppressive laws. But I guess that wasn't the big, bad China, eh? This stinks of double standards.
So you're saying they're what King George and his unmerry(wo)men are trying to turn america into :D
yes yes i know -10 flamebait
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
To be precise China is an authoritarian state with a mixed command ecomony-free market economy trending further tword a command economy resembling communism.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
And that makes it okay? "Shareholders" and society in general need to grow a conscience and learn there is more to success than money. That there's more to LIFE than money.
What if that money that they made was spent on curing Malaria in Africa, or some similar beneficial endeavour? Wouldn't that lighten this already-grey area slightly? Is openly-labelled censorship better or worse than disease? It's subjective.
My point is that it's easy to say there's more to life than money, but when money has such a significant effect on you and those around you it's rarely that simple.
The US has a lot of censure too, in movies for example. I'm prety sure that Google Video isn't gonna un-censure videos or parts of videos that were censured in the states and I don't see anybody complaining about it.
If the economy has 5% unemployment under a Democratic president, the economy is doing well. If it has 5% unemployment under a Republican president, it is doing poorly.
A) government-measured unemployment
B) Maybe you haven't been paying attention but between those two presidencies the government has changed how it figures the unemployment rate to artificially shrink the number
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
In the words of Groucho Marx: "Those are my principles, if you don't like them I have others"
What is CSSRepublic
This is such a "corporate" move. The beliefe that you must control every bit of every sector. Why not let some chickenshit company like MSN have this market. Even Yahoo admits that they can't beat google, so why not let the Chinese suffer along with some third rate search engine. Even in a communist country, the people's crys will eventually be heard. After being stuck with crappy search results for too long, they'll be rioting in the streets for the freedom to use Google (Well maybe not rioting). If there's one company that can afford to tell the Chinese to stuff it it's Google. I doubt this decision would have been made prior to going public.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Wasn't Sergey Brin born in Soviet Russia? How long did he live there? You would think that growing up under the Soviet system, he would have some antipathy towards authoritarian governments and not become a collaborator with one because of simple greed.
The Chinese Government has never denied that nothing took place in Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989. They've just covered up the whole incident by downplaying it as a minor disturbance and insist no violent massacre took place. What they're more afraid of is the democratic ideals of those protestors being revived.
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
Ah, I read all this with a certain sense of amusement. Its their own fault for putting the bar too high for themselves... Don't be evil, where evil is something that is determined on a personal level. PR is great till it bites you in the ass, eh? To be honest, I don't blame google for what they are doing. Its far better to be inside and able to leverage that position than to be locked out while your competitors grow fat on the leftovers.
But seriously, if I was google I would have turned that weakness into a strength. I would have set up a chinese google, entirely uncensored, with instructions on how to circumvent the great firewall. And I would be laughing while I was doing it. Because the writing is on the wall for the tinpot dictators in China. Already the worm is turning. The key words to note in that article is that vietnamese workers are already cheaper than chinese workers. They haven't got long, and google will be around far longer than the PRC in its current form.
Yes, I know business partners invested up to their necks in china would put pressure on google in that case, but google can just say, whoops, don't like it, hop on out of our search engine then. Vox populi, baby. Looks like they dropped the ball on this one.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
What are the real low/no-evil search-site alternatives? Shouldn't search be opensource & p2p? If Google were to lose the confidence of its users, they will lose their route to profit.
Practically speaking, what does the /. crowd think can be done to keep off the evil google (geegil?) search engine?
Life is about compromises. The problem is that once you start down that road you concede everything that you were fighting for.
This "getting into bed with the enemy" is not an all or nothing affair. Would you be more upset if Google had made an immediate decision with little or no deliberation, and simply modified their search results without notice to the user? Wouldn't this be 'more evil"? If there can be a "more evil", then there can be a "less evil", and you see this is not an all or nothing issue, it's a range of degrees.
Google had two choices - provide censored searches or provide NO searches. From a political point of view, no press or regulated press is about the same, (regulated may even have the advantage) but from google's point of view for their business, regulated vs nothing at all is a huge difference. This really was the best decision for them to make. Without knowing the details of the agreement I can't say if google had to fight for the "these search results have been edited" notice, but if they did, I'd call that a major victory for us from google. Knowing that information ("the other side of the story") is being withheld from you at least makes you a little more cautious and skeptical about what you read, and helps you to stay more properly focused.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
What if that money that they made was spent on curing Malaria in Africa, or some similar beneficial endeavour? Wouldn't that lighten this already-grey area slightly?
/. reply to the Gates Foundation? ;-)
No, that actually makes you more evil because its horrible marketing bullshit. Or have you missed the typical
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
If they must censor information, they should pop up a statement to the effect that
"The requested information is not available at the request of your government".
And maybe congress should pass a regulation REQUIRING them to do this!
Google is a business. It has obligations to be a good corporate citizen of the global economy, but it is not obligated to try and fix the evil in the world. It just shouldn't add to it. Bottom line is they are a business and they are going to make decisions that benefit their stock holders. China is a huge opportunity and they were bound to do something to enable their penetration of that market.
Google being available in China is good for the Chinese people. I would expect that the vast majority of queries in China will have nothing to do with repression. Serving up that information is hugely valuable to educating and helping elevate the awareness of those 100M web surfers.
That said I would have prefered to see Google arrive at a slightly different solution... why not just block the query completely. The part that galls me is that they are not just censoring the results but that they are actually redirecting to government propoganda. It would seem much better to just reject the query and say "Nothing to see here, move along." or something in official approved language.
Of course, Google may have tried that and the gov't wouldn't allow it. Nothing makes people want to go somwhere like a "do not enter, important stuff hidden here" sign.
First off, it is going to take a long time for the Chinese market to become as attractive as the American one.
There are a lot of poor people, everywhere. I don't think anyone can comprehend this nor the inability of the average Chinese person to afford anything more than day to day living expenses.
Neither is China interested in handing over its large market to western companies - vis a vis making their own DVD standard and 3G standard. They don't want to pay royalties to others - they want to keep their yuans! They know how big their market is and they know if they can come up with their own technology, even if it is a close copy of someone else's, they don't need to pay others for it.
Next, having lived in China for some period of time, I will say that during that time I often had problems accessing www.google.com. Quite often these problems seemed to appear when there was discrepency between the DNS results for looking up www.google.com in China vs the USA.
Something that's really bizarre is that not there is not universal blocking of any particular web site. Sometimes a URL won't work but the IP address will. Sometimes you cannot access a web site but someone using a different ISP can.
Lets not forget that the google cache is permanently inaccessible to anyone behind the Great Firewall of China.
Of course this google problem is easily fixed with an ssh tunnel to a proxy outside of China and a nice proxy.pac entry.
But, to round off, any company that rolls over for China will not gain any respect from the Chinese and could well be lining up to be screwed by them.
All you slashdotters whining about how evil Google is being here, answer this one question: How many "made in China" products do you have in your home?
Since many of you seem to feel so strongly about human rights abuses in China, why are you supporting the Chinese economy? Doesn't that make you evil too? You are giving the Chinese government the very money they use to kill and oppress their citizens.
Let's just admit that we all want "lots of cheap stuff from China" far more badly than we really want an end to human rights violations over there. Everyone's a vocal critic of China until the moment it inconveniences them in even the slightest way.
When I see people start boycotting China's exports (as South Africa's exports were boycotted during Apartheid), then we can start throwing accusations about how evil these companies are for doing business in a country with severe human rights issues. Until then, you're all equally complicit.
Just as we have laws in the US, which we expect ALL multinationals to follow, China has laws too. And just as others object to some of the laws we have, we too may object to some of China's laws. However, that does not mean that companies operating in China have the right to FLOUT their laws, no more than they have the right to flout our laws here in the US.
We are NOT the paragon of free society or the chosen people, and it's silly to read self-righteous responses to the effect. While we may have more freedom here in the US, that was not the case for a large portion of our population until the civil rights era. In that time, we in the US would not have tolerated the Europeans telling us how to run things, or having their companies flout our obviously misguided laws.
Beautiful point about google playing dumb.
I think a censored, searchable internet is a much better tool to bring an oppressive government down than a censored, non-searchable internet.
Google isn't the only one with a gun against its head here. The fact that the chinese government allows an internet at all shows it also has a gun against its head. It has no choice but to continue to allow its economy to grow, and attempting to shut down or stop the growth of China's access to the internet would directly injure its economy.
One the one hand, the chinese government has to restrict the dicsussion of its crimes against its own citizens or risk open revolt, on the other it has to allow information to be exchanged between its citizens over the internet if education and the economy are to continue to expand or face a worsening poverty and as a result, open revolt.
The chinese government is between a rock and a hard place. It has guns pointed at it from two directions.
Google is advancing the day when open dicsussion of the chinese government's crimes will take place, and the chinese governemnt has no choice but to let them.
I wonder, as a technical point, what is to stop a chinese citizen with access to the internet from their home linux computer from using an internet anonymizer like http://tor.eff.org? Or from setting up an encrypted VPN to a computer in the U.S. and browsing the web from there?
If a volunteer core of Americans set up a tor like network with ever changing IP addresses, how would the government be able to track it?
How about when next year the Bush administration asks Google to remove all negative references on Bush to be not displayed? Is that OK as well? Especially when it is an Executive Order?
That would afterall be "just a case of them following the law". Is that OK as well?
By going public Google gave up the right to use its lame "do no evil" clause. The fact that they still acknowledge that they "try not to be evil" is pathetic and insulting to our intelligence.
The shine has DEFINITELY worn off on Google. They are just another corporation out to make their sharholders rich and will eventually screw consumers in every way possible. If you think in the end Google won't end up selling every last drop of information they have gathered on us in order to make profit not matter what the privacy implications your a fucking idiot.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Actually as long as the DOD, FBI, etc only wanted or expected to get information on
internet trends in searches and NOT specific info on what specific users were searching
for and what the results were, (IE: what information pops up for specific searches and
how many requests are made for such info (BUT NOT BY WHO)), I don't have a problem
with GOOGLE helping out law inforcement. You've got some real scumbags out there
kidnapping kids for sex, these guys need some serious jail time (or worse).
And these are local laws that some Chinese citizens LIKE. They enjoy the "safety" the the censorship provides to them. Yes, I know it sound weird, but this is a constant battle I have with my Chinese girlfriend. Censorship is normal for her. Removing it is like saying that her way of life is wrong, and that is something she will not accept. It is *our* way of life that is wrong to her. Such dirty freedom. From this, I expect that there are more Chinese with her point of view.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But they're still aiding and abetting the Chinese government.
They aid the Chinese communist government, yet they refuse to aid the IS republic government. Interesting perspective on how bad the US government really is getting to be.
It's nothing like a terrorist bomb at all, as there is a very important difference:
- With a bomb, something is taken away from the "end user" - they end up with less than they had before (e.g. maybe short some limbs, or loved ones).
- With Google creating a presence in China, even a censored one, some value is added to the end users but nothing is taken away. With Google there, the Chinese citizens have access to MORE information (and in more ways) than before Google was there. Google is only adding to what the "end user" already had, even though the 'amount' they're adding is less than what it could be as it is constrained by the government. But Google are not blocking sites that weren't already blocked - so they're not strictly "censoring" anything at all. The government is censoring sites. Google couldn't censor websites themselves even if they wanted to; unlike Cisco they don't offer "censorship technology". What Google provides always adds something that wasn't there before.
Anyway, if all you guys care so much about human rights violations in China, you would all be boycotting China's export. I bet your home is full of "made in China" stuff.
Is anyone really surprised about this? When have corporations and government agencies shielding people from individual responsibility ever done the right thing when there was money at stake?
I think that number is somewhere between 0 and some fractional value of 1.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The US is the world's only hyperpower - for now. I hope that people everywhere make their displeasure known as US power fades, as it eventually must.
That is completely different. What would you have done? Stand against it?
You would have been shot, and sombedoy else would have taken your place, under further duress if necessary.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I for one will not be using Google anymore. I couldn't boycott MSN and Yahoo, because I didn't already use their garbage. Google's ads were one thing I didn't block, that just changed, and now I won't visit their search page either. Some other people here have mentioned how well we boycott Saudi Arabia. Most of this is out of my control, I don't have a choice. My government isn't going it's job.. Namely investigating alternative energy, and I don't have the personal resources to do it myself. That is the job of government too, to do things it's citizens can't do for themselves. Anyone know any good online search? Is A9 colluding with china?
A lot (if not all) big corporations stresses their ethics or enviromental resposibility only as a way of improving their image and hence maximizing their profits. The only exceptions are when the corporation is purely private and the sole owners can do what they want. When the company is publically traded, the pressure of shareholders means that 'don't be evil' is OK when is giving profits but when it means loses (or less profits) then 'be evil' is the motto.
For Google 'do'nt be evil' might have been genuine before IPO (but I still doubt it). But now, it is naive to think that is anything more that I nice image.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
Does this mean they will censor the search results on the website Google.cn?
If so, then maybe that is what they have todo to comply with the local laws.
China block chinese people from accessing Google.com?
If everyone just bow to their oppressive regimes and keep conduct business with them, the censorship will continue. If big corporations took a stand and refused todo business with them, then maybe they would start think.
Watch out, your comment is bordering on unamerican activities. Money is what keeps the world (the US) go round.
Forget google, just take a look at the BBC! They also have a forum on the Google China Censorship and they have frantically been removing any postings critical of the BBC.
d ID=824&&&edition=1&ttl=20060125134243
http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?threa
First I posted this:
I thank the BBC for making this forum "Reactively Moderated" since otherwise all the forums would have been "Fully Censored" as per usual and it would also be silly to censor a discussion on censorship. If you are going to engage in such widespread censorship of peoples views, you would be better off going back to the old system where you at least had some plausible deniability e.g. "We get so many emails, we can't look at them all". The new "automated" system is clearly geared up to allow instant postings and your artificial obstruction of this ability makes any censorship much more obvious to the people posting.
Which was quickly removed. So I posted this:
Earlier I criticized the BBC for censoring Have Your Say postings. I have now seen that they have pulled my posting. How do you all feel about that? Do you like being censored?
Which was also removed. Fortunately people started to notice. e.g.
Added: Wednesday, 25 January, 2006, 12:41 GMT 12:41 UK
Interesting to see just how much censorship is taking place no "Have Your Say". Postings removed quicker than a Moderator can read!
[terrybyatt]
RECOMMEND
Recommended by 1 person
I really think China could learn a thing or two from the BBC. I think the Chinese Government should make the BBC "Have Your Say" team some job offers. Why can't the BBC just sit back and let people speak? And why is their software so crappy compared to Slashdot when the British Public pay them millions!
Watch your step, slippery slope ahead.
So as long as it's a worthwhile sacrifice then it's Ok?
Neither Google's e-mail nor blogging services will be offered in China because the company doesn't want to risk being ordered by the government to turn over anyone's personal information.
You:
For someone who is currently living in China and using it daily, I am very glad they made this particular decision. For those condemning Google for not sticking to "Don't Be Evil" or for selling out, consider this - which is the greater evil, to filter out some information (and let people know it _is_ being filtered), or to deny them access to information altogether? ... At least a smart and curious person still can go out and find out what it was that was filtered. ... All blocking Google means is that when we hit obscure technical problems, we can no longer find solutions quickly.
It would have been better to do exactly the opposite of what they are doing. They should have provided mail and blogging and not admitted that the Chinese government could do anything good or bad to them. Blocking access to information is evil so Google should not cooperate with or be dependent on those that do it. Every penny they earn doing this is power the Chinese government will have over them. Every tool they deny the people of China themselves makes the people less able to help themselves.
As you say, smart and curious people know what's going on and can find out about it. Those same smart and curious people can find an uncensored Google, which leads them to better information. Indeed, you point to a valid reason for the Chinese government to leave access to Google open: technical efficiency. It is better for you strive to reach a news source you trust than to have another one you can't trust.
Google may even be helping China censor the news. M$ and Yahoo's search capability is not as good as Google's, as you have noticed paging through hundreds of their results for technical answers. If Google's technology is used to determine what articles are to be censored, they will have done you and everyone else a disservice. The more money they earn through such disservice, the worse off they will be. At the very least, the company is leanding credibility to censorship by saying that it's worth it.
They should leave the dirty work to all the bullshitters and continue to do what they do well. Google's success is based on simplicity. This censorship gig will be anything but simple and will end up sucking more resources then it gains. Google should also remember that hard core communists view the US as an enemy and will do everthing possible to cause harm to and reduce the technical efficiency of the US and everyone else that's not a member of the Chinese Communist party. Every man hour Google dedicates to censorship is a man hour that did not go towards improving real services. It really is that black and white.
If this makes you angry, and it should, you need to direct your anger at the people who make things difficult for you, your government. It is your own government that blocks access to technical information Google provides because they are afraid of what else you might see. They are the ones who are sacrificing efficiency for control and ability to matian their privilege.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Could it be because in China they are colluding with an oppressive totalitarian regime to control the flow of information and so helping the regime to remain in power? Whereas in France and Germany they've just made a pragmatic decision to go along with some quaint local laws about what cannot be mentioned.
I agree that the cases are of the same type - and I wish they hadn't capitulated in either case - but in magnitude they're very different and that does matter. It's shoplifting and murder: they're both against the law, but people are correct to be more outraged by one than the other.
Unless they make a strong effort to publicise to the Chinese people the nature and extent of the censorship they live under - and a muttered footnote is not good enough - this is straightforward, profit-motivated evil corporate behaviour. Very disappointing.
I don't know. $200k seems a little low to me. If I want to be able to give my children the opportunity to attend top-flight schools that could end up costing as much as $100k/year (if the current rate of increases continues), then I think I'd still have to be spending a lot more time earning money to do that if I only have $200k instead of $2 billion. Still, the concept of a cutoff makes sense. I just think it's an awful lot higher than you might expect. Heck, in an extreme case, if I bought and maintained a private jet to take me from place to place that certainly could save me some time over flying commercial...
They would be kicked out of the country in a whim if they are found to be supporting any organizations opossed to the Chinese authorities.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That's why they're in business in America where cash is king and pesky ideals get pushed aside.
Doesn't Google block some searches in the USA? I've seen the message that says results were blocked because of the DMCA. I know that you can also report DMCA violations to Google, and maybe get them to block them.
Change "Google" with "MSN" and I doubt we'll be seeing the same posts.
I can understand that if any other company does this. It's expected. But when a company that routinely touts the "don't be evil" tagline does it, it _deserves_ criticism.
Or else they can simply stop cawing about "Don't be Evil". I've never felt comfortable with the their insinuation anyway-- it's fashionable to call a lot of Google competitors *cough* MS *cough* 'evil', but when you look at _true_ evil (the Holocaust, Stalin's purges, Mao's cultural revolution) you realize that Google's just cheapening the word by applying it to their competitors.
Go somewhere random
their saying is "dont be evil" it seens that they arent telling themselves not to be evil , they are actually telling others not to be evil because they feel they are the only one allowed to be evil the saying should be, "Dont be evil (thats our job)"
I really wonder if another search provider would be so easly excused...
I would have more respect for Google if they didn't do business with China at all, and spoke out against the Chinese dictatorship. But I wonder how Google's Chinese employees would feel about this? Could they face revolt within the company?
Consider that in the United States we have citizens who, despite being essentially decent good people, support political leadership that acts against American values and the teachings of Christ (support for torture, unnecessary war, tax cuts for the rich, eavesdropping without warrants, support for profiteering at the expense of consumer and environmental protection, etc.). Many Chinese citizens have intense nationalistic pride and defend their government even though it can be argued that the Chinese dictatorship is illegitimate - corrupt, not elected, and continually destroying people or denying human rights purely to preserve power as a dictatorship. China even threatens to attack Taiwan, a free and democratic country, even though this would be a disgusting act of violence, sending brother to kill brother for no other goal than political power.
But the confusion of some citizens who support their own corrupt governments notwithstanding, I think it is important for the free people of the world to be clear and vocal that the Chinese government is unacceptable and needs to be changed or overthrown. We must speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. If corporations would encumber financial loss to do the same it would have immense power.
Following the rule of law in France and Germany doesn't seem problematic to lots of people, just as following the laws of the US (not ignoring DMCA notices and so forth) seems reasonable. Those laws are the choice of the people (via their representatives). If a group of people formed a political party in any of those countries and proposed changing the relevant laws and the people elected them by a vast majority the law would change.
However, no matter how much you want to pretend otherwise the people of China don't have that option. They'll get squished by tanks or arrested. Providing assistance to the Chinese Government is thus by many people considered immoral. There's still an EU-US arms emnbargo on China, so clearly I'm not alone in this view.
And how would this be different anywhere else?
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
This was something I expected from Microsoft, but I am hugely disappointed in Google for selling out like this. Choosing to kowtow to an authoritarian regime and violating the Constitution of their own country.
Once again, we have a clear demonstration of what happens when an MBA is put at the helm of a company. Morals and ethics go out the window in favor of the bottom line and making sure his severance contract is as fat as possible.
The more I read that article, the more I feel sick to my stomach! I would rather accept a lower profit for my company than betray the hundreds of thousands of my fellow Americans who gave their lives in various wars to defend my right to the Freedom of Speech.
And what about the many people in other countries, including those in China, who gave everything they could to gain that basic right? It wasn't just those individuals who suffered, it was their families as well who were also punished in order to set an example for others.
Hey Google? What's next? Are you going to make a contribution to Sadam's Gas the Kurds! Defense Fund in Iraq? Or how about a little for the Tienanman Square Memorial- Oh, wait! There isn't one. Guess you're safe on that score.
Is Ask Jeeves still clean? Or does anyone else know of a decent search engine we can use in place of Googlesoft? Is it really possible today to boycott Google? I for one just changed my default search engine selection away from Google.
Thanks, Google for totally destroying my faith in you. And thanks for betraying your countrymen and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States. Take a good look at Article 1 of the Bill of Rights- Oh, that's right! You're not allowed to read that any more unless you get permission from the Chinese government, eh?
What ever happened to "Do No Evil?" I guess you have to change that a little to "Do No Evil to the Highest Bidder!"
Whew! This water sure is cold!
Why do so many people on Slashdot and elsewhere have the idea that "fascist" is a useful term to describe anyone you don't agree with? The Chinese government may be a lot of things, "evil" is one term that comes to mind, but they definitely are not fascist. Communism and fascism are not the same thing. It's like the people here who insist that the current US government is fascist simply because they don't like Bush. Has everyone forgotten what the word actually means?
don't say things like that. The US is a force for good in the world."
Yanks are so fucking dumb that I sometimes suspect they put on a show to disguise their true nature.
Many folks here are judging Google based on their westernized propaganda regarding democracy(not values, if people in Western countries were defending any values Bush, Blair and others would be out of office by now, and perhaps facing judicial processes. They may still do, hopefully). If you are a right winger you tend to see things in white and black only, which does not help because life is in all shades of grey.
What many people here are not appreciating is that freedom of expression and political dissent is not seen as a good thing in many societies, specially in East Asia.
For many people over there censorship and limited or non existing democractic rights are a perfectly reasonable thing, lack of censorship and too much freedom of speech are seen as a social evil that puts preasure in the social contract (and here I am not tlaking about outright dictatorships, nominal democracies like Malaysia, SIngapore and even Thailand have reservations about many things that in the West are considered more less standard freedoms and rights).
From the Chinese point of view, not to censor may be considered evil. Remember that for each Chinese dissident out there there are 100 people that could not care less about this and that will wholeheartedly and genuinely be convinced that censorship is the right thing to do.
The problem for Google (and any company doing bussiness globally) is that this may leave them in a no win situation, with half their users concerned about what they do in a different part of the globe.
I see many people blabbering maddly about how Google is not honouring its "do no evil" comitment. What I fail to see is a sane course of action that Google could have followed.
TO blabber madly is evil, to show you have an idea that may work (I myself don't) would be not.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You can see this in why they haven't turned over search results to the US government. They're not being "evil" and holding to their ethics and a sense of right to privacy.
Now, why did they agree to mutilate search results by censoring them? (Which I think we can all agree is an evil thing to do, censorship and all..)
Answer : They're already doing business and making profits in the US, not helping the government won't hinder those profits. On the other hand if they want to make PROFITS in China by doing business there they have to agree to do "evil".
Profits > Ethics = Evil
They choose to pride themselves on the "Dont be evil" motto, that creates a pretty black/white line to judge on in this case. And agreeing to it gets back around to the quote already made about evil winning when good men do nothing.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
"We realise that China is a growing country that is being more and more aware of the world therefore it represents great advertising opportunities for us. We would be sorry if we missed that boat, since this is our core business."
This is nothing more than a business decision.
I don't know about the specifics but is it possable for google to ignore the chinese government? Why can't google just operate from outside the country and still send the information there (if the servers are outside chinese juristiction or that of a country who doesnt have an extradition treatie) i fail to see how they could block a site completly (isp's could but there must be a way around this (switch ip's or something i don't know)).
If a site doesn't want to be blocked then how do you do it without takeing out the servers? If google doesn't want to be evil then perhaps they should make a stand for what they belive in. I agree that out of the two obvious options this is the best but why not the third they are a big boy now so lets put them in the ring.
If my thoughts don't work with the mechanics of the internet then please don't flame me for not knowing, try to think of a way round.
In the parent post zielaj makes an astute point, but isn't so astute at slashdot posting. When there are hundreds of posts, most people will see only your subject line. Summarize the point you're making in your subject line and more people will get it.
I agree that the notice at the bottom is too subtle. I think google is contributing to the illusion that things aren't so bad in China. This is evil.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=zh-CN&q=tiananmen+ Square++&btnG=%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&meta=
S quare++&btnG=%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&meta=
versus
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=tiananmen+
Save query, different answer. Google is evil.
If you think the BBC is any different, you are deluded.
The BBC being a "public corporation" may take no corporate money or sponsorship but, they are still a business and the money is followed. Incidentally, the UK is currently reviewing the BBC's charter and, well...the sharks are circling.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
In response to Google's decision to censor searches on www.google.cn., John Young of Cryptome.org has just set up a new site which "publishes information, documents and opinions banned by the People's Republic of China."
http://www.cryptome.cn/
What market? Oh, you mean the one that sells all the cheap plastic and electronic crap that we Westerners seem to adore so much? That market doesn't mean shit if we can't sell anything back to it. And raw materials to make said crap don't count for much.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
"Shareholders" and society in general need to grow a conscience and learn there is more to success than money. That there's more to LIFE than money.
For a seasoned slashdotter, I'd expect you would have a broader understanding of how absurd that perspective is (and insightful only to those who haven't had enough caffeine yet to know better). When you're spending your own money, value statements like that are perfectly fine, but not when it's someone elses money. Company credit card? Hookers? Try that "There's more to life than money!" line with your boss, the CFO and the police. They'll get a good laugh.
Let me ask, how does one measure this "more than money success"? Let's say you own 10% of a company. You get the annual report and the company is tanking - it has enough cash on hand to last 6 months at best. Your $50,000 invested for retirement (terrible non-diversification idea, mind you) is probably gone.
You ask the senior management what they've done to screw things up this bad, and what their plan is to keep from dying? In your scenario, they'd probably answer:
"Well we don't really have one. Why should we? There's a lot more to success than money. For instance, we golf every day at the country club where we talk about philosophy and doing great things to help others, thanks to our company-paid memberships. Lunch takes two hours alone because we feed a hundred senior citizens on our company expense account in addition to our own lunch, at the best places in town - everybody should know the taste of success. This leaves little time for work. We spend the mornings teaching children at an inner-city school, and afternoons at the local homeless shelter. We've donated half of the company's cash to the humane society because they said they were killing kittens every day without money. So what if the company tanks? We'll all get new jobs - nobody is hurt. You need to understand: there is more to life than money."
The reality is that corporations belong to people that own the stock, and money is how we track how the company is being run. From your evil Fortune 25 to the small pizza shop started by a couple of friends. Through this approach, many companies do behave with an exceptional social conscience, but are monitored by shareholders who can fire the managers if they behave out of line with their expectations. By being up front about the company's charitable mission, such as Ben & Jerry's did (which had much poorer financial performance but had shareholders who supported that approach), shareholders can invest in the company fully knowing where the managers will be spending the profits.
As you plan for retirement and invest, all of these things are important to know. If you want all of your retirement savings to go into companies that are charitable and return a 0% on your investment, you'll probably be upset since you'll be spending retirement as a Wal-Mart greeter. Money and corporations aren't evil conspiracies like some here think - they're simply constructs we've made to help track how people are doing with our money, keep things transparent, and allow us a way to get some return on our money invested for our kids college and retirement.
Boy, I feel better now that YOU are comfortable knowing what's being censored in China - that makes everything OK. (Hmmm, I wonder though, how the Chinese PEOPLE are supposed to know what they can't gain access to). Boggles the mind.
You "Porn-at-any-cost" types are sure bending over backwards in your logical contortions - all to cling to some way to have sympathy for the totalitarian state of China and the communist sympathisers at Google. Everyone knows, though, that at the end of the day, communists are just capitalists who don't want to share - and that they worship power, money and riches even more.
Free speech for me, but not for thee, if I ever saw it. Slashdotters, your hypocrisy is staggering.
China is not a facist country. It is a Statist country.
As you put together your retirement plan (or really any investing plan - whether it's for retirement, college, whatever), write down some values you have before you do anything else. Some of mine were:
Take that value structure and as you put together your investment portfolio, make sure you reject any companies that are inconsistent with your goals. Then, if you don't mind losing some income opportunity, take a portion of your portfolio (like 20% in my case) and specifically invest in a few things that pursue your social goals. There are a lot of companies that are trying to do good things, but don't return the same kind of earnings as others and have a harder time accessing capital. If everybody took 20% or so and allocated it for this purpose, it'd dramatically change things for the better. Hydrogen energy? AIDS cure research? You name it - put part of your money there and you're helping to find the solution.
Yes, you're probably going to lose some possible income and might lose some investment principal as well, but this is your money and you're free to designate it for social causes if you believe in them. That's the right way to pursue social advancement - with your own money.
Google, as well as any other search engine, censors results so the Status Quo is preserved. This happens in every corner of the planet. And they must do it if they want to survive in that place.
Just like China bans some things, your goverment censors other things. Don't fool yourself thinking your country is different. I'm talking about every country, not just USA. Your goverment will always try to hide certain knowledge from you. Always.
GrimRC
How about a language filter for google.com results? Grab any available info in the Chinese language.
Like this perhaps?
Because you believed "do no evil" to be a policy, rather than a marketing statement. You wanted it to be true but it's not. Larry & Sergei couldn't resist the thought of putting AdWords in front of all those Chinese...the ones with money in their pockets for the first time in years. The fat brains at Google could have come up with a way to help chinese Internet users bypass the great firewall. I guess a rising stock price is very addictive.
Just remember, "do no evil" is not the same as "do good".
it's really more like:
"...an excruciating decision for a company that adopted "don't be evil" as a motto. But management believes aiding and abetting the killing millions of Chinese for the sake of corporate profits a worthwhile sacrifice..."
Goodbye Google stock!
It is my understanding that Yahoo, and MSN are in the same boat as Google is when it comes to Chinese censorship.
1) Are there any viable alternatives to Google that work effectively enough to replace it? (Alternatives that do not include Yahoo or MSN as a parent company or search partner)
2) Do enough people actually feel strong enough about this issue to stop using Google? Do we actuall hold our truths to be self evident etc etc?
I doubt anyone will read down this far in the comments, but I would love to start some sort of movement to boycott Google. I have stopped using them myself, as of today, and am looking for alternatives.
Can we effect change and would enough people want to?
"What people need to realize is that Google doesn't really have a choice in the matter."
There is always a choice.
If they had refused then China would have blocked Google? Okay but Google would have done no evil then. They would have taken a stand. Google isn't a Chinese company and has no more obligation to obey Chinese laws than a company or person in Sweden has to obey US laws, remember Pirates Bay?
How about this. Google I request that you censor all results that return companies in china. You may add a tag this result censored by LWATCDR.
Google you have sinned against your own law. The fact that you have justified this sin makes it all the worse.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"A new study monitored brain activity of partisans; they shun logic and use emotional processing centers to justify their candidate's contradictory statements."
Eew. Who wants to eat that much caviar?
// This is not a sig.
So, they'll cooperate with a repressive communist government to keep people from seeing information that the Chinese government doesn't want their serfs to see, but, when the United States government asks for about search results without any personal information being relayed, they won't cooperate?
Huh!
Be cool and be good humans.
Gonzodoggy
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
The Chinese Government is evil, and what Google did was Evil Lite? Google had to know going into negotiations with a totalitarian state that censorship would be an issue. Their dominance alone gave them leverage with the Chinese government.
"The Associated Press is reporting that Google has agreed to clean-up results in the United States. According to the article, 'Google officials characterized the protection concessions in America as an exciting decision for a company that adopted "don't be evil" as a motto. Because management believes it's a worthwhile sacrifice to stop terrorism and curb child porn.'"
Example: Darfur.
It's best for the advance of freedom in China for Google to comply and get its foot in the door. 'Dangerous' information will leak in through the cracks, which will widen over time. A revolution changed China from a monarchy into a Communist state, but it will be evolution that will move it from Communism to... who knows what? Capitalism and democracy? Maybe. China is already moving in that direction.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
It might very well make it okay when informing the Chinese people helps to bring forth change. They might begin to ask themselves why exactly things are being censored.
Pure speculation, I know, but it might have positive consequences.
I do not hate privacy.
Conflict?
Everybody will all have their own definitions of these words, which is of course natural. To understand what I am talking about here, please allow me to ask that you put your definitions aside for a moment so that I can paint the following image which might be useful to some of you. . .
Both Secrecy and Privacy are tools which use the same gate. The gate restricts information both in and out, allowing for a controlled flow in both directions so that the individual or group only have to deal with or share chosen information.
Privacy is based on the fact that there is some information which individuals or groups can't deal with, which would upset them so much that they would unravel or become endangered through knowing. Such information needs to be processed gently, internally, or released a bit at a time. You can't digest a whole turkey in one gulp. An oxygen burning flame is blown out when fed too much air too quickly. To facilitate healthy growth, Privacy is needed to make sure the individual or group is not overwhelmed or destroyed. Privacy does not intend to hold forever; only until it is no longer too hurtful or dangerous to share or allow in.
There is another type of intent, however, which uses the same tools but which has nothing to do with facilitating healthy growth. It has to do with avoiding spiritual growth and it has to do with controlling others for personal gain by withholding information. This is the essence of Secrecy.
The difference lies entirely in the Intent of the person or people making the choices on how the information gate is used. --Privacy exists to facilitate healthy growth, while Secrecy is there to stop or reverse growth.
I find Google's move disappointing.
Right when I was beginning to warm up to them for denying Bush access to their data base, they had to pull this nonsense.
-FL
The motto of Google is "do no evil". Not "be ethical". If you don't see the difference between morals and ethics then you've got a problem.
The point is that complying with laws is sometimes unethical. The ethical choice would have been either complete non-involvement or violating the laws in question. And since when is behaving ethically not one of their duties to their shareholders? I can't rationalize or justify supporting this action.
It seems to me, as a business, Google really has no choice, as their competitors are already in China. But, seeing as our very First Amendment, perhaps the most valued right in US and the free world, we as citizens should wholey reject US businesses, in essence, supporting censorship. I think the US Govt. should levy a heavy, heavy tax on any income that is generated from US businesses engaged in directly supporting what americans (and the free world) consider basic human rights. Money collected should be earmarked to fight such violations. This would level the playing field, and allow companies who care about morality more than money, not feel forced to go against their principles merely to survive (not that that is an excuse either).
Does a publicly traded company only have financial duties to shareholders, or should it be trying to help those shareholders in other ways? For example, would a shareholder rather live in a world where he has an extra $500, or a world where his kids won't have to fight a war with a brainwashed Chinese population? As a shareholder, I expect my companies to behave in a manner that will make my life better in more than just financial ways.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hacked by Chinese!
The other option is to hedge your bets. Buy stock in all of the companies you dispise the most. Take your pick, tobacco, Microsoft, oil companies propping up corrupt governments, etc. etc.. If these companies fail, you can take comfort in your loses because your conscience won. If these companies continue to succeed, take your profits and give them to the groups opposing these groups, e.g. open-source foundations, green energy developers, etc..
...unless you are fighting simply for the sake of debate... um, carry on...
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to govern any other" -John Ada
Are there any search engines that are not censoring their content anywhere?
Does anyone else find it less the conincidental that right after Google stands up the the current executive administration this story is all over the news? Lets look at the facts: Google turns down an illegal request from the United States governement, Google follows the law. Google censures its searches in China, Google follows the law. Right or wrong I am more interested in the fact that this story is such big news RIGHT AFTER Google chooses to stand up for itself in the USA.
I actually have never been that impressed by the oft-noted Google motto. This recent action is actually consistent with the statement "Don't Be Evil' because on the face of it, it's not an overtly evil act, more the sin of omission.
"Don't Be Evil" is a lame motto to live by. "Don't Be Evil" could easily have been the motto of the many people in Nazi Germany that said nothing while neighbors disappeared. It's a motto that suggests inaction. I find it interesting that even before going public, Google had a motto that meshed well with standard American corporate philosophy, although in the last decade "Don't Get Caught" would probably describe the zeitgeist better.
"Do Good" would have been a motto I think would have been admirable, and clearly inconsistent with Internet censorship. But that's not what Google signed up for.
Roman Military Contractor in First Century Palestine: "The Romans have just asked me to help them nail this Jesus guy to the cross, but everything that I have heard about him is that he a good and decent man guilty of no crime. But, you know, I do have a family to feed and a plans to retire to Tuscany. And, hey, if I don't do it, then that Brutus guy will probably get the job and he won't drive the nails in as gently and humanely as I will. So, I guess I just have to make the best of it!"
;)
And hey, if that Jesus guy hadn't been crucified, then the central tenants of modern Christianity would be completely different! Of course, if he was actually all that that religion makes him out to be, then it was all supposed to happen, and the crucifiction served a purpose. Thus, this contractor of yours is a just man indeed! Meanwhile, if he wasn't, he probably wouldn't have been remembered as much. If the guy believed what he preached, then he'd probably be pretty happy in retrospect that his influence is still felt. Well, maybe not, the whole history of it all is debatable, the arguement could go in a million directions. But the overall opinion is unified through scholars: your point is bunk
'sides, crucifiction was only for political criminals; at very least the Roman authorities must have *believed* he had committed crimes for which he needed to be thusly handled, and it's likely that any people working in the employ of these authorities would have heard the story in that light as well. In that case, why stick your neck out for another good-for-nothing rabblerouser? Argue whether that's correct or not, but your "Roman military contractor" would probably have seen little reason to avoid crucifying this Jesus of Nazareth guy, certainly not any more reasons than another other political preacher crucified.
And hey. If we're going for equivalents, then the equivalent position for this guy in reference to Google would be something more like agreeing to crucify this Jesus guy, but putting up a sign on the hill saying "some of these political criminals may not have been guilty of the crimes they were charged with and now executed for".
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Why?
You know what!
i answered an article a couple of weeks ago and said that China was repressive on internet activity and ignoring freedom of speech and such and i got moded down to troll.
Funny how people are sometimes offended about truth.
"must have been chinese government agent that read slashdot and moded me down"
Google has financial guns, which in many ways can be far more powerful than physical ones.
Maybe so, but they're still outgunned. The value of the company may be measured in billions, but China's economy is measured in trillions.
First, there's that guy, Bill Clinton, who allowed sensitive information to be leaked to China while forbidding security agencies to investigate and helping CIA to be almost destroyed.
l e.asp?indid=644
l e.asp?indid=977o s.htm
http://www.discoverthenetwork.com/individualProfi
After that, there's this other nice guy, George Soros, who thinks the treason par... I mean, the democratic party is so nice he must purchase it by both financing every kind of subversive liberal cause in existence as well as financing its elections, what the party heads of course love. A man who, of course, also loves China:
http://www.discoverthenetwork.com/individualProfi
http://www.rense.com/general61/thecaseofgeorgesor
And now, Google, a major contributor to the treas... sorry, to the *democratic* party, also explicitly enters the gang.
Oh, this was "such" a surprise. As if liberals weren't like that...
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
What if this were Microsoft?
Would you be so willing to understand?
Ah yes... but it is Microsoft:
http://www.msn.com.cn/ and yahoo: http://www.yahoo.com.cn/
Are they telling you that they are being forced to censor what you read? Seems there is a real line between going along quietly with oppression and telling you directly who you need to talk to in order to stop the thuggery.
It is an age old question, when is doing nothing better than doing something you disagree with under the threat of force? I think the morality of the situation depends on how much you can effect the outcome and if there is anything immoral that is done that couldn't be done without your participation. In this case, if they are truly telling people that search results are being omitted and the reason they are being omitted, then I think this is the bet they could hope to accomplish.
In this way Google is not misleading people like other search engines might by simply omitting the results and pretending that they are giving you complete results.
But the devil is in the details and this sounds like a slippery slope, to use the cliche, in order to remain "not evil" google would have to be willing to stop doing business in china or any other country that saught to use google itself more directly to mislead.
You can have Democracy with one party in power by choice. Japan had the same party in power from 1955-1993.
But you can't have Democracy with only one party ALLOWED to be in power. It means a lack of real choice, which means no Democracy. And from a practical standpoint, the party who is the only one allowed to be in power won't bother following the people's will much because they don't have to. You've heard all the stories about how in Russia or China you can't get ahead unless you join the party. If the government will not let you succeed unless you join their party, it's not a Democracy.
Cuba is also in no way a Democracy. That's not to say Castro doesn't like the people and try to do things for them. But again, the people have no way to effect change at the top, so it's not a closed loop, it's not a Democracy. I personally despise that our (US) government won't deal with Castro. To me it seems like it is due to a combination of pigheadedness and a want to buddy-up to the anti-Castro forces in Miami, as they represent a powerful voting block and a large source of campaign money in a state that is critical in presidential elections.
Additionally, I don't see Castro as much of a Communist, either. He really only turned to the Soviets because we refused to deal with him in the beginning. Our government wouldn't deal with him because he nationalized the assets of large American companies, and they were lobbying the government hard. So he turned to the Soviets, who were glad to put a thorn in our side, only 60 miles away (or whatever it is). In return, Castro got access to essential trade and subsidized energy costs.
No, in my mind, Castro is a good old fashioned dictator. One who seems to want to do good for his people, but not at the expense of his power as he jailed people for life for the same things he did in school to oppose Batista. Additionally, he micromanaged his country into the ground badly with various hairbrained schemes to develop new industries and milk self-sufficence.
I don't know how you can say that Communism is representative unless a central structure forms. A central structure ALWAYS forms. Think of the "five year plans" from the central government. In all examples of Communism, both the economy and political power are centrally controlled.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It should be modded offtopic. The issue is about wether google is evil by doing this, not if you are a person fighting against MS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I agree. Why is China treated differently than Cuba? Money. While it is true that no single company or even nation can really choose not to do business with China because the loss to opportunistic competitors is just too terrible, why a critical mass could not be achievd by the US, the EU, and some assorted other organizations throwing up sanctions is simply a sign of a shameful lack of backbone. There is rationalization aplenty here, and I'm not buying it.
Sanctions against China on a massive scale would work quickly -- they have seen the trajectory they are on, and are wedded to it in mind and spirit. They need only look at FIdel Castro and it will be as though the Ghost of Christmas past had paid them a visit in the night. If only we had the guts to put this to them.
tone
tone
Whatever the Chinese government may or may not be, it cannot be classified as fascist. State-capitalist would be my term, others would prefer communist.
I've heard that the vast majority of Chinese don't even know that anything happened in Tianeman Square. I highly doubt that they realize they've been duped by their own government if they don't even know about one of the most important quashes of free speech in the 20th Century, in their own country no less.
Go back to that page that gives that pleaseant description of Ahmed Rami, take note how it implies that Hitler's regime was legitimate. And sweet Allah, Hiter is painted as Muslim. Why as a fellow Muslim, Hiter sure sounds like the ideal Muslim man to me... or not!
Now, go have a thorough look at that site, you'll see the Jews are the enemy and, apparently, the Holocaust never happened... there is a huge difference between Germany and France's anti-semitism/anti-Nazism laws when compared to China's censorship laws. As an analogy, think of all the laws in the U.S. granting black wo/men rights, when preceding laws did not specifically forbid such rights... that is except for the tons of Jim Crow laws. The laws bar Jim Crow laws and explicitly grant rights for those idiots it was not already clear. Thus, in modern day Germany and France there are laws against Nazism and anti-semitism to prevent its rise and to serve as a declatory statement: "That is no longer us". Of course, discrimination against blacks has not disappeared (nowhere near), and certainly anti-semitism in France and Germany has not disappeared. In both cases, the laws help the situation.
What China is doing is simple fascism. I, personally, can't eloquate the difference between "good" censorship or "bad" censorship, but I bet Google (and the average person) can easily tell them apart. Did you notice Google making a big PR statement with censorship in France and Germany? No, because Google knows, and the public knows, there is a difference with the censorship in China. The inability to find pro-Nazi stuff isn't going to hurt you much, but the inability to see entire aspects of your life from a critical angle is going to really suck... Google is stifling freedom to useful information.
How will Google solve its problem of ethics versus bucks? No idea, but for now it seems it has found a suitable compromise to itself and its shareholders. But please, for fuck's sake, lose the "Do No Evil" and the PR about how things are just dandy...
Boycott Sony
You think college leads to success in business? Sheeeesh.
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
China has bigger financial guns.
Google should comply for 3 or 4 years and own the Chinese market like they own the rest. Then they should start relaxing the filters. China is no longer a Cuba or North Korea, and there is a certain momentum which the government is not able or willing to resist. Faced with blocking the universally used search engine at that point or letting it go, I think they would end up letting it go.
Now, Google could try the same strategy in Germany or France, but the people might just take to the streets and demand that they bring back the censorship. (hmm, maybe if we gave their leaders some free oil vouchers...)
This gives Google some interesting opportunities.
First, Google gets to remind the Chinese millions of times per day that their government is censoring them.
Second, Google is a symbol of Western ideas and freedoms -- again, visible millions of times per day.
Third, this allows China to eventually become addicted to Google's services. In the long term, Google could end up in the driver's seat of China's information flow.
Fourth, Google can now play the role of "secretly subversive insider". No filter can be perfect. Google will always claim they're doing "the best filtering job technically possible", but we'll always wonder if they're REALLY committed to it -- just like we always wondered about the original Napster's commitment to excellence in filtering. If 99% of the Google workforce secretly hopes that the Chinese filters will be ineffective, what do you think is going to happen?
Is the illusion of freedom more dangerous than its absence?
"There is no man so hopelessly enslaved as he who believes, falsely, that he is free" - Von Goethe
You Americans can wax poetically about "censorship" when I can see a nipple on the Superbowl without the whole country going "WTF we're all going to die!".
Different cultures have different standards. I don't believe China's way is the best, but I'm not sure. And neither are you.
Do you really think Google has to fight against opression? Why don't you start? Go and break the DMCA ina really visible way, and face the consequences. I mean, we all know it's an unjust law, right? So why are you abiding by it?
What is evil is the Chinese governments restrictions on free speech Just because the US has free speach doesn't mean everyone needs free speech. In china, free speech is the thing Americans have. If they want it, fine, do like we did and have a revolution. Oh hey, George W, if they do have a revolution, keep your nose out of it.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
For one - and I'm sure you know this but I'll say it anyway - your scenario is an outlandish piece of conjecture.
Secondly, maybe what you're pointing out is the problem that is inherent with capitalism. With capitalism there's very little motivation to do something "good" just for the sake of it being "good". Usually any good that a company does is only done because of a potential tax write off. I'll be even slightly less amoral about what "good" is, if that makes sense. How often do you new architecture that was designed to be beautiful and unique? I never see it. It's all about what is functional.
Capitalism is not the final answer.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
- Google search records a whole lot of user info, your IP address linked with your searches, plus a whole lot more. That's why it doesn't want to give that info to the govt, coz they had no business collecting this info in the first place !
- The China link. Google getting in bed with the communists is really bad for the common chinese people, no matter which way Google spins it.
- The DRM in Google Video.
- Google hasn't released ANY worthwhile open source code (I do know about the Summer of Code, but that is different), though it is a big user of open source code.
- The perpetual BETA and the mostly crappy products. Except Google search, gmail and gmaps to some extent, almost all the other products have a big SUCK smell.
- Google's goal is to organize the world's info, without giving a damn for copyrights and user privacy, whether it be allowing malicious people to easily find info about you on the net, or scanning copyrighted books unless publisher's opt-out.
I am opting out of the Google mania.
I am sad to hear about BBC.
What is really important is to gather information from more than one source, because then noise is reduced and the bias is easier to spot.
But this is only feasible in a proactive approach from the citizen. It is very bad to have this happening on the "respected" news feeders, because the average people will take it as truth.
I happened to be in USA at the time when Bush declared war to Iraq.
Following the news on ANY other media anywhere in the world, it was clear that there was no WMD in Iraq, but taking the NBC coverage by the letter, one would believe that was in imminent danger.
Don't take it personally, it is just what I saw.
Actually, quick fact check. The UN did not agree to Kosovo. It was blocked by Russia and China instead of by France. Apparently that makes all the difference.
You may now return to your self imposed exile from reality to whatever fantasy world you like.
(Oh, and by the way, Clinton also bombed the daylight out of the Iraqi's without even informing our allies to say nothing of UN approval)
It's funny how you think that you would act differently if you were in Google's position. Google is not China's liberator. Only the people can free China and if Google is their main method of doing so, then they have bigger problems.
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
Google is not the world liberator. Google _can't_ free China, and if China's people are using Google as a staging for their revolution they are in some sad shape.
You don't know jack about China. And it's a pitty people expect others to act when they sit and do nothing.
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
Perhaps that should change.
I'm fine with what Google is doing. It's their company, they can do as they wish. However, I don't agree with it. Complicity will not improve conditions in China. The average Chinese citizen is already so sheltered by the government from what really happens in their own country that getting a "censored" Google will be a HUGE appeasement. They might even think that the government is becoming more friendly. This could not be further from the truth. This action by Google will do far more harm than good. Let's hope this puts an end to Google's horn blowing about what responsible company they are. Actions speak louder than words. And in this cse, Google had a huge opportunity to make a statement on a global level. WHo cares if they subsidize employee purchases of hybrid vehicles. They are now complicit with the policies of the Chinese government. I'm selling my Google stock. I want no part of this.
So ya, communism sounds good. But thanks for the typed masturbation.
... for it to be blocked by Google in China?
Has anyone written M-x-spook-google.cn?
"China doesn't need Google very much; they already have Yahoo, MSN, et al. As such, Google declining to operate in China would do almost nothing to further the cause of free speech because it would not damage the opponents of free speech in the slightest."
okay then, lets replace China with USA.
"USA doesn't need Google very much; they already have Yahoo, MSN, et al. As such, Google declining to operate in USA would do almost nothing to further the cause of free speech because it would not damage the opponents of free speech in the slightest."
Google's standing up for peoples right only if they can get away with it. When real shove come to push, will Google release IP address of people who search words such as:
"Democracy", "Falung gong" and "Tiannamen Massacure" to Chinese gov't then?
Above statement you make, points towards "yes"
I guess Dont do Evil, is only spoken in English by them.
Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down? Why is that a rhetorical question? It's got a fascinating answer: Your mirror image is not reversed left-to-right any more than it is reversed top-to-bottom! You only _think_ it is because your brain more easily recognizes an image of you reversed left-to-right than it does an image of you reversed top-to-bottom. It is just as correct to say that the image in the mirror is reversed top-to-bottom (and not left-to-right). If you imagine yourself being rotated 180 degrees about the vertical axis in the mirror, the result has to be reversed about the vertical axis to match the image in the mirror. Similarly, you could imagine yourself being rotated 180 degrees about the _horizontal_ axis in the mirror. The result would have to be reversed about the _horizontal_ axis in order to match the image in the mirror. In fact, any axis you pick will work. Rotate 180 degrees about that axis and then reverse about that axis and you have your mirror image! Psychologically, it's much easier for your brain to "parse" the image in the mirror if it does an implied rotation about the _vertical_ axis in the mirror, the result of which only mismatches your image by a simple left-to-right reversal. Imagine a gravity-less world of aliens who were more symmetrical about the horizontal axis than about the vertical axis. It would be easier for them to visualize themselves rotated about the horizontal axis than about the vertical axis. Their mirror image would, then, only differ from this visualization by a top-to-bottom reversal. They would look in the mirror and say that the mirror had reversed their image top-to-bottom!
"What people need to realize is that Google doesn't really have a choice in the matter. I don't believe this violates the "Don't be evil" motto, as Google is simply trying to follow Chinese law. I don't think Google should be scrutinized for this, considering every other company (Microsoft, Yahoo, etc) has been forced to do the same thing. What people should be scrutinizing is Chinese law, not companies that follow said laws. Of course, the entire political situation in China is horrible and always has been."
This clearly violates their Don't Be Evil motto. Saying just because everyone else is doing it... is a copout. If Google took a stand and said we're not doing business with China on these terms, it would make a huge statement. Instead, they're more concerned with making money, just like every other company. Don't Be Evil, Unless It's Profitable should be their new motto.
Vote for Pedro
An apt reference to Nazi Germany . . . 'tis a rare breed of analogy
More seriously, that's painfully true . . . it's somewhat disheartening to think that people would be much more outraged if it had happened recently. (Although I may be speaking as a bit of an apologist for Google in this matter, the only justification I can see is if Google truly thinks that their presence in censored form does more good than their absence.) And it's not like the distance of time has improved the temperment of the Chinese government or opened up the society, it's still more or less the same predicament that existed back then, but people loose touch with things over time, they need those reminders or they seem to put back on their rose-tinted glasses.
It may be too common to trot out Nazi Germany as an example of terrible deeds by a State whenever someone disagrees with something and wants to rouse up opposition . . . but on the other hand, using one modern totalitarian regime as an analogy for another is quite apt! Somewhat distressingly so, really. Many companies did indeed deal with Nazi Germany until there was no real option there, and people elsewhere were quick to believe the soothing reports of things being fine until it came time for everyone to be roused up into fury . . . disheartening, as it seems that with the great economic paradise that China is being touted now to be, people are all too quick to forget what they can. As long as things are looking good for them, it's much nicer to imagine that things aren't that bad over in China, there's nothing really that wrong there, it's not like they kill people and quash dissent with force or anything . . .
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Totally disgusted by this. While the google.com search results show info about the massacre in tiananmen square, the google.cn results show tourist info and the official govt. websites.
This is the 2nd most evil thing I have seen in my life (1st is Bill O'Reilly...oh that venom spewing bastard).
Again, go fuck yourself Google....I am not gonna use your search engine any more. Again, from the bottom of my heart, fuck you Google.....I hope you have to pay for this. Senate hearings would be good....wotsay sergey ?
Will you have obeyed the laws of the land in Afghanistan ? Fuck Google.
A lot of people tried to justify Cisco custom-building new functionality into their routers specifically to enable that "effective Great Firewall of China". They justified it by saying that it was impossible to fully track and censor the Internet.
Well, guess what? They managed to do it, with Cisco's help. Without those specially-designed routers, they would not have been able to, but now they can. They can track individual connections and trace them back to a person, and people are going to jail and being executed because of it. The only way to evade the Great Firewall right now is to have a safe and trusted machine outside the Firewall to provide an encrypted tunnel and proxy for you. Sure, every Chinese citizen has one of those, all billion of them.
Cisco did evil, and people used the exact same justification you are trying to escape the obvious moral quandary. Claims that "the Firewall will be ineffective" led to a now "very effective Firewall". Now Google is breaking their own "Don't Be Evil" motto, and you are claiming that the censorship "will be ineffective". Does no one on this planet learn from history?
Maybe not, but it's better than all the other answers so far.
With capitalism there's very little motivation to do something "good" just for the sake of it being "good".
I would argue that this is a problem with humanity. Capitalism is just a system that allows our race's true colors to show. We are flawed and greedy, plain and simple. If the human race was truly intelligent, we'd all realize we vote with our money and act accordingly. That will never happen. We can either accept that humanity is ignorant and greedy or we can keep trying flawed systems to go against human nature (for example, communism).
Vote Libertarian
China is a communist country.
Not any more, they're not. They're a hard-core capitalistic oligarchy. But they understand that by continuing to mouth Communist rhetoric, their enemies stay all outraged and irrational, attacking the rhetoric while ignoring most of what the Chinese government is actually up to.
Lots of people are falling for the ruse.
OTOH, here and there you can read dispassionate analyses of what's actually going on over there. It's hardly communism any more; it's a rather different sort of authoritarianism. It's a lot like the earlier Chinese system before Mao, but less insular. It's having some significant successes, from the ruling class's viewpoint, while the rest of the world is distracted and misdirected by the rhetoric.
Whether it's more or less evil than Communism was isn't clear yet.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
So does anyone here want to argue that the American Jews who refused to enrich the Nazi regime, and made their refusal visible, were morally responsible in part for Kristallnacht and the Nuremburg Race Laws, let alone the Holocaust? Should they have just "engaged" (i.e., done business with) the Nazis instead, and hoped that the Nazis' attitudes towards Jews would gradually change? Both ideas are preposterous. The Nazis chose to commit their crimes against humanity, and the blame for them rests with the Nazis alone.
Genuinely ethical people (and companies), when confronted with a choice between compromising their principles, or holding fast to them with the knowledge that other people might then choose to commit evil acts as a result, realize that they have no choice at all -- and bear no responsibility for those evil acts. Google, by enabling China's censorship policies, has shown that democracy and freedom of speech are not principles that it is genuinely committed to. I suggest, therefore, that people who do cherish those principles should not do business with Google. Or China.
And the lesson is? Big business is...(drum roll)...(chatter)...(commercial)...big business!
With that said, that doesn't mean that one can't dislike a company's practices more than another. I know that a good amount of customers at Target (where I work as college tuition loves to sodomize me) come there because they hate Wal-Mart, and their experience at Target is overall more positive. Look at IE versus Firefox. Search engines versus Google. Many companies are organizing their efforts towards consumer satisfaction (does the customer feel like they are being treated well) and ease of use as that seems to be THE catching point for many.
Although Microsoft is definitely a revolutionary (yes, argue it all you want, but then question what is on almost every computer) in the computer industry, their attitude is one that dissuades innovation, advancement, and provides other detrimental things for an average consumer. They're not the only company that does such things; they just may be the most notorious. Too bad that many big companies attempt to control their respective industries (Please advance to Boardwalk) and create a dependence upon their consumers, but it's called capitalism.
But the day will come when their control breaks down and they will need to adapt. Just look at the RIAA and MPAA. :)
That isn't so bad.
They have made a travesty of any positive benefits of technology (along with those Diebold folks, etc.) by fulfilling the pessimists who proclaimed that the final result of technology would just be the easier enslavement of mankind.....
BRIN: China actually shut us down a couple of times.
PLAYBOY: Did you negotiate with the Chinese government to unblock your site?
BRIN: No. There was enough popular demand in China for our services--information, commerce and so forth--that the government re-enabled us.
PLAYBOY: Have you ever agreed to conditions set by the Chinese government?
BRIN: No, and China never demanded such things. However, other search engines have established local presences there and, as a price of doing so, offer severely restricted information. We have no sales team in China. Regardless, many Chinese Internet users rely on Google. To be fair to China, it never made any explicit demands regarding censoring material. That's not to say I'm happy about the policies of other portals that have established a presence there.
PLAYBOY: Which sites cooperate with Chinese government censors?
BRIN: I've heard various things, but I don't want to spread secondhand rumors. There is a Harvard site that lists what you can and can't get from different places around the world.
PAGE: Search for "censorship" and "Berkman" and you can get the website. [Editor's note: The website is at cyber.law.harvard.edu/home.] It has some cool programs that automatically track what is and isn't available on the web.
PLAYBOY What would you do if you had to choose between compromising search results and being unavailable to millions of Chinese?
BRIN: There are difficult questions, difficult challenges. Sometimes the "Don't be evil" policy leads to many discussions about what exactly is evil. One thing we know is that people can make better decisions with better information. Google is a useful tool in people's lives. There are extreme cases, we're told, when Google has saved people's lives.
I do know that on at least one of the topics mentioned in the article, Taiwan's independence, the Chinese are very brainwashed. Talk to people from any other country, including Taiwan, and you'll get a mix of opinions on whether Taiwan is independent from China, a part of the nation of China, a part of some "Greater China" or some other weird thing. Talk to people from China and it is a very rare thing to meet someone who doesn't believe that Taiwan is part of China and that China should take Taiwan by force if necessary to support their claim. That is a dangerous thing. If people from China could hear other sides of the debate it might not change their minds completely, but it might at least lessen their belief that capturing Taiwan and taking freedom from the Taiwanese people is something worth spilling blood for.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Why the article does not have the same sexy title as this one:
/ 17/2045241
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01
Because we love Google ?
This whole hullaballoo over censorship in China has already been debunked by Snopes China . It's an urban legend.
No no. China has the upper hand. They control their own pipelines and can cut off any access to Google if they please. They have done it before.
When the old men in Beijing pass away, Mao's ideals will also pass. The Chinese Communist Party will be exposed for what it is: A paper dragon that has lost its legitimacy in representing the needs of the Chinese people long ago.
Very OT, but doesn't the trick seem to be working at something you like/enjoy/are proud of? It seems to me that there are plenty of rich people out there who have too much money and the time weighs heavily on them. Sacrificing for future payouts makes sense, but if their is no enjoyment in the process, how will you know how to enjoy life once you achieve your goal?
People gave exactly the same arguments against the use of sanctions against South Africa.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
"Actually, quick fact check. The UN did not agree to Kosovo. It was blocked by Russia and China instead of by France. Apparently that makes all the difference."
First of all it does indeed make a difference. If you don't think there is any difference between a modern european democracy and russia and china then you need to get your head out of your ass and stop listening to Rush.
Secondly it was a NATO project. You may want to look up NATO on the web. I know Rush doesn't talk about it much so you won't get any information about it on the radio.
"(Oh, and by the way, Clinton also bombed the daylight out of the Iraqi's without even informing our allies to say nothing of UN approval)"
Only for a republitard definition of "bombed the daylights out". To a republitard there is no difference between dropping a bomb in a isolated area which is launcing missiles at you and destroying 75% of fallujia (twice!) and having the grim spectre of mass graves in soccer fields to bury all the civillians.
Oh and one last thing. CLinton did not occupy any nation, he did not lie about weapons of mass destruction, he did not torture anybody, he did not set up concentration camps all over the world either.
Only the most idiotic of the republitards thinks there is no difference between clinton and bush. Of course the fact that the republitards have now resorted to saying "bush is just like clinton" is a wealth of irony considering how much they hate the clinton familiy.
evil is as evil does
Tibetans Outraged by Google's "Evil" Plan for Censorship in China "Don't Be Evil" Protest Planned for Google Headquarters Today San Francisco - Students for a Free Tibet is outraged at Google's decision to join hands with the Chinese Government in its censorship efforts. Google has launched a web search engine custom-built to the Chinese authorities' specifications that blocks access to information about Tibet, human rights, and other topics sensitive to Beijing. "Students and young people worldwide are appalled by Google's decision to become active partners in China's censorship apparatus," said Lhadon Tethong, Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet. "Google's participation in the Chinese government's program of repression and information control renders the company motto "Don't be evil" a terrible joke." Google rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft have already shown a willingness to cooperate with Chinese authorities. Last year, Yahoo! provided information that helped jail a Chinese dissident for ten years and last month, Microsoft shut down a Chinese political blogger's site for "not complying with local law." "Political and corporate leaders constantly tell us that foreign business will contribute to a more open and democratic China," added Ms. Tethong. "This is yet another sign that China is in fact forcing foreign businesses to be more closed and anti-democratic." Tibetans and their supporters will hold a demonstration at 5:00 pm today at Google Headquarters at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, CA. Students for a Free Tibet http://www.studentsforafreetibet.org/ Contacts: Lhadon Tethong (917) 418-4181 lhadon@studentsforafreetibet.org Thupten Tsering (510) 381-8384 thupten@studentsforafreetibet.org
"Not that I disagree with most of your points, but I had to correct your notion that the entire world was in agreement with Clinton's decision. I often hear this point raised, and it's just not right."
While there was not universal support the kosovo adventure was carried out with NATO co-operation. The level of disagreement with kosovo and the gulf war would be a facinating comparison. I certainly don't recall billions of people worldwide doing co-ordinated protests during the clinton administration.
Furthermore Clinton never occupied kosovo. He just conducted airstrikes and special ops. He certainly didn't confiscate any of their natural resources and turned them over to American companies.
Finally he never tortured people and never destroyed entire cities (a-la fallujia). You may recall images of soccer fields outside of fallujia being turned into mass graves after the first time we bombed the shit out of that city. There were no similar incidents in kosovo.
evil is as evil does
In the long term, it pays to be good. Those are good generate goodwill towards them. This turns into revenue because people like to stick with the good guys. In the short term, being greedy and immoral may bring you quick cash, but won't last in the long term.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
What comes around, goes around...
Welcome to the new world.
-----------------
Is it fascism yet?
It all makes perfect sense
Expressed in Dollars and Cents
Pound Shilling and Pence..
Simply providing their search engine to China in censored form... isn't evil. What is evil is the Chinese governments [sic] restrictions on free speech...
Simply providing Nazi Germany with guns isn't evil. What is evil is the Nazi government's use of those guns.
Really?
Lies about crimes
Its the governments fault, not googles.
I Know I get pissed when I see that "Some search results have been removed in order to comply with the DMCA" here in America. Damn it. Does that mean Google should withdraw from the US? HELL NO. My searching on the net would be destroyed without Google - DESTROYED
If Google, IBM, MS, AMD, Intel, and all other major US tech companies boycotted China, yes, eventually the market would be filled by Chinese companies. But that's not the point of boycotting or going on a strike - we may all boycott Sony, but I am the only one in my area that even heard about what Sony did. Just because *I* will not likely be able to change Sony's ways doesn't mean *I* am about to start buying their stuff again. Or MS's stuff. Ghandi's strikes took a long time to mean anything, and his long jail stays and malnutrition may have really been hard on him and his followers, but that certainly stopped no one. Google and others may have to take some legal heat and go on a profit strike, but that's the price of "do no evil". As a great man once said: "A threat to Justice anywhere is a threat to Justice everywhere."
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
(If only I were an educated person, I could actually read it.)
first we kept quiet about their baby killing. now they want to censor our free speech. they can censor their own citizens' speech, but to censor ours is outrageous!
Hello.
You may not recognize me, but I was recently elected, quite democratically, as the supreme overlord of humanity. I'm still getting used to the office, but my first act as supreme overlord of humanity is to declare that all beings on this planet must think like I do, and behave according to my own personal ideals. This includes you, China! And you too, Google! Everybody shall henceforth do what I say, because I'm right. How could I not be? I'm the supreme overlord of humanity!
--
If I may move out of character for a bit: A note on freedom. I see some of you writing things like "Google's new motto: Do not be evil (unless pressured by a government)" and so forth. But none of these people are any better. You are essentially saying to the rest of us "Everybody should be free to do whatever they want, as long as it agrees with my point of view." Freedoms conflict, guys.
China has been around for quite some time, and it gets by OK. China is free to run itself how it believes. You are free to dislike it. The Chinese people are free to rebel, and the Chinese government is free to suppress rebellion. That's freedom in the broadest sense of the word.
So why don't you all come down off those high horses and join the real world? Google has two choices: Provide some search capability to the Chinese people, or provide none. They chose 'some'. This is to the benefit of the Chinese, as they now have one more resource than otherwise. And no text filter is perfect.
Google made the best choice available to them.
Yes but the difference is I can go to those sites and read the news rather than having to stick with CNN or NBC that you say are censored. So exactly HOW are we more censored than China? I've seen no law or digital lock making it illegal to browse news non-American news sites, namely your examples, however with the current leadership we may have to just give it a few years before your comment shines the truth.
Turn based strategy game that runs over XMPP. Phalanx
This is not a new thing for Google, see there activities with concerns to French and German users, I have also heard that in America Google assists by policing copyright infringements.
My personal opinion to all this, Google is a capitalist company, they are sneaking off after the money that can be made in China nothing more, for all there talk it seems that Google is a company standing at odds with itself.
BOO
Communism is all but dead, but Fascism, it's economically viable cousin, is seeing a resurgence all over the world. China has bought in to this corporate totalitarian economy and is now more fascist than communist. The United States is headed there thanks to the efforts of both political parties. The EU and now Canada are moving in this direction as well.
Where Communist states like the USSR were crushed under the weight of their horribly flawed econonic system that couldn't possibly sustain itself long term, the neo-con fascists enjoy elements of a potent corporate business engine backed up by an invasive big brother goverment entity.
The whole world is going fascist, they are just heading there from different places on the political spectrum.
How did you get past our firewalls?
- Chinese Gov't
It's to the people who happen to live in it. And following the law in territories they operate, even if they aren't satisfied with the rules, does not equate to getting in bed with the country... Anymore than all corporations are in bed with the government.
Google may aim not to be evil, but this doesn't oblige them to self-sacrifice just in order to make a political statement against the rules of play in a country they offer services in.
In order to not provide search services in fascist countries, they would have to exclude the United States and others as well.
To be clear, Google is a corporation, and if they don't make a buck, they don't survive. Just because they wish to not be evil does not oblige them to be idealists or political activists, refusing to obey troublesome laws of countries they wish to operate in.
You really think average citizen in China are stupid and don't know about tiananmen square event or political rights abuse(not human rights)? You really think you know more than people over in China because you can have a little bit more political freedom? Grow up!!! We know more about what is going on in US AND China than American knows about China. American gets so limited cover on China versus other way around, it is pathetic. And you american write over here like you know everything about China.
Ignorance just make people speechless. You think American government and corporation are friendly with China because they are stupid. Look into the mirror, you are the stupid and outdated one. That is why you are not one of the key people in the government or corporation to make important decision.
I am sure it will put you in shame once you talk to Chinese citizen, that what world view they have which you never think at that level. You are argueing about baby steps to so called freedom and well being which just slow yourself down, but China is taking huge step with its citizen toward that goal!
Last line: Research on culture revolution, it is a revolution with freedom on politics which went on ten years, with guns and violence going on for politics. Chinese people are sick of politics because it slow the society advance down. Without it, 1.2+B Chinese can advance far faster than before, and build a greater future for themselves.
Why not have Gnutella users in the "Free World" install a plugin into their gnutella clients that proxy encrypted Google and other major search engine queries for people in China?
Would this be feasible?
Not to be pedantic, but China has never been a communist country, nor has it ever claimed to be one.
Communism is the end result of a long transformative change process that Marx et al thought could take many generations. Marx also believed that capitalism was a necessary phase in the transformation to communism.
Officially, the CCP refers to the political system today as being "Socialism with Chinese characteristics".
Communism is planned for sometime in the future.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
Yes, you make a good point. What would Microsoft do? To make an abbreviation of it:
WWM$D? (for a Klondike Bar (TM))
this is the low point of google's existence.
shameful.
disgusting.
Yes, but the average Chinese can't spell "massacre".
I don't think that anybody objects to the idea of Google making money. That's good capitalism.
The problem is the hypocricy of the corporate slogan and their actions. This is not like Toyota or Ford selling the government trucks which could be used to transport prisoners as well as farm goods without a design change.
Google deliberately is selling a product designed to supress information. That is oppression and Google is collaborating. The argument that they still have access to a lot of other information is also hollow. If you don't know what is out there then you really aren't getting an accurate picture of the world.
I guess "Don't be evil" is an order to the rest of us who aren't as smart as the geniuses at Google who can understand the difference between good oppression and evil oppression.
Private jets and top-flight schools are still just different forms of caviar.
Really you need to work only as much as it takes to meet your basic necesseties. If I'm not too mistake, Agriculture takes up about 2% of our economic output, housing and related sectors (construction) take up about 10%. Theoretically, to eat and put a roof over our heads, you only need to work about 12% of what the typical person does now... about 5 hours a week.
Everything else is a luxury, though our shared consumerist culture might brainwash us otherwise. The question of where to set this magic "cut off" is really a question of how much in terms of luxury items one person should be allowed to have. The thing is, people don't react well to being limited in that way, even if the limit is set absurdly high.
yeah you really got to hate aiding a fascist country.... i cant believe google would do such a thing, oh wait, they still haven't, unless i missed, last time i checked, id be pretty sure china is a COMMUNIST state...... but what would i know...
and you know, aiding a fascist/authoritarian state NEVER done by a US company, or you know maybe the US government.....
and the majority of western nations would never let a dictatorial regime take control of country, even if it resulted the deaths of anywhere from 200 000 to 1 000 000 (some sources say over) innocents dying.... and the imprisonment of over 1.5 million political prisonners....
In the short term, being greedy and immoral may bring you quick cash, but won't last in the long term.
:)
You say that as if people care about the long term.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
New Google.ch! Now with 25% more evil</neon>!
I'm not sure I understand all this whinging about Google breaking their motto of 'don't be evil' because I can't see anything inheriantly evil about censorship itself.
Censorship when applied to say films and their ratings isn't an evil thing is it?
Or journalists protecting their sources?
Personally I don't think a government that uses censorship as a control method is going to work, as too much responsability is placed on such a few number of people.
I think some of people posting are far too naive and brainwashed into thinking that the 'west's' way of government is the only correct way. If its so great why does the slashdot comm continously post about the suffering with the Recording Industry Ass. of America and the Motion Picture Ass. of America and their crimilization of the public just to protect their outdated business models?
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person
Do an advanced google search for "google" in Chinese (Traditional) and Chinese (Simplified). Your fantasy about google being virtually unknown will evaporate.
You have a point ;).
I really hope that my comment do not become true.
But think about the average American. And just to be a bit pushy, did you notice how Europe has more fast internet penetration than the USA?
I bet that this is not due to the telephone infrastructure...
If you mind talking more about this, my email is costamacsoft.com.br
I'm not making any claims about the effectiveness of college on business. (Heck I'm not making any cliams about business at all.) All I want is to give my children the opportunity to get the best possible educations they can, wherever happens to make the most sense for them. I don't care if that's a $5000/year state school, a $100,000/year Harvard/MIT/CMU, or volunteering somewhere with the Peace Corps. I don't know what it will be, but I damn sure want to be prepared for any of them.
While I understand your point about living simply being able to provide a potentially greater free time than pushing deeper into "consumer culture", I disgree with your characterization of high-qality schools as luxuries.
The capacity to learn and educate ourselves is a vital part of what makes us human. I believe that providing the best possible educational opportunities that I can to my children is just as non-optional as food or shelter. And moreover, just as I want to feed them whatever food will be healthiest, I want to provide them education in the same manner. Now certainly they may not want or need to go to a $100,000/year school to pursue their educations. But if that happens to be the best fit for them then I'm going to make sure I'm ready to support their endevours.
Or would you argue that all anyone really needs to learn is how to grow their own food and build their own home? And even if that is the case, where does buying the land for said home and garden fit in to all that?
You're right.
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/