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Google De-indexes Talk.Origins, Won't Say Why UPDATED
J. J. Ramsey writes "Talk.Origins is an archive with thousands of pages exposing creationist pseudoscience. Rather mysteriously, Google pulled the plug on its search engine, giving only the vague reason: 'No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines.' This was apparently triggered by a recent cracking of the site that added 'hidden links to non-topical sites,' but Google won't say just what the violations were. Talk.Origins webmaster Wesley R. Elsberry believes that this Google policy harms honest webmasters." From the article: "My mission, whether I liked it or not, was to find and fix whatever problem the [Talk.Origins Archive] might have, with no guidance as to what the problem was and nothing at all about where to start looking... I was extremely lucky. The damage to my site was limited and in the first place that I happened to look. Other honest webmasters might not be so lucky. They may have to undertake an arduous process of vetting pages, essentially having to second-guess the mind of the cracker in trying to locate a problem that Google knows the exact location of." Thanks to an alert reader who sent in Matt's blog posting about how Google handles hacked sites.
What's this?
While, I have some sympathy for the guy, just because you think your an honest webmaster does not mean that Google should have to vet you and your content. They have a business to run too. At some point a webmaster has to put themselves in a position to recognize and address these sorts of problems BEFORE Google gets involved.
Nobody was evil here. The guy's site got hacked and spam links added, Google rightfully de-listed him, and then the webmaster found the problem, fixed it, and asked Google to re-list. Am I missing something?
and saying you're not evil doesn't mean that you should donate your time to every webmaster in the world either.
The egg. Breakfast is always the first meal of the day.
The writeup sucks. It implies that Google is censoring Usenet.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
was that he had no idea why he was delisted so he could fix the problem.
You'd think they'd keep regular "Last Known Good" backups and just be able to do a simple diff between the current page & their backup.
Or even just MD5 sums of all their pages, once a day, with known updates marked as such.
There should be no reason anyone has to even contemplate manually digging through thousands of pages if they've prepared sufficiently beforehand.
Maybe they'll take some very simple & no-cost precautions now that they've been burned.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
right!!, whats the moral of google's message? SECURE YOUR SITE!! i mean, if no one enforces web secureity, people will contenue to start securing their site with "what are the odds" still in the back of thier minds. a security violation from the start
"exposing creationist pseudoscience"...
Slashdot is so biased I don't know why I even bother anymore. Bashing Christians is so fashionable these days.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
Sort of. I believe he is talking about the Google search engine, not google groups which was Dejanews.
Fight Spammers!
Yes. And you were wise to ask. What you're missing is that Google gave him no clue/hint/guide/comment/help on why he was delisted. Just tossed him off, left it to him to discover that this had happened in the first place, left it to him to figure out (guess) what the problem might be, and then only relisted him after they got around to it.
Like it or not, Google has essentially become a Public Utility. They also make great claims of their ethical behavior code. If a site is delisted, there's a reason. If there's a reason, then that reason can be shared with the contact e-mail address that's part of every domain name registration. To just pull the plug because you somehow -- maybe not even your fault -- ran afoul of a constantly changing set of rules is not aboveboard behavior for a $157B company.
That's what you're missing here.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Similarly, AMD, though it is much smaller than Intel, provided the necessary competition in the x86 market. When Intel ignored the market need for a 64-bit version of the x86, AMD quickly met that need. AMD's actions vastly enriched the market. Look at the 64-bit x86 servers that are proliferating in the market.
"exposing creationist pseudoscience"...
Slashdot is so biased I don't know why I even bother anymore. Bashing Christians is so fashionable these days.
"Creationist" != "Christian", but don't let that stand in the way of your pretending to feel victimized.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
So many people refer to Google as if it were a human looking at web sites and giving it the big thumbs up or down. As part of the indexing if the spider finds "violations" such as presenting a different page to spiders than to humans, it risks being dropped from the index. To expect a human response to why each site triggered the de-indexing is not reasonable.
In the webmaster's whining about Google, he complains about the request to be re-indexed containing:
*I believe this site has violated Googles quality guidelines in the past.
* This site no longer violates Googles quality guidelines.
He thinks these are "an admission of guilt", but they dont' say "I violated" they say "the site violated". So, if the site were hacked and did violate their indexing policy, fix it, say you've fixed it and move on. How many hits has he had over the years that came directly from Google? And did they come from Google due to all those people choosing Google to search for his site or it's topics? But now he whines about being delisted for the time it takes him to fix a site he should have kept unhacked in the first place.
No I would not give you false hope,
on this strange and mournful day.
But the mother and child reunion,
is only a motion away.
KFG
All it says in the article is "creationist". No where's in it does it say "Christian".
People may be treating Google as a public utility, but Google (a private company) has absolutely no obligations to any website.
Ultimately, Google* has the right to change the rules when & if they please, in an arbitrary fashion, without consulting anyone.
*When I say "Google" I mean "the guys who own a majority stake in the company and cannot be overruled"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I was under the impression that they told the webmaster the reason they were delisted, they just didn't tell the webmaster the specific pages that the reason pertained to. Like "Your site has been delisted for hidden links to non-topical sites" instead of "Your site has been delisted for hidden links to non-topical sites on pages index.html, intro.html." etc. To me, that's a webmaster job. Google did their job on their end. What if the site had hundreds of pages of non-topical links? What if Google spiders just stopped at the first one they indexed (as they should). Should google be in charge of going through this guy's site and telling him exactly where the problems are? They are a search engine, not a website security firm. People are getting lazier everyday and everyone expects someone else to do their dirty work for them. People need to take some responsibility and stop whining.
The first wiki, c2.com, also has a similar problem. Google stopped indexing it (or at least listing it), and nobody is sure why. It may be a side-effect of anti-spam features that c2 added, but this is just speculation. Site custodians debated removing the anti-spam features because of this, but it has yet to be settled.
Table-ized A.I.
But no, Google does something unpleasant and all of the sudden Socialism rises again! Can't you people see that every time you start spouting socialist crap, anywhere, what you end up doing is devaluing the people you're trying to help? Was it really that hard to figure out that (a) something bad happened, traffic wise (logs will show a huge dip, right?), and (b) it happened somewhat concurrently with you letting your site become a spam breeding ground whose goal is to devalue the Google index? That's the most important property Google has...
If you think Google's a public good, then start bitching about the talk.origins webmaster polluting our public good with his spam links. But Google isn't a public good. It's a private venture, an excellently lucrative one, and we should all be thanking them for offering us the service and making enough money off of it to continue to offer it.
You bunch of handout wanting pansies. Geez.
-knewter
Unfortunately you're missing something too.
Google is in an arms race with spammers and blackhat seo firms. How are they supposed to know whether someone is honest or just mining them for information for their scam?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Actually, you're full of shit. He did not hire Google to do a security audit of his site and give him a list of which pages were breaking the rules and why. That's his problem and he can fix it. Google's responsibility includes indexing sites for search results, not telling hackers and SEO cheats specifically what they did to get caught and what they need to change.
Public utilities for a town have certain responsibilities only because they have accepted those responsibilities in exchange for the town making them a monopoly.
Google has no such responsibilities just becuse of the way they're treated by users. (And even if you argue that they're a monopoly, they haven't been granted monopoly status by a government.)
The words "Christian" or "Christianity" do NOT appear in the above article. Only "creationist".
What you're missing is that Google gave him no clue/hint/guide/comment/help on why he was delisted.
I'm not for censoring any information, and I am not trying to defend google. But there may be one very good reason why this may be happenning this way.
Google is at war with search engine spammers. When google de-lists somebody for spamming their search engine, if they gave a specific reason why then all the spammers would do is tweak their spam farm and be up and running in a couple of hours.
If they told this guy what was wrong, they would have to spend a huge amount of time and resources telling why everyone is wrong, all the while helping out the spammers.
Google is a good search engine, but if you notice that if you go beyond a couple of pages out of search results, many times you will find nothing but useless "link farms." Unfortunately, spam is no longer limited to email inboxes anymore, it's everywhere.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I saw User-Agent: * and my knee jerk reaction was that it meant all robot agents were disallowed... nevermind.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Bzzt. The website admin needs to locate one or more problems (== however many the cracker planted), and Google knows the exact location of at least one. "one or more" >= "at least one". If google tells people where their problems are, google will be playing whack a mole for eternity. There are contractors/services that should be able to help them/anyone, google is not one of them.
ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
my hash brown recipe doesn't involve eggs.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Er..... Google is a Public company, not a private company. Big difference there. Also, if they claim to do no evil - the anthesis of evil is good. So if they know where the problem is, it would be *good* for them to help out and point the site admin at the problem area. Right?
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
I'm responding to the post above mine, which was responding to the use of the word "creationist" in the article. Even though you didn't notice that post, however, you might have clued in to the fact that I was quoting by my copious use of italics.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I thought you could buy shares in Google if you have an extra $500 laying around. Doesn't that make it a public company?
I does seem to me that when google sold itself for all those billions, it traded the money for some public input.
In this case, it doesn't seem that it would have been that hard to have sent an email explaining the problem to the webmaster.
Sometimes replies don't hit their intended targets :)
Funny, nowhere does it say that Google has any obligation to inform people of where broken links are. Chances are its an automatic piece of software that decides whether a site can be indexed or not; what makes you think that the *reason* that it can't be indexed (let alone exactly where the problem is) is recorded anywhere for lookup?
You really need to look up exactly what the definition of "Public Utility" is. Google doesn't qualify.
Can't you people see that you ought to get a clue as to what socialism is before spouting crap like that?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
This was quite obviously the work of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
What's stopping the spider from returning the page on which a problem was encountered?
I am not a number - I am a free man!
I think the whole problem here is the way the guy is carrying out his campaign. He has a legitimate issue, but he is taking things out of turn. He could have started with a very apologetic pleading like "I'm very sorry this happened, and I know it usually takes two weeks, but I believe this site is important for public education, particularly at this time of year, could you please re-index my site?" You know, try and ply them with a little sugar.
Instead he explodes with a "OMGosh, Google is dishonest, you guys won't communicate with us, why are you haters!" Well, okay, that's not a direct quote, but...
He has a legitimate axe to grind, he is just doing it in the wrong order. Get the site re-indexed FIRST, then start a debate about the methods used. Doing both at the same time colors the debate as a whine fest, which I am positive is not intended. (I read TOA all the time, good stuff in there)
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
With the index sizes that are being collected by search engines these days (on the order of 10 billion entries), it's completely naive to think that some humans are sitting at a terminal choosing to delist websites for some policy reason or other. It's also completely naive to think that a human email monkey can do any sort of digging to find out the exact reason that Google's automated algorithm has censored this particular site.
Instead, Google's engineers have automated algorithms which do all the censorship, and the policy is just there as a thin cover for whatever the algorithm happens to be doing today. It's worse of course, because 1) algorithms change every few months and 2) there's simply no comprehensive way to test the quality of the implementation.
Anyone who's programmed a nontrivial algorithm knows that obscure edge cases are a bitch, and with 10 billion websites, any algorithm will have plenty of obscure edge cases which nobody has ever tested, nor ever will. The most likely explanation is that the website in TFA is a false positive of some subsystem, but fixing it will require changes to the algorithms, and Google don't want to risk that, would you? The problem will probably go away in a few months when the algorithms are scheduled to be updated.
The problem with there motto is it isn't "Only do good." Just because your not evil, doesn't mean your good.
What if instead of evil they decided to be bad, reckless... or whatever else that might be considered negative?
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
Look for the webmaster's email address on the pages, assume it's webmaster@domain.com or try root@domain.com? All these could bounce or simply disappear. Should Google put the effort into finding out who the webmaster really is?
Nothing is stopping it but if it were my spider, I'd program it to stop when it hit an error so it wouldn't waste time and processor power to spirder pages I wasn't going to index anyway. I think indexing a site you've already "caught" as spam or non-indexable is a waste of resources.
When you can substitute the word "kind" or "nice" for "good" then you're not really looking at the "antithesis of evil"... more like the antithesis of mean. They're implying that their actions should be Good Things with their motto, i.e. things that are for the betterment of everybody (not just a single website).
Don't get me wrong, I completely agree. It would be a very good thing for them to explain why a site has been de-listed. But that's not really the kind of good implied by "do no evil" (or "don't be evil" - I can never remember).
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
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With security mechanisms like that, it doesn't take much to get around them if the mechanism provides automated feedback.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
It might be good, but my point is that Google doesn't have to... and maybe shouldn't.
To some extent, part of Google's ability to foil bad website behavior relies on security through obscurity. If Google doesn't tell or hint to anyone how the cheat-detecting algorithms work... well, isn't that good for Google?
I could make the argument that since (as you argued) Google is a public company, they have to do what's best for the shareholders by doing what's best for Google. But that is an irrelevant argument, since there's really only three people whose opinions on the subject matter.
If Google ever did do something along the lines of what you're proposing, they'd have to put a lot of time & effort into setting up a system that can't be easily abused by link spammers, is easy to use for idiots, etc etc etc.
That may be more trouble than it is worth, compared to saying "not our problem, deal with it yourself."
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
> Google is at war with search engine spammers. When google de-lists somebody for spamming their search engine, if they gave a specific reason why then all the spammers would do is tweak their spam farm and be up and running in a couple of hours.
Security through obscurity is no security at all. The spammers already know Google's weaknesses -- that's why there's so much spam everywhere.
My other car is first.
Let's face it. It's all a vast right wing conspiracy by fundamentalist Christians to remove any website that counters their beliefs... either that or it's simple Google policy and posting this story was a waste of everyone's time and only served to try and stir up debate.
It's not like google is running his board or that he is paying google to debug his site.
I felt like making some silly comment about how lost the site is with out creationism and science.
Without either the site couldn't exist, or at least there would be nothing to "talk" about.
Some paradoxs:
We have science and use it to do things, to create things. Someday we may have the know how to create a galaxy and care for it lie a farmer does his crop. To inject life and help mold it to a conscious life from. But what would hat life form believe? Creationism, that they can never be such creator we have become? Maybe they would rather develope science and learn how to.
One cannot exist without the other.
Right to life vs. freedome of choice is another paradox exposed by a starving child who doesn't seem to have the freedome of choice to eat some food and there for will lose his right to life. Imagin all teh children that could have been feed, clothed, taught, given shelter and medicine with all the resources that have been wasted in the arguement....
People who something for themselves can sometime take advantage of something symbotic by falsely splitting it to create a public arguement that sells their book or presence, wins them an election, etc..
.
Imagine then that Google automates the process with an email to the registered domain owner with enough techincal information that they can narrow it down to which page causes the problem, and why.
Imagine then that they add an automated "Please retest my page" setup where the webmaster can submit their updated website for validation. This would be necessary given the large volume of webpages being delisted and re-added daily.
Now imagine a spammer can set up pages using different scamming techniques, wait til google delists them, and then tweak the page until it gets accepted again. Whamo, Google's SPAM catching Al-Gore-ithms become useless overnight. SPAMMERS have an automated system for finding flaws in Google's code and exploiting them basically as soon as they are updated.
This is why Google delisting is purposely somewhat vague. The assumption is that most of the pages being delisted deserve it, and I'm sure for 99% of the time they are right. Flipping the system around to make things easier for the 1% would generate way more work for them. Hey the SPAMMERS ruin it for everyone, they should be strung up by their short and curlies.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Am I missing something?
Yes, you are missing the conspiracy theory. There is always a conspiracy man.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
People may be treating Google as a public utility, but Google (a private company) has absolutely no obligations to any website.
PG&E is a public company. ComEd is a public company. Verizon is a public company. AT&T is a public company. They're all public utilities. Simply being a publicly traded for profit corporation doesn't mean that you're not a public utility.
Ultimately, Google* has the right to change the rules when & if they please, in an arbitrary fashion, without consulting anyone.
Yes, but there is something called ethics. Google is held to a higher standard than the Ackbar and Jeff's Falafel and Oil Change Hut because of their unique position of being depended on by hunderds of millions of people the worldwide. Also, Google said they should be held to a higher standard with their "Don't be Evil" slogan.
Did Google act wrong in this case? No. But that doesn't mean that your larger point about corporations are beholden to no one is valid.
You're missing the point. The article mentions that the webmaster got this message: No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines. Please review our webmaster guidelines and modify your site so that it meets those guidelines. Once your site meets our guidelines, you can request reinclusion and we'll evaluate your site. Which insinuates that there is a blacklist somewhere which contains talkorigins.org. It would not be a big deal to add an additional field to that listing which would allow for the following improved message: No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines on http://www.talkorigins.org/index.html (and possibly elsewhere). Please review our webmaster guidelines and modify your site so that it meets those guidelines. Once your site meets our guidelines, you can request reinclusion and we'll evaluate your site. See? Sure, it would be "easier", but a useful feature is still a useful feature, and this is one that would be easy to implement.
I am not a number - I am a free man!
If the site was blacklisted because of spam links on a specific page, they can just say that. They don't need to list every single violation. Once the webmaster checks out that page, he can fix that and fairly easily search his whole site for similar problems. If you have a big site you have no idea what to look for or where to start otherwise. As it happens, the guy was reasonably lucky in that the links were on the home page...
Here is why they were de-listed...
http://www.uncommondescent.com/archives/1830
Karma? Sorry, i don't believe in superstition. http://talk.thinkingmatters.org.nz
Calling Google a 'Public Utility' has some consequences. If you accept that they are this 'public good,' then you're implicitly accepting that they are responsible to the people to keep it running, the state can intravene, etc. Maybe you don't take it that far, who knows. But this poster refers to de-indexing a spamming site without providing a reason as 'not aboveboard behaviour for a $157B company.' This would seem to imply that they did something wrong, right? And should be held accountable? Again, maybe he doesn't go that far, but do you see how absurd this becomes? Under this line of reasoning, if Google should be held accountable for de-indexing a site the indexing of which would taint their search results, then he's claiming that society should control their means of production. The only thing they produce is an across-the-boards excellent search engine. At least to any profit.
This reeks of socialism. I felt the tone of the post tended more towards 'this sort of thing should be illegal.' Maybe it just meant 'we should dislike them greatly for this.' In that case, I still feel it was ignorance, because they have to protect the search rankings. I love them because they help me search, not because they help this guy keep his traffic flowing until he lets his forums get overrun with tainted data.
So you choose, socialist or ignorant. But you have to see how it seems socialist if he meant the former.
-knewter
Google hasn't told the webmaster why he was de-listed, but the webmaster could have found out why if he had used google's free webmasters tools.
/. filters).
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
A similar thing happened to our site, google de-listed us although we used to rank first in our category and first in Google's results, but once we got de-listed a little investigation on the webmasters tools clearly showed that google was perceiving us as a porn site and a phishing site -- among other things (things that I probably can't say here because of
It listed the offending keywords and the ranking for those keywords, with those keywords and some careful search -- we were able to find the problem pages. In some cases, it even listed the paths to folders and files that had been uploaded to our site. This is not to say we weren't pissed by the de-listing, we were, we were really pissed, and it took us may be 8 months for google to relist us and completely push us back to the top of the search results, but the situation is not as desperate and as dire as it may seem.
Yawn. All your post demonstrates is that sometimes, suicide really is the answer.
It is just the natural evolution of things. These guys act like some devine intervention came about and made google and all it's joys therefore creating a right for them to exist somewere. (pun intended)
Google has no Obligations outside what it publicly and contractualy claim to have. And if it seems neccesary to change those obligations, then be it.
The complaint can really be translated to: Something happened outside my control and the site was hacked, then ran against some other site's rules and I'm pissed because that other site didn't tell me were to start looking to fix my site. As it turns out, that omission was a godsend because it not only made them verify thier code, It made them not gloss over the fact that someone or something hacked them and something else needed to be done. Maybe this is just a curse of using a microsoft server or maybe it some prankster who achived a goal. Maybe in the end, thier site and services will be up longer, more acurate to how they wish it to be viewed as well as actualy saying what they wish it to say. You could easily sneak a few words in their articles to make them look completly insane and remove any influence over the reader that they were wishing to leave.
In my opinion, Google has done them a favor. They should look at the bright side of it instead of having a "you mean i had to work?" additude.
It's worth noting that Google is not the only search engine out there, and anyone else is free to start their own. Google is nothing special. So, no, it's not a public utility, nor Yahoo, nor anyone else out there for that matter. They're all privately-held companies, offering a service to anyone who visits them, who, if they persist in being complete fucktards, can and will be removed from the market by a competing operation, existing or yet-to-be-born.
The only issue here is that they didn't tell the guy what he needed to know to fix the problem, and perhaps that they took their time relisting him. Focus on that.
AFAIK, It's not Google's job to point out the problems in others website.
Google was completely in the right to de-list them.
"Some men just want to watch the world burn..."
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You sir are a fucking idiot! Damn this place gets worse and worse by the day... digg here I come.
Or at least like a particular ex of mine... (I know -- I shouldn't generalize)
/.ers and girlfriends...
"If you don't know what you did wrong, I'm not going to tell you!"
cue jokes about
Ian Ameline
what does being a private company have to do with ethical standards? i'm a private citizen, and as such, i'm legally allowed to act like a douche, but that doesn't change how those actions reflect on my character.
If Verizon is treated like a public utility even though it is a publicly traded company then so is Google based on its basic role. Just because it is part of the internet and a relatively new concept doesn't mean it isn't a utility.
Google have a set of http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ tools for webmasters. essencially it give out every diagnostic needed to fix your site for Google. Additionaly you have statistics for searches and how GoogleBot see your site. So, you shouldn't blame until you googled for the answer! Searching for "Google index tool" shows up "Google Webmaster Central"...
I recently had several sites that I host find their way into Google hell. I wrote a small 15 line Perl script (using File::Find) to hunt thru thousands of pages and return all url patterns.
:{
Filtered out local domains and found easily found the problem with a run away forum that spammer zeroed in. Looks like they were also using a Perl script
They had uploaded over 3000 links - the bastards.
He mentions that it's impossible to get any human response, phone or email. Unless you're buddies with Sergei, forget making personal appeals. Most big companies are like that, I once sent about 10 emails to Yahoo trying to work out a problem with my email account (which I pay then for, not a free account). I never got any response except links to irrelevant FAQ pages. Never one human being would give me their name to follow up.
What if you went through airport security and instead of saying "you can't carry that penknife on board" they just said "you have something forbidden"? When I code an error message into a piece of software I don't just say "You did something wrong" I know what the cause of the error is so I tell them.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
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i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
Why would a company want to be responsible for "your lost revenue" because you cannot administer a site to their terms of service guidlines? If the spider stops after finding the "first falt" and the dumbasses only fix the reported page, it could be a long time before they index the entire site to declare the problems with every page. I know a girl right now who does website design. She is being sued because she started building a ecommerce site and the customer decided he wanted it all done in flash. She told him she couldn't do it in flash because she didn't know how to tie her comerce programs into it. After insisting on it, she refunded his money and said be gone, he is now in litigation for lost revenue from a site that never existed. So i'm sure someoen would start with the "you didn't tell me about pages X-Y so you own me for down time".
This doesn't even begin to address the fact that google wouldn't have been able to tell them the site was hacked (which is ultimatly the case here). What kind of liability would they face if they said this page violates this agreement but fails to mention it was because of a cracker/hacker then the site gets defaced later or worse yet get it's credit card infor harvested? It just opens too many doors. If it doesn't agree with their terms then they delist it and the person ultimatly responcible for the site needs to find whats wrong with it in their own.
Okay, Mister Pithy Quote. Exactly how would you suggest Google securely authenticate every web page on the Internet, not for identity, but for intent?
A snappy quote is no substitute for thought. You can quote me on that.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
A site gets delisted by google.
Then scores a slashdot homepage link.
How do I keep track of people who are fingering
Really. Google has no obligation to anyone but its shareholders. You can start calling google evil when it pulls a microsoft and says "Redhat, install us as your default search engine and delete yahoo from your computers or we'll de-list your site".
In some countries a woman is stoned for not wearing a tent. Welcome to America.
/. you know how this argument applies to ID. Where the problem arises is trying to dress up 'faith' as 'science', as if science could threaten faith, and constantly moving the goal posts when the arguments crumble. I think people are justifiably wary when faith moves into the secular realm. One man's heresy is another man's pop song.
> String theory is an attempt to unify various theories under one umbrella but it unfortunately is not testable and hinges of the existence of dark matter and dark energy.
String theory is not testable so far and certainly disprovable. As it is disprovable, it is a valid scientific theory. If you read
> Too much of the so-called "science" we see today is nothing more than new age philosophy combined with pseudo-science.
If you include string theory in the above statement you don't do mathematics. Wrong, possibly, new age philosophy, no (.. well, maybe, whatever floats your boat).
>science was merely a study of how things work, not why we are here or whether there is a good.
I'd take issue with the 'merely' but other than that what's your point? Does string theory address why we are here? (it may try to redefine 'here' but that's a different issue)
> I am a theist who views the science of today with a sceptical eye and only trusts theories which have observable proofs that do no depend upon other assumptions.
Good luck with that. See: Godel. Also, as a 'theist', are you differentiating between 'new age philosophy' and 'old age philosophy'? Curious where that goes.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Crusaders aren't generally known for being level-headed.
What, exactly, is so insidious about Christmas? Really? I haven't even seen a manger scene this year yet. Does the Christmas season really fire up them fundamentalists? Or is that Easter, or Halloween?
Sorry. Your blatant Christians-are-all-stupid-idiots attitude was a bit too much for lil' ol' me.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Sites don't violate policies. Only humans violate policies. Until the sites are AIs, anyway.
What the site owner did was run a site that was hackable, and it was hacked to include bad links. I don't know if Google's policy includes "Run a secure site" but if not, the site owner didn't violate it. The black hats did.
Google has worded it in a way that you could accept as true, that the "site" violated policies (at the behest of unauthorized parties) and not me.
Of course, Google's policy of not revealing the algorithms they use to spot search engine spam is regretable, but I understand why they do it. Security through obscurity is always tempting. In this sort of case it may even make sense.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
with no guidance as to what the problem was and nothing at all about where to start looking...
So you're a web master and you don't know how to check if the content you're mastering is OK. We clearly have to redefine the word master .
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
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This is strange. I got a crappy spamvertisement from google recently with an expired adwords offer. ;)
After I thanked them for the offer, I received an apology from a real person and an extension of the offer
I.e. they are not only very selective about what to answer to and what not to, they also appear to have the technology to filter through requests pretty efficiently.
They just won't bother with the "crap" that doesn't bring money directly. Whether a site is a benefit to the public or not isn't at all important.
This is a google cache of talkorgins.org showing the porn spam links.
However, I checked on deepx.com and it is *not* a porn site.
From DeepX.com's about page:
XML provides an open and flexible language for the creation, management and exchange of electronic content. Founded in 2000, deepX has an experienced team of consultants and developers, who specialise in the design and development of solutions using XML and the emerging technologies related to XML.
Also, another link shows www.theoi.com and it is *not* a porn site, either:
Here's how THEOI used to look via the Wayback machine.
Theoi.com has been banned by Google (no reason given) and forced to close down as a result. There are no plans to re-establish this site in the future.
wu.edu.gh is Valley View University is a Seventh Day Adventist college in Ghana.
Both deepx.com and wu.edu.gh redirect to porn sites.
Unsurprisingly, wu.edu.gh, theoi.com and deepx.com have been de-indexed by google.
I speculate that all these sites that have been de-indexed were tagged by automated processes.
I think the whole problem here is the way the guy is carrying out his campaign. He has a legitimate issue, but he is taking things out of turn. He could have started with a very apologetic pleading like "I'm very sorry this happened, and I know it usually takes two weeks, but I believe this site is important for public education, particularly at this time of year, could you please re-index my site?" You know, try and ply them with a little sugar.
Instead he explodes with a "OMGosh, Google is dishonest, you guys won't communicate with us, why are you haters!" Well, okay, that's not a direct quote, but...
Yea, in fact it's not a quote at all, and you just felt it's better to completely make it up and make conclusions based on a situation you just imagined yourself.
That makes sense.
Maybe this is just a curse of being a zealot who couldn't be bothered with the ten seconds needed to see the talkorigins site is an Apache/Linux combo?
Netcraft is your friend.
It's funny how the Google apologists are always around on Slashdot to defend Google's (a private company) right to screw anyone, never mind their virtual monopoly on the search engine market, but Microsoft (a private company) is supposed to pay millions of dollars to EU and cripple their own products so some other (really shitty) private company, like Real Networks, may benefit from the outcome.
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This needs to be said, as a deeply religious person and an engineer I find both sides of this debate need to get some perspective. The way the article summary was being worded made it sound like the fact that this was an anti-creationist site had something to do with google de-listing it. That's just plain silly! They did something wrong and hopefully now they fixed it. People on both sides of this debate keep getting bent out of shape, thinking everyone is out to get them.
The role of science is to observe the world and draw conclusions from those observations. Both the big bang and evolution theories are wonderful examples that to the best of our understanding try to explain how the world began, and that is exactly where they should stay. At the same time religion or in my case Christianity answers the questions for why the universe began and what our purpose is for living in it.
There are a lot of misguided people out there that try to push ID as science, and I feel sorry for them. If someone is going to look towards ID they will find they are trying to use the supernatural world to study the natural world. Not something that fits.
At the same time any pseudo-scientist that tries to answer the questions of original causation of the universe (why did the universe start) or the immortality of the human soul is merely employing another cleverly disguised religion with it's own set of beliefs. The existence of God can not be proven with science, since by definition God exists outside of time and the natural world. Even the ardent denial of God's existence is a religious belief of its own requiring faith in something un-provable.
Basically, this "so called" webmaster wanted free consulting from Google. I don't think so. My personal response would have been, "I'll be happy to supply you with the information you request. It will, however, cost you my standard consulting rate of $xx/hour, two hour minimum."
Only friends and family get free computer help from me, but I'm rethinking that policy since I spent half a day cleaning the malware off my brother's computer during the last family holiday. He probably won't ask me to do it again, though. When he asked how his system got so infected, I answered (in front of the entire family), "You got infected from all those lesbian porn sites you've been visiting."
-- Will program for bandwidth
Instead he explodes with a "OMGosh, Google is dishonest...
He has a legitimate axe to grind, he is just doing it in the wrong order. Get the site re-indexed FIRST, then start a debate about the methods used. Doing both at the same time colors the debate as a whine fest, which I am positive is not intended.
He attempted communication with Google. He audited the site. He fixed the problem. He went through the process to have the site reindexed. He sent Google feedback on the process.
Then he wrote a personal blog entry about the experience. What could he have done in a different order? What could he have done to avoid accusations of whining and crybaby (the current story tag) besides not have the great and mighty Slashdot notice his blog?
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So is Firefox's web developer toolbar extension ;).
I may be a little outdated but last I checked, ASP was an active server page that runs on microsoft's IIS.
Didn't know apache does ASP now. Cool!!
Yea, I couldn't be bothered with 10 seconds becsause i spent all of 20 seconds reading the FTA.
But how is this google exploiting there monopoly status?
Well, maybe because they think google is right? :-) People here are arguing that google should be more verbose about reason. But from my point of view google was polite to tell the administrator about de-listing (I think google has no obligation to do so) and we can only discuss the way of this message, but not to blame them about sending it.
OK, I'll bite. The problem: How does Google avoid delisting "well known" sites with valid content. Talk Origins is an example of such a site.
/. but with narrow criteria, "Is this site actually about what users directed to it are searching for?" Reviewers should be given the words and phrases which lead to search results which in turn lead to the site under review.
Google should whitelist certain sites if they meet a few criteria.
First off, it should be a valid site listed on Google for a "reasonable" period of time. Second, it should come up as a valid result for a "large" number of searches on relevant terms. Please note terms in quotations which Google could set to arbitrary values in order to make the whitelist manageable.
If there are other useful tests that can easily be automated or found by DB query insert them here.
Last someone at Google should be informed that a site has met the automatic criteria for whitelisting. A human should check it out, and if it appears to be a valid site etc etc. It is whitelisted probationally. 6 month human review... then a review only if there are complaints or if there is a problem leading to technical disqualification. These human reviews should be spread around the company so that employees that sit at a desk with net access might be asked to check out a site or two. Sort of like moderating on
There are a lot of sites that Google could readily whitelist, like CNN, Yahoo, Google itself, Microsoft, Apple, Wikipedia... you get the point. A site like Talk Origins should fall into this category pretty quickly.
This is a relatively safe practice because spammers would have to post sites that had a long life on Google's index, attracted users searching for it, and passed two human checks. This is manageable because a very small percentage of sites fall into this category. Many if not all of these would be more profitable as legitmate sites than link farms.
First stab at the issue with just a few seconds of thought. I'll let the people getting paid figure out the sordid details. (You know like how do you verify adult sites for inclusion in the listings at work?)
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
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In Australia for many years the privately held power companies had an excellent time of it -- egregious anticompetitive behaviour including cross-state price fixing on a grand scale. Look up the name "NEMMCO" for a history. It's interesting, although not terribly pretty, and not a part of our history I'm proud of.
The result of all this unconstrained trading (Oooh... the power! The Power!) did not escape the notice of the people though and regulations were written. This is what turned a number of private companies into a public utility (oddly looked after by a private company, but hey, that's Australia!).
The point I'm turning here is that Google has a huge amount of influence, and a subtle but potentially catastrophic and unbalanced control over what is seen by a segment of the population that is nearly planetary in scope. If they don't adhere closely to their "Don't be evil!" motto then they will have regulations written to constrain them.
I'm utterly convinced that this would be a bad thing, too -- I believe that Google and other search engines are the equivalent of a free press and should forever remain apart from government control -- but not all control. The best newspapers were those that knew when to tell the government to go to hell, and would stand up for their principles and their customers and content providers.
Note that word -- it's a biggie. Principles. Google has one, and it's the main reason why I've chosen to use them in preference to others. If Yahoo or Alta Vista or others of that ilk copy it (is imitation always so bad?) then perhaps I'll be more eclectic in my choices. But a free press still matters to me, and a free Internet. And the Internet is one very, very big book to try to get through without an index. "Don't be evil" is simple and unambiguious -- you might differ in what's evil and what isn't, but you'd always be able to go back to that simple statement and measure your behaviour against it. In the long run, it just might be enough to keep Google a force for good, and out of the clutches of the regulators -- if they mean it, and if they keep their self-control.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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password: ******
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You can also try one of the following non-root accounts:
1. admin (8 character password)
2. backup (6 character password, all lowercase letters)
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Failing that, if you can't remember any passwords this server is located at 1234 Main Street, Anywhere, USA. The server rack key is located in the desk drawer on the second floor in the manager's office. You can boot with a Knoppix CD (inside the rack) and reset the password after mounting the hard drive.
Often, helpfulness is at odds with security.
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>I cannot fathom why scientific community did not go back to the drawing board to create
>a model that fit the known universe rather than inventing fanciful things such as dark
>matter and dark energy.
>Too much of the so-called "science" we see today is nothing more than new age
>philosophy combined with pseudo-science.
>....trusts theories which have observable proofs that do no depend upon other assumptions.
Now the rebuttal:
I shall start at the bottom, as this is where you are going wrong. Most important i feel is the term "observable proof". What is an "observable proof"? Does this mean you only trust things you can see? If so, simple concepts such as soap and disinfectant are beyond the science you wish to grasp. All modern medicine depends on things you can't see. The computer with which you wrote this opinion depends on utilises many phenomena you can't see, most imortantly electricity, semi-conduction and magnetism. These also require some of your "assumptions" in their explanation.
So what does "observable proof" mean? I hope it doesn't mean "something which can be explained to ME in a way that I understand".
Modern science is not "new age philosophy combined with pseudo-science". This is simply plain wrong. Modern science builds on the work that has gone before, and modern scientists go to great lengths to ensure that the work they do extends this (this can include the evolution/rejection of previous theories as well as the development of new ones). And this means being aware of, and understanding, the work which has gone before and the concepts on which it is based. You don't learn this by magic - it's damn hard work. Throwing out a previous theory and starting again is unimaginably difficult, which is why it is rarely done (as it may take a lifetime) and is generally achieved by those we term "genius".
The confusion you have on this point can probably be placed (at least in part) on the desire for science to be more accessible to the general public. We are increasingly surrounded by a lot of stuff we don't understand, and we want to know more about it. The problem is, by the time the scientists have come up with an approximate explanation that YOU can understand, and then the media has turned it into a 30 second piece that the blonde reporter can understand, it starts to look a bit shabby. But believe me, if the real science was anything like the stuff you see in the media, you'll be lucky if the sun comes up tomorrow.
And on to the final (or first, by your order) point. "I cannot fathom why scientific community....". I think the first three words of this explain the problem. There is no shame in not understanding something, but you should be careful in the dissemination of your ignorance - you would not want your work criticised by someone who knows nothing about it, and nor do the scientists that you are accusing of charlatanism.
Google has been up front with where their loyalties lie in the search engine business: With the user. They got big and continue to be big because the give results that the search users are looking for. In general, this means the links they present are on the topic queried for and on the basis of links from other sites the content has been "rated" useful.
If a site is designed ( or screwed up ) such that it shows as a result to a query when inappropriate, delivers spam, or ranks higher than the content would warrant, and Google still presents it as a search result, then Google has failed their customer.
Webmasters are not their customers, individuals who are searching are. Ethics says that you give your customers what you promised them. Ethics says you live up to what your stockholders expect by doing what you told them you do: Delivering search results that keep your customers coming back ( and serving them up ads each time ).
These companies were all given special monopoly privileges by the force of government. They can run wires, pipes, and other items through your property without your consent, by law. They are required to provide service to all persons in their scope of operation by law. No such law exists regarding Google Inc. and they are not a utility.
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
This is how google does business
I used to work on a site that had this happen. It ends up that past practices from the company led to the penalty and delisting. Unfortunately, google will not tell you exactly what you are doing wrong.
It pretty much led to the demise of the company. Sales plummeted so far that the investor pulled the plug. We did actually end up fixing the issue and relisted but the damage was done. (amongst other problems the company had...wasn't only google that did them in)
There really should be a tool provided by google that tests your site and tells you if and what it finds wrong. You would think this would be easy considering the code already exists.
Perhaps it could even just be a tool provided only to advertisers.
Relegion has to be removed.
Spam of this type is hard to detect. My blog get's hammerd by spam bots, in my blog case they use the comment system. Thankfully I have a good spam filter. As for Talk Origins there site must have had a flaw in it setting or some exsploid that defected there site. It problay was a automatic bot that did this, crackers leave there signature behind, normally (usally always).
Well, maybe because they think google is right? :-)
And I thought law is standing on its own, but I guess it applies selectively depending on whether you're "right".
I also think it's "right" that Windows should ship with a browser and media player, but who cares.
I wonder how many people agitated over the de-indexing of Talk.Origins would be very happy that Creation as an alternate theory of origins be barred from being taught along-side the theory of evolution in public schools.
If you are going to call Creation a theory, you presumably have some testable evidence for that.
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> At the same time any pseudo-scientist that tries to answer the questions of original causation of the universe (why did the universe start) or the immortality of the human soul is merely employing another cleverly disguised religion with it's own set of beliefs.
And where does this happen? I missed the 'string theory proves there is no God' paper. While I agree that the article summary may have been trolling somewhat, history (and current events see: Richard Leakey vs African church) is covered with examples of faith, or should I say secular opportunists exploiting faith, attempting to dictate to science. ID is attempting to employ the big lie process to do battle with science. Repeat and shout, uncertainty, doupt. Repeat. Clergy are often involved in telling their flocks, of whatever denomination or faith, how to think about various subjects.
the revenue brought into google by having his site indexed, was considerably lower than the cost of having a google employee investigating his problem and givin him a site-audit.
Weird, eh?
> Exactly how would you suggest Google securely authenticate every web page on the Internet, not for identity, but for intent?
:) That's Google's job to figure out -- blacklisting random sites doesn't help anyone, and it hurts Google's credibility (which is what 100% of their income is based on).
If I knew, I'd write my own search engine and kill Google -- not post it to a slashdot discussion. However, I don't know
My other car is first.
Going on the market puts some control of the company into the hands of shareholders, not the general public. Become a shareholder, then you can have a say and ask for a nice, friendly email.
I love my sig.
It's funny how the Google apologists are always around on Slashdot to defend Google's (a private company) right to screw anyone, ...
It's also funny how the Google haters are also here to throw stones at every little perceived problem with how Google works. It's funny how they also seem to use Google a lot, despite of them. I wonder why that is. Could it be that Google does what they want it to do? And, is it Google's problem that so many sites have come to the conclusion that their very existence is tied to their Google page rank? If you do not like how Google works, don't use them, and use your site's robots.txt file to exclude them from indexing your site. The more people who use other search engines, the less "power" Google (or any other search engine) has over "the market".
In this particular case, Google gave the webmaster sufficient information to discover the problem. If it wasn't enough for "other honest webmasters", then they aren't particularly competent, in my opinion, which would tend to affect how I felt about their information being relevant, too. A lot of people spend a lot of effort trying to scam their way to the top of the page ranks. And it looks like Google is spending a lot of effort to keep the game "honest".
Google has no stake in my using their service, other than wanting to display advertising to me, just like a TV or radio station. Given that the website in question here is not a paid advertiser on Google, I don't see where they have a responsibility to do anything special for them. Their responsibility is to make money for their stockholders, the same as any other corporation. Their "niche" for doing this is to sell advertising that is displayed to people who willingly come to their site. Their way of making people come to their site willingly is to index pages in as "honest" a way as they can figure out to do. Refusing to index a particular site for dishonest links, whether intentional by the owner or not, makes them more desirable to most of their users.
And a few dozen people bitching about it in a front page story on Slashdot doesn't hurt, either.
Personally I don't mind if Google delists websites which list tricks to fool them. I also don't want Google to give a list to these people which of the hacks on the site where detected by Google. As in, a note which hack still work in Google. People who try to trick Google into promoting there website don't get my sympathy. I understand that this website has been changed because of lacking security rather then an actually evil webmaster but how is Google to know the difference?
I'm happy to have a search engine that works and because it's algorithms are unknown also has a good ranking system with little to no spam websites in there.
My freeware games
Google claims to act in a moral way, and then they proceed to act in an (to many people) immoral way. If they want to claim they're following their own morals. That's their prerogative. Just as its mine to claim "bullshit" when they claim not to be evil. Google is welcome to disagree with me, just as I'm free to come to slashdot and tell others what I think of their actions.
I find Google's behaviour appalling, but not very surprising.
Except that evolution != atheism. In fact Wesley Elsberry (one of the people involved in the TO archive) is a Christian. Nor is evolution some sort of worldview or lifestyle, it is simply a description of something that occurs in nature, not a manifesto on how one should live. Naturalistic fallacy, is does not mean ought, yadda yadda, and all that.
When Google doesn't work (which it often does), I use Yahoo. I also tend to get better results depending on the search subject.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
> I enjoy slashdot, usually, but the rabid religion-hating mobs that pool their ignorance really ruin it at time imo.
Sounds like you're confusing "creationist pseudoscience" with "religion".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If talk.origin should get whitelisted, the list may not be as short as you think. The problem lies not in the initial proces, the problem is that websites are not books. You can't say "This one's ok, lets whitelist it until the end of times." Webiste change, so when you go around whitelisting sites you need to check up on them once in a while, which will turn in to a huge investment, for something which should really sort itself out.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
> There are a lot of hypocrites on that site. They claim that religious people are closed minded while completely ignoring anything the other side presents out of hand.
Can you call our attention to any creationist claims that have ever been made on talk.origins that didn't deserve to be dismissed out of hand?
> This blind faith in popular theories is not just restricted to theoretical physics but also appears in the biological sciences as well. Science is supposed to be a tool for discovery. It is not supposed to supply the meaning of life
Biology is no more concerned with the meaning of life than geology or meteorology is.
It's just that some peoples' world views are threatened by the facts that biology has uncovered.
> or delve into things which are best left to philosophers and theologians given our current state of technology.
I don't know of any question best left to philosophers and theologians. If it's not supported by evidence, it's just someone's opinion.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What's to stop them putting their fingers in another pie?
What way would an automated crawler like Google have to contact a site owner when they have delisted him?
The admin should have gotten an account at Google. Then he could look in the statistics and see why things are wrong.
Have a peek over at the forums at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint, SearchEngineWatch, or any number of other webmaster related sites. This happens all the time. It is an issue that webmasters have had to deal with for some time now. Google at least provides some input for you if you can be bothered to register a sitemap with them.
Google has several billion pages in their index, and a significant portion of them are spam. Their business model relies on them having internal methods of dealing with web spam and it is not feasible or desirable for them to produce a list of violations to each and every person who runs afoul of their algorithms.
This is far from the most popular or important site this has happened to. Wordpress was delisted, as was BMW, Syndic8, and many others. This guy is using the controversial nature of his subject matter in an attempt to draw more attention. Get in line buddy, there is a long list of people whining all over the web about the same thing. Are you more important because the word Christianity is loosely affiliated with your site? Nope.
Do a little googling yourself and you can pretty easily figure out how to resolve the problem. It takes some time, and there are ways to accelerate the process. If you are that reliant on Google, it is time to start participating in some webmaster communities and figure out how to play ball with the Search Engines. Just like everybody else.
Consider yourself educated.
v4sw6HPU$hw5ln6pr5$ck4ma8u7LMO$w2m6l7DL$i2e3t4MWb9AHKMRTen5a29s0r1p-5.88/-8.36g5CST
It's fair and accurate. Creationism is pseudoscience, and talk.origins exposes (and refutes) it.
What's the problem?
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Virtual monopoly?
I call bullshit. A monopoly is a company that uses it's status to push competitors out of business.
Google is not a monopoly, plain and simple... it is more like a trend. For now, they are at the top of the market. In the past, Yahoo, Webcrawler, and Altavista have all held the same position. At any given point, this can change.
Google has every right to treat their customers like shit, and likewise, their customers have every right to get their product elsewhere. There are other search engines out there, and you are more than welcome to use them. Personally, I use a variety of search engines depending on what I am looking for.
I wish people would get their basic facts correct before spouting off. At this point there are no monopolies in the Search engine business, it is a completely free and very competitive market. Instead of pointing your finger and crying monopoly just because you don't like what your preferred product does, be a consumer... switch products.
Make America grate again!
If you dig deeper, it turns out that Google emailed talkorigins.org to alert the site that it had been hacked and was stuffed with rape and animal porn spam. Google's head of webspam has posted a full write-up.
"People may be treating Google as a public utility, but Google (a private company) has absolutely no obligations to any website."
Actualy Google is a Public company (though with a dodgy share structure)
Thats part of the problem google faces some companies (normaly those in monopoly positions or thos that are politicaly sensative) do get treated as public utility (phone companys's for example)
Google will some day (within 4-5 years) - be looking at an antitrust lawsuit
You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim
But if they tell the webmaster, who might be cheating, (remember, a lot of the exploits out there are actually used by the webmaster) where the problem is, then the cheating webmaster only has to get rid of one exploit and gains insight into the detection methods employed by Google. Then he can leave all the others in place. Wouldn't it be fair to say that the people doing evil is, well, the exploitive webmasters?
Don't hit reply yet...I know this guy was honest, but how in the hell could Google possibly tell who is legit and who is not? Google can't hope to be "fair," only just.
An important change for education.
I would say that a monopoly on the search engine market is different than a monopoly on the OS/browser market. It's not like people don't have a choice to type in www.google.com or www.yahoo.com.
It's just that Google is that much better.
hacking for spam is EVIL. letting hackers in is plain stupid. not telling the exact problem is evil.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
The only reason this article appeared on the /. is because crusaders against creationism (rightfully) suffered (for the reasons unrelated to the content), and the viciously atheistic vigilante crowd of alarmists started to moan and moarn. The /. editors smelled the opportunity to add some hits (why? /. is very popular without this sensationalism).
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
People may be treating Google as a public utility, but Google (a private company) has absolutely no obligations to any website.
and
Ultimately, Google* has the right to change the rules when & if they please, in an arbitrary fashion, without consulting anyone.
*When I say "Google" I mean "the guys who own a majority stake in the company and cannot be overruled"
Somehow I would think that's quite troubling given their background. Corporate deification immediately comes to mind when I think of Google. That is, companies are allowed to act without any practical bounds other than "getting caught". If they do get caught, they hide behind the vanguard of "private entity" and bring up small business if they're about to be hit with something effective. If it is indeed effective, they attempt to circumvent it or leave in a way most damaging to the region.
In other words, stop treating companies like they're $DEITY on earth and that they can do evil at will with no practical consequences.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I thought you could buy shares in Google if you have an extra $500 laying around. Doesn't that make it a public company?
I does seem to me that when google sold itself for all those billions, it traded the money for some public input.
That public input is only meaningful if there is any meaning to the 1/10th class shares. If there is a regulation prohibiting such structures without penalty based on how difficult it is to check the power of the company, and how well said shareholders betray the smallest defined consumer there would be some meaning. Other than that, the folks from Stanford Labs Inc. just act like they're transparent but are completely as opaque as a country club.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
So, if evolutionary theory is correct, it seems to have favoured a line of cry babies. There's evidence against, if ever there was any.
I suppose he could be a mutant....and his predecessors are all non-cry babies.
Max.
in their website. But if you wait a million years, Google's algorithm could randomly change.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Nope, you are right. I can even understand why Google would be careful about disclosing details, as that could be systematically used to deduct their criteria/algorithm.
I call bullshit. A monopoly is a company that uses it's status to push competitors out of business.
And I call "you need a dictionary". The term monopoly suggests complete or near-complete ownership of a market and implies nothing at all about behavior. It's perfectly possible to have a benevolent monopoly, one that doesn't push competitors out of business or in any way abuse its power. Of course, we can assume power will corrupt, eventually. But it's not part of the definition.
And I think it's pretty reasonable to call google a monopoly or nearly a monopoly.
I know nothing about asp but what I see it as is: the asp got from the server, therefore asp is not running. That is not a good why of determining whether it is IIS or appache
My Transformation Website
Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
Interactive CYOA http://www.catprog.org/st
After seeing the headlines, I popped "talk.origins" into my Google search bar and got "trueorigin.org." Which claims to "Expose the myth of Evolution."
WHAT THE FUCK.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
They can run wires, pipes, and other items through your property without your consent, by law
Um, actually, no they can't. They can run wires, pipes, etc. through a utility right-of-way if it crosses your property (which is usually provided for in your deed), but for any other use they have to get your permission and compensate you accordingly.
Their "public utility" status does not give them any rights of trespass otherwise.
Google is in competition with other search engines and also trying to stay on top of black hat SEO and SEM people. If Google gave away their secrets then more people would exploit their search engine. There are hundreds of other search engines and directories that a site can be listed on. If you can't get on Google, then always try to get on the others.
Can I bum a sig?
Oh please....
Google's head of webspam has posted a full write-up [mattcutts.com].
Read this first and then step up to the plate. They e-mailed and also let him know via well established channels. If the guy uses sloppy code and lets a spammer cause him to be delisted its his problem.
He aint missing jack! You are!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Well, by delisting a website, thus cutting it off from billions of potential "customers" and then providing no means on how to get back.
It would be the same as Microsoft stopping an application from running under windows.
I disagree this is what's happened but that would be what's being implied by the ancestor posts.
It would be the same as Microsoft stopping an application from running under windows.
Which would be an entirely appropriate response if said application was a virus.
Google isn't obligated to tell him why and if you don't like it you're not obligated to use Google.
Easily done. Not all religion is creationism, but all creationism is religion.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Maybe you should check your facts. Your site was hacked (see some of the URLs posted on your site),
"http:........animal-sex">animal sex
"http:........dvd covers">dvd covers
"http:.....dvd-ripper">dvd ripper
And you didn't respond to any of Google's emails on 11/27 or 11/28.
In fact, "publicly owned" essentially means "owned by the government"; "publicly traded" means "you can buy and sell shares in it".
(Disclaimer: IANAE)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
'How shall we decorate the walls in the Department of Philosophy and Theology?' would seem to qualify.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I salute you grimjester.
"What's the problem?" said Lunkwill.
"I'll tell you what the problem is mate," said Majikthise, "demarcation, that's the problem!"
"We demand," yelled Vroomfondel, "that demarcation may or may not be the problem!"
"You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?"
"That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
That's the stupidest thing I've heard in a while. Whitelisting? Are you crazy? Blindly trusting content?
Never, I repeat, never, whitelist anyone for anything on the internet. Everyone and everything should be considered unsafe and all mitigation techniques should apply to everything. If I've learned one thing from managing email for the past 10 years, being responsible for trillions of deliveries (current job @ 50m/day), I've learned that whitelisting is normally a kludge. The risk of whitelisting far, far, far outweighs the reward.
So wrong. Electric, gas and hardwire local phone companies are public utilities, and regulated as such, because they are monopolies condoned by government. The reason that they are condoned is because it would be completely inefficient to have duplicate infrastructures, which is what a competing company would have to implement. Furthermore, there is no way for a competing company to enter the same market as a public utility, because of the insane cost of building that infrastructure.
Oil companies are more like public utilities, in that society would founder without them. However, there is competition in that market; I can buy my gasoline from Shell or BP or Thornton's or anywhere I like. Hence, oil companies are not regulated as public utilities.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
I didn't know the law is posting it's thoughts on Slashdot, or the slashdoters do represent the law? If yes, you are right :-)
This whole article assumes that Google exists for the convenience of websites -- it doesn't. Google exists for the convenience of USERS who, as a group, view advertisers' paid links. As a user, I don't give a shit if Google notifies website owners about their reasons for delisting.
Security through obscurity is no security at all.
As a security principle this statement is just plain wrong. Obscurity is one of the few ways to secure things online. What special attribute does your password have that allows it to protect your computer? Only the fact that it is obscure. Obscurity of a system or mechanism itself is also often used to greatly increase security: steganography is one example. Such methods have their own downsides, but saying that obscurity is not a path to security is not correct.
I don't agree to your second premise, "The universe began to exist." I define the universe as everything that ever exists. That's not just the current set of matter but also time itself and the rules that govern its physical evolution.
If something happened before the Big Bang -- a Big Crunch of a previous set of matter, or a spark ignited by some entity -- then that is all part of the universe. Anything that interacts with the universe is part of the universe. The claim that some entity is timeless is equivalent to the claim that the universe is timeless. Those claims are either both absurd or both reasonable.
I think that you are confused in your statement that it's "no longer scientifically plausible" for the universe to have no begininning. That seems like a reference to the scientific discovery that galaxies are moving apart as space expands. That discovery means that it's implausible for the distribution of matter to be static and eternal. It says nothing about the source of matter or the timelessness of the laws of physics.
AlpineR
The assumption that google "knows" where the problems are is based on a probably false assumption. Many times these algorithms use merely ranking and automated inspection.
Google has billions of pages indexed, there isn't enough time or manpower to have humans inspect pages. Even if they could elevate to a human, google could not possibly inspect for every domain.
The truth is that the webmaster let his site get hacked, Google delisted the site to protect the integrity of its product. It is the responsibility of the WEBMASTER to protect the integrity of their site. He may complain that he has to assume "guilt" (He doen't really, he merely has to affirm he has corrected the problems and believes that there are no more.) The problem is he IS guilty of being a bad admin that allowed someone to hack his site, and he wants to blaim google and not himself.
How is this a misuse of Google's hypothetical monopoly status? Are they trying to leverage their search monopoly to eliminate competitors with their new, highly profitable, evolution discussion site, GOrigins? I must have missed that.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
ah, the ol' macro/micro evolution loophole eh?
it is creationist nonsense about splitting hairs and moving goal-posts.
utter. total. worthless. drivel.
Nothing to see there. Move along.
If Google revealed the core techniques used by its index to filter out hacked pages, then it would be effectively making those techniques useless. Its the same reason Microsoft and Firefox have not told the world how its anti-phishing features work, even if you have a domain that appears erroneously as phished. Its also the same reason that only dozens Google employees REALLY know how AdSense works. We know it depends on the context of the page, but clearly there is more to it (this confirmed by an Google employee friend of mine who is under NDA; could noy say more).
Its security through obscurity, sure... A valid form of security when the goal is to prolong discovery of methods until new ones are in place.
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
If the consequences of repeatedly failing the airport screening were simply that you have to go through it again and again, it would be immediately obvious that providing a complete error message would be a disaster:
"you can't carry that penknife on board"
(ditches penknife, tries again)
"you can't carry that belt-buckle-knife on board"
(ditches belt-buckle knife, tries again)...
Clearly you aren't Ken Thompson.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I know what the cause of the error is so I tell them.
Tell who? I don't recall specifically registering with Google to have them crawl my site. Who should Google contact about a website?
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
One might argue that it's in Google's best interest to help out sites like this, that are clearly not just spammers trying to game the system. OTOH, preferential treatment might expose them to legal liability. Much better to treat everyone exactly the same, and keep mum on your actions as much as possible.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Dear Al Qaida Cell,
Please accept this letter as notification that your group visitors permit has been rejected on security grounds. Just to help you out, please accept the following pointers on how we spotted you and where you slipped up;
- The name. Bit of a give away.
- You tried to hide your funding sources, but, oopsie, you forgot that the mail address of your main bank account is the same as another account security forces froze last week.
If you want to try again, fixing the above problems, we may miss you next time and let you enter the country.
Please, if you want to know anything more about how we check these things, just drop us a line and we'll happily share it with you. As an agency we are always happy to discuss security matters. Remember, security through obscurity is no security at all!
Yours,
Homeland Security
Too bad it must be one of only those two choices, and there's no possibility of any kind of other option.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
But you do that now. They tell you to pass through the metal detector a few times, scan you, have you give up items until you clear. What is the difference?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
WHOIS on www.paulmischler.com:
Administrative Contact:
Mischler, Paul mischlep@gmail.com
398 Barton Run Blvd
#A
Marlton, New Jersey 08053
United States
Every domain must have a valid, public accessible, contact email available in the WHOIS database.
One qualm I have with everyone's thoughts about how the universe "began" is that any concept of "beginning" or "end" MUST imply time's existence and if you are also talking about the beginning of time progression in the context of the Universe's "beginning" then technically there might NOT have been a "beginning" per se simply because there was no timeframe to put a "beginning" in... or?
What you're missing is that Google gave him no clue/hint/guide/comment/help on why he was delisted. Just tossed him off, left it to him to discover that this had happened in the first place, left it to him to figure out (guess) what the problem might be, and then only relisted him after they got around to it.
So, the guys site got hacked/modified and Goolge gave him the boot because whatever was modified, was classified as a potential cheat by Google. His site was still available on the internet, just not referenced by Google.
The site owner closing line in the linked articel:
As I said in my post to the Google Webmaster Help group, the Google policy of obscuring de-indexing decisions is harmful.
I completely disagree.
Google's main business is providing useful and reliable search results. The game of cat and mouse with search engine tricks, spam reduction, spyware, viruses, adware etc is never ending betwwen those that want it and those that do not. Google gains an edge by elimating sites that do not follow some guideline. Users of Google search results get better results when Google elimates sites that do not play by their rules. Describing exactly what and where the offending material would be a great benefit to the bad guys as well. They could fine tune their practices to find out what does and does not trigger Googles defense systems.
So yeah, it sucks if your site is delisted but it also sucks when your site was hacked. It sucks for all of Google search engine users to have to wade though bogus results as well. It would also suck for Google (no business benefit) to spend time and personal resources with every single site operator that has a delisting issue. I'm sure every single one of the people that called the Google delisting hotline would deny they did anything on purpose and they would all claim they were hacked. Google personal (or anyone for that matter) doesn't know the site operator at all and has no idea if he/she is telling the truth or not. So now if Google opens up a hotline for these delisted people, they are now giving an advantage to the crooked people AND Google would be wasting even more of their time and money helping them get around the filters.
I'm all for Googles decision on this one.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
They link back (in the Index to Creationist Claims) to the original site that made the claim, and on the main ICC page, they link to the rebuttal at CreationWiki.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
What you've suggested is pretty well thought out - but it would still fail. If you set any static criteria for determining what is spam and what is not then you can't win. The spammers have almost infinite patience to jump through hoops placed in front of them. Whitelsting stable sites will just mean that spammers park domains for 6-12 months before turning them into link farms. Sites that come up as valid results for large numbers of queries are keyword farms - these were really common when Altavista was the dominant search engine. Human verification is not possible - Google would need 1000s of times more staff to implement that. Their entire business model is based on automating the tasks in providing search.
We had a speaker from Google give a talk at work a couple of weeks back and he made a really interesting comment. Google would *love* to publish the criteria that they use for detecting spam but they can't because they would lose the game. If somebody could come up with a Cryptographic protocol for a detection method that they could use publically - with a proof that the spammers couldn't game it - they would pick it up instantly. They're not into security through obscurity, but at the moment this method is the best that they have.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
How many slashes would a slashdot dot, if a slashdot could dot slashes?
Airport security can presumably tell the difference between innocent and not-so-innocent infractions.
Google can't do this 100% of the time, so any information they give to an offender *might* be just what that offender needs in order to slip through more effectively next time.
I hope this gets fixed soon. Because now when you search for talk.origins the first thing that pops up is true.origins. www.trueorigin.com which I won't link to. They are a bunch of willfully ignorant creationists. Sorry that was redundant.
Anyway, here's the proper link http://www.talkorigins.org/ if you can't find it with google. I occassionally use other search engines like AllTheWeb if I can't find what I'm looking for with google.
And there's nothing on the Talk.origins news page about the delisting.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Well once again, I don't agree with the conclusion, merely defining what it was.
That said, "Supported Software" is interesting in your case. Because there's two ways I can see to read that.
a) All software that claims to work in windows, which includes viruses and malware.
b) All software MS says works on windows, which includes only what they say it does.
Neither in this case seems to apply.
Plus you've got it a little sideways. If I use the Google search engine I "expect to get the results from all sites". If they're excluding sites for no stated reason then that could be read as antitrust.
Dogmatic atheism, eh? ICC to the rescue!
CA602. "Evolution is atheistic."
And related.
CA602.1. "Darwin made it easy to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist."
CA602.2. "Scientists aim to make God unnecessary."
That sort of thing would tend to work againt your claim, wouldn't it?
If you'll look in the ICC under "CB: Biology", you'll notice that the responses to claims which actually say something about biology tend to reference mainstream peer-reviewed research. Unless (random example) you're saying that (a) Darwin's original The Origin of Species, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Biological Sciences and Current Biology are fringe-science publications which have nothing to do with accepted evolution theory.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
These aren't conflicting usages, despite what it looks like.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Atheists are no more anti-god than they are anti-Invisible Pink Unicorn. They may be anti-religion on numerous grounds, but this doesn't make them anti-god. Whether or not religious people consider atheists their enemies is irrelevant.
The anti-god people are maltheists--"God exists but he's a bastard." An excellent work of maltheist fiction is Preacher, in nine illustrated volumes, with grievous head wounds every few pages.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
PG&E has a regional monopoly. ComEd has a regional monopoly. Verizon has a regional monopoly. AT&T has a regional monopoly. Being a company that provides a service to the public isn't what makes you a public utility.
Just in case anyone thinks SubtleNuance was engaging in pointless stone-throwing, that the evolutionists are running and hiding from this stunning logic, and that the word 'microevolution' is meaningful...
CB902. "Microevolution is distinct from macroevolution."
It's possible that SubtleNuance was jumping down the throat of someone just trying to respond to the grandparent on their own terms. No offense intended, in that case.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
No true Scotsman.
For extra points, try to prevent the same person from denouncing Communism by claiming that no true Communist would establish a reign of Stalinist terror, etc.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Don't hit reply yet...I know this guy was honest, but how in the hell could Google possibly tell who is legit and who is not? Google can't hope to be "fair," only just.
There's a couple of sides to examine. Enumerated they are:
1. Webmaster/Website
2. Google
3. Cracker/Spammer
And each of them have several types of interest:
1. has an interest in:
a. providing their service to the internet community (information)
b. maintaining a good reputation among the internet community
2. has an interest in:
a. providing the best search results by:
1. making sure the good sites (high reputation) are listed
2. making sure the bad sites (low rep) are de-listed
b. maintaining a good reputation among the internet community
3. has an interest in:
a. making money off of people through whatever means necessary including fraud and misuse of resources that don't belong to them
b. learning about the defense mechanisms of websites and search engines to exploit them for 3a.
Now, 1 needs to be sure that their resources are protected. A big part of having a successful website is high reputation. For that reason alone they should be willing and able to police themselves.
2 also has an interest in 1 policing themselves but even more in making sure that 1 has (legitimately) and keeps a high reputation
3 wants neither to be the case
Based on this, 1 and 2 have a symbiotic relationship so long as neither bites the hand of the other. 3 has a parasitic relationship with both.
By using a decay-factor algorithm against the content of 1, 2 can provide them with reputation-aware analysis via their extant sitemaps program and webmaster tools (freely available). In return 1 provides 2 with an accurate site-wide snapshot to assist in crawling their site for indexing. Both can work for better relationships with one another in an effort to lock 3 out in the cold to freeze to death.
Which monopoly was that?
If you take the Bible as metaphor, you can make it square with reality pretty easily. It's the inerrantist position ("god made with world in six days, and my grampa weren't no monkey neither!") which is so easy to poke holes in.
For instance, Lev. 11:20-23, referring to locusts as having four legs. Psa. 93:1, referring to the Earth as immobile. Gen. 1:6-7, referring to the sky as a great big dome (which god walks around on, see Job 22:14), above which there are "waters".
Of course, this all makes sense as metaphor. But it's mighty hard for someone to claim that the Bible is (a) literally true, and (b) without error, and square it with this sort of thing.
As for the rest of your defense against the notion that Christianity is evil because it's done evil things (which no one here mentioned, by the way), I'd like to add that Communism is not evil because you can't judge it by Stalin and Mao (who were, after all, just men); the Thuggee cult was not evil, National Socialism wasn't evil, the Manson Family wasn't evil, and I'm sure I could go on. If we can't judge a system of thought by its fruits, what can we judge it by?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Please find me a four-legged locust. (Lev. 11:20-23) And no, you can't make it yourself by tearing the legs off an existing one.
Please demonstrate how the sky is a "dome" with "waters" above it (Gen. 1:6-7), with god walking around on top (Job 22:14). Don't forget to mention how the Apollo missions managed to break through said dome, and what happened to the falling pieces.
Please explain why you think the earth is immobile. (Psa 93:1) Make sure you explain how stars and distant galaxies can zoom around at speeds far in excess of c as they orbit us.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You missed the point about social pressures and the like. I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you were brought up Christian, in a largely Christian nation, in a Christian community. What a coincidence that you would turn out Christian. Do you think that if you were brought up Hindu, in a largely Hindu nation, in a Hindu community, you would feel just as strongly about your Hinduism? Can you explain your belief, however deeply felt, as being completely independent of your upbringing?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
...narrow minded. Sorry for being blunt, but your "black" and "white" analysis is so flawed it staggers the mind. Yours is the viewpoint of a child, or at least early adolecent.
The universe is. We haven't lived long enough to piece together all the of the puzzle. So far, all the "data" seem to indicate that earlier in history the universe was "hotter" than it is now. It also appears that all the objects in the universe (sans the local group and virgo) seem to be running away from each other (the doppler effect). But we've only been in analysis of this data for less than 100 years. That span of time is but "half the blink of an eye" (metaphor).
You can't make something from nothing. It is impossible, it violates logic. No being, no matter how powerful can do that. The universe has "always existed", it has just changed forms? True, because the word "universe" includes everything that exists...it is "defined" that way. If an intelligence created the universe then the intelligence is part of the universe.
Whether it is oscillatory or not is up for debate. Whether it is steady state or not is up for debate. Whether we live in a black hole is up for debate. Whether the universe was created is up for debate. Whether the universe was created by an alien intelligence is up for debate. Whether we ourselves end up creating universes (and are the aliens) is up for debate.
As for "god", where does that "fit" into anything. What "god" are you talking about. What is a "god". We don't know what the word "GOD" stands for. The three letters "G", "O", and "D" strung together have no intrinsic meaning that everyone can agree on. Your god is not my god. Your god is bigger, faster, stronger, leaner, meaner, infinite this, omnipotent that... What the xell are you talking about? The mere concept of gods are for people with tiny little heads.
-1
You should feel special. You come here and whine that Christian creationism isn't regarded as equal in value to current biology, and then whine about being modded down.
I don't see anyone showing up on every thread that has to do with physics demanding that Slashdot provide equal time for Nature's Harmonious Simultanous Four Dimensional Time Cube, then whining about it when they get modded down--despite not having any more reason for their mystical blatherings than you do, with the exception of "but our mystical blatherings are popular!".
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I beg to differ. Political Correctness is a systematic Orwellian torturing of the language under the guise of civility, when it has nothing whatsoever to do with that. A label of "vertically challenged" is just so much meaningless noise if I continue to think less of you, and treat you worse, for being short.
Manners and civility are the grease that make the make the machinery of society go forth. PC puts the focus on word choice rather than intent, and is sand in the gears.
"Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
My, someone has their feathers in a ruffle. Considering, for me, that'd be a very unwise attitude to take.
But if you really want to debate this: Most of my fellow Christians are "Christians of convenience." That is, they only go to church services around Christmas, Easter, or when they stole some old lady's social security check, when it seems proper and convenient. I guess a little is better than none, however, many pastors are fond of misguidedly instructing their flock about evolution. They themselves don't understand what they are talking about and they spread the misinformation. TOA is the best place to get answers about what current mainstream evolution theory actually has to say about all the things which might be said in an anti-evolution sermon.
I'm not anti-Christian, I'm anti-anti-intellectual. It embarrasses us all when some pastor declares to his congregation that even Charles Darwin recanted evolution theory on his deathbed, or that all the genes of the eye must evolve before any of them are useful.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
No, actually, I read his thread on google groups about it. Did you?
I don't think his intention is to whine, but it certainly comes off that way.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
By your own definition, (complete or near-complete ownership of a market) I think it's unreasonable to call Google a Monopoly.
Perhaps while your flipping through your dictionary, you should look up Tunnel Vision... There are other companies out there with a significant part of the market share.
Make America grate again!
Did you read his thread on Google groups? I'm not speaking just about his blog entry, I'm talking about the entirety of what was done.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
There are two kinds of faith: faith in things which cannot be disproven, and faith in things which have been disproven. You fail to distinguish between the two. I'm afraid that I'm going to have to take ten points off your grade, which means that you will fail the course. Sorry.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Has anyone called anyone a nazi yet?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
I see you logged into slashdot with your slashdot password. If you never whitelist anying, how can you trust that this site is really slashdot? If it has a SSL cert, how can you trust the CA? How can you trust the algorithm? How can you trust your eyes?
Whitelisting is a fine idea. "Trust until someone complains" is a great model in the real world.
My other car is first.
While I agree that the write-up's use of "pseudoscience" was meant to be flamebait, pseudoscience most certainly has an objective definition, and it doesn't involve the assumption that science is whatever the majority says. Science by definition is a set of theories built up inductively from empirical evidence based on the scientific method, which states that any new model must be falsifiable and better represent available data than the old model does, with a general preference for simplicity and logic.
Pseudoscience is anything masquerading as science which does not fit this definition. "Pseudo" comes from Greek and means fake or false. It's really fairly logical.
Religion is not pseudoscience by definition, because most religious people know full well that religion and science are not the same thing and in fact attempt to explain fundamentally different concepts. This is why, for example, many of the world's greatest scientific minds have been devoutly religious and have seen no contradiction in this. However, when one attempts to equate science and religion, or advance religious explanations as competing scientific theories, the use of the word pseudoscience becomes appropriate.
In the case of "creationist science" (their term, not mine) you have an explanation that fails to qualify as science on many different levels. This does not mean you shouldn't believe in it, but it's important to recognise that you are accepting it as an article of faith -- faith being the definining center of most religion. When you attempt to make creationism into science by suggesting it as a competing theory for (in this case) the origin of man and animals, you are, as per the scientific method, suggesting that it is a better theory than evolution for the data we have, and that it is falsifiable. It is not falsifiable, evidently. The religious man sees Genesis as canon, and does not question its veracity -- but questioning the veracity of anything, including evolution, is at the heart of science. Ultimately, science cannot address the existence or non-existence of God, because there is no evidence either way. In fact, taking the leap of faith, accepting Jesus as your Lord and Saviour, well, these things are sort of central to the Christian experience. In my mind -- and I am admittedly not a fundamentalist -- if God's existance were scientifically verifiable, no reversal of the original sin would truly be possible. But that's theology, not science.
Remember too, and this is important, the questions that science and religion aim to address. They are not the same, and it is wise not to conflate them. Science addresses the how, and never the why -- by science's very nature, asking why will always lead to an infinite regression, and so scientists avoid asking why, and limit themselves instead to how. Science is misrepresented to the layman by the media in this respect, which is why I think there is often so much conflict between spirituality and science. For example, when Newton developed his theory of gravitation, and when Einstein later refined it, these men (religious, both of them) were not asking "why" does the apple fall or the earth rotate the sun, but rather they were explaining "how", quantitatively, such a thing occured, and how one could go about predicting it. The why, well, that's a much more difficult question. If you think on this a moment, you'll realise that saying "Two objects are attracted to each other by a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them" does not in anyway explain "why" this effect exists. Indeed, science cannot explain why gravity exists, or why we exist, or what our role is, or how we fit into the greater cosmic plan, or if there is such a plan.
Taking evolution, the person who answers "Why are we here" with "Because we evolved from apes" has misunderstood the question. His answer, at best, explains how the human species came to be, but even then, it explains only the last ste
The latest in cutting edge technology. I mean apache::asp has only been around since 1998.
Yea, I couldn't be bothered with 10 seconds becsause i spent all of 20 seconds reading the FTA.
And in the finest Slashdot tradition you not only felt you had enough information to write a response, but one that had a snarky dig at Microsoft and the hacked site's webmaster. Sadly, that does make you a mainstream member of the Slashdot community.
Skim through the comments here. Skim through the comments at the Wesley's linked blog. Note the overwhelming percentage of snippy, self-righteous, insulting, condescending, and throroughly unhelpful entries. Now, follow the trail to the blog of the employee in charge of the Google webspam team: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-google-handles-h acked-sites/
There is a blog discussion there on the same topic covered by Slashdot and Wesley's blog. Note the information level of comments in a nonSlashdotted forum. Note the civil discourse. Note an evolving conversation which makes actual progress toward beneficial understanding. I quote the last entry by Google employee Matt Cutts:
And for the record, I agree with Wesley. Our alerting process is better than other search engines, but it's still not where (I personally believe) it should be. It's from hearing complaints and feedback like in Wesley's post that Google can prioritize what things need to be done next.
Holy fucking Christ on a Stick! Foam at the mouth much? Your level of cognitive dissonance must be completely overwhelming all sense of rationality.
Honest webmaster you may be, but it was your site among millions that was hacked -- it is not Google's responsibility to provide tech support to each of those sites. You got hacked, you fix it. Google is not a public agency, and you don't pay them for their services, so they have exactly zero liability to you.
Strange, That site says it uses perl to create ASP pages. Would "hidden in ASP code" and not "perl code" mean they are running windows?
As far as i know, apache doesn't run ASP, It uses perl to implement ASP. Or am I missing something here?
You haven't actually made a distinction. People have a choice in operating systems, browsers, and search engines.
The monopoly status conveyed upon Microsoft was more about business practices. The choices presented through competition are and were plentiful.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
And I'm sure your a well versed in perl and ASP and consider them one in the same. Wich of course makes you a more acurate slashdoter. Sorry my not understanding that PERL==ASP and being non-disputable evidence of "looking threw ASP code" intending to mean Perl code on a Apache::ASP implementation.
And your point is what- look past all the flames to the one conversation with a professional response team and someone looking to gain something from them and see how much more civilized it is? Duhh.. Thats a no brainer, For one, people aren't likely to make risky statements when they are representing their company _and_ expect to keep their job. Two, When someone is wanting something from someone, they tend to present things differently then in a general discussion that they are only participating in for comment value. Do you see a difference here?
And the snippy comment? that hilarious. First, he was using ASP not Perl on apache to simulate ASP. Or at least thats what he claimed. Second, he claimed to have been hacked and only found that when Google de-listed his site and forced him to look threw the pages source. Instead of seeing this as a "good thing we caught this before too much damage was done" situation he insists on complaining that Google didn't hold his hand and tell him what to fix. It could be that he might not have ever noticed that "someone hacked him" if Google didn't take this approach. I see it as Google doing him a favor not making him do extra work. But maybe if there wasn't an aversion to doing extra work in the first place, he would have noticed his server has been cracked before Google took an action.
Back to the Microsoft comments. Last I heard, there wasn't an automated worm/virus/malware going around and infecting Apache or Zeus web servers and their underlying operating systems. Of course they could be ran on Microsoft's OSes so use some common sense when interpreting that. But you see, the difference between running Microsoft servers directly on the internet and running an alternative is how you watch over it. IMHO Microsoft servers take much more time and effort then a BSD or Linux flavor. You need to check the logs constantly and need to look at things others then "is it working". A well trained sysadmin likely would have caught the intrusion before Google took an action to tell him something was wrong. But there again i may be wrong. I though Google was a search engine, It could very well be an intrusion detection system for all I know.
Even if google only knew of one thing that got the talk.origins webmaster removed from the list, they could have easily included it in the email. What if google had made a mistake? Wouldn't it be reasonable for them to explain why they delisted the webmaster in that case?
Also, is it lazy to ask that when someone could have easily included the page in an email? Worst case scendario, we're talking about copying-and-pasting, or (yank-and-put if they use VIM). The most likely scenario is that they could accomplish their goals by modifying a form letter.
It's not like we're asking them to do anything difficult, like answer a phone, or give out trade secrets...
I don't blindly trust /., or even the domain name. I just use a username & password that I couldn't care less about getting out. Low risk, low return. S
SSL certs lend a little more trustworthiness, though by no means do I check them every time. I do make sure they're there, though. If I didn't take the risk (i.e. bank transfers, balance checks, paying cell bill, etc.), things would take a lot more time and effort on my end. To me, the risk is worth the return in that area.
With algorithms and eyes, you're going a bit outside of the scope I defined with the internet. The potential for abuse for whitelisting a search result is very high (msn's homepage could be compromised, company could get disingenous and ruin things for a while, etc), and doesn't really solve the problem we're trying to fix. It's just an ugly duct tape kludge that will ultimately cause more problems than it will fix. What are you gonna do? Hire thousands of people to whitelist and de-whitelist people all day long? Some search engine. Now it's biased on your employee's definitions of spammy.
Whitelist is the last place you want to go with this issue. This is essentially the same thing that's happening between spammers and mail admins, and we know explicit whitelists don't work there, and that's a larger scale "service" than web.
Then there's the "euphamism treadmill", mocked on Saturday Night Live in a "Glory" (US Civil War movie) skit, with Sinbad claiming, in response to the "n word", "We prefer the more respectable 'boy'."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You erroneously presume the socialist concept of "the public" as synonymous with "government". In fact, government ownership of items being "public ownership" derives from the concept of common people owning it, and is not the master of the concept.
Ironically, in a more deeply philosophical sense, governmental "the public" ownership is arguably less public, given government is actually just another conglomeration of people exercising "might makes right", and a coercive existence is hardly the free-based nature of voluntary ownership.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
ASP is not a language. It is a glorified wrapper, or a "server-side scripting environment" according to Microsoft.
It usually contains VBScript when used on IIS, but can also contain JScript, and yes, even Perl.
On Apache, as you've already learnt, it can contain Perl if using Apache::ASP, or VBScript/JScript if using Chillisoft IIRC, although it's been a while since I looked.
v4sw6HPU$hw5ln6pr5$ck4ma8u7LMO$w2m6l7DL$i2e3t4MWb9AHKMRTen5a29s0r1p-5.88/-8.36g5CST
So ASP.net would then a be collection of these languages bundled to take advantage of the dotnet framework.
It is get much clearer now..lol So would there ever be an accurate description of "going threw the ASP code" to mean anything non generic?
Can you see that even though I thought i understood what he was saying, what I think it meant wasn't what he said.
ASP.NET is the .NET version of ASP - ie. you can use any of the .NET languages, AFAIK.
The point of .NET is that it's non-language specific, so you can use VBScript, VB.NET, C#, etc etc. ASP's still the wrapper though.
I am not a Microsoftie by any means, so I'm sure there's more to it than that.
But yes, most people would assume "ASP" referred to "VBScript in an ASP wrapper". Just wanted to point out that this isn't always the case though.
v4sw6HPU$hw5ln6pr5$ck4ma8u7LMO$w2m6l7DL$i2e3t4MWb9AHKMRTen5a29s0r1p-5.88/-8.36g5CST
Google has the right to do whatever it wants with its own search engine. If it were a government run search engine, you could say otherwise, but it's not. Google doesn't have to index a website, for no reason if it wishes. They're a company and companies have those rights. Google is not responsible for damages to the website it's not indexing, why should it?
It's just the same as a bar tender refusing to serve beer to someone who looks under age, or someone who's too drunk already. If said drunkard doesn't get laid that night, too bad, ain't the bar tender's fault.
Ah, that definition of PC... yes, I agree wholeheartedly. As a literature guy, I view that definition of PC as equivalent to corp-speak or legalese; unnecessary rubbish intended to stifle communication as a way of sneaking past all of our hard won societal lessons on greed and personal agendas.
Moving away from the language definition (which is the only one neocons want you to think about, BTW), there is also a more reasonable (though somewhat more vague) version which, while related, isn't focused on obfuscation. Specifically, the underlying concept that all voices deserve to be heard, all views respected in their own right (respect != belief or acceptance), and that consideration needs to be made with regards to fixing the problems caused by prejudice. Part of this is that we try to avoid needlessly insulting others, but if it just ends there it's not really what I would call politically correct.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
The problem is that "why" is not necessarily a valid question to ask. It assumes that there is reason when there may not be one at all.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
And, yes, I did deliberately misread your sentence.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I think that if you find a socialist undertone to that, you're looking too hard for something that's not actually there.
/. is populated by libertarians who view anything to do with portraying socialism in a positive light as a horrific sin and who haven't thought over their political philosophy of choice to see the evident flaws (seriously, there are TONS in libertarianism, let's start with "lack of anti-monopoly laws" and I'll let you do the thinking from there) this post will either get ignored or marked down viciously by teenagers who honestly think that switching to some extreme form of government will actually fix anything.
Besides which, what is wrong with socialism? America, in particular, needs to move more towards socialism, IMO, there's a balance between capitalism and socialism to be struck, and America's way too far towards the capitalism side. Also, note that I use the phrase socalist rather than communist (there is a difference) and capitalist rather than libertarian. Once you get to the point where you can call your society communist or libertarian accurately, your society is more or less screwed.
But of course, because
I don't know, I think that any question is valid. It's just that some questions don't have answers (or at least, answers we can verify.) I personally don't care much about why we're here, nor do I care much about whether there's a god or not. But some people do. I think it's important to respect them enough to allow them to ask such questions.
In addition, PZ Myers has a pretty fascinating account of how chromosome counts change over time, by a mechanism called Robersonian translocation, an instance of which is described above. One in 900 humans has one of these, and (from the Wikipedia):
I used to wonder about this, too, and was quite pleased when the explanation was this interesting.
So: (a) chromosome number can change without any change in the actual complement of genetic material carried around. (b) It happens all the time.
Happy to help!
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You seem to have gotten somewhat bogged down in definitions of exactly what the scientific method entails. I think this is a losing strategy, because it's frankly a bit complicated, it's counterintuitive that you can never really be absolutely certain of anything, and epistomology is boring.
You might want to say that common descent is accepted to the same level of confidence as, say, universal gravitation (not "things fall down", but rather, "the force that makes the planets orbit the sun is the same as that which makes an apple fall"), or the germ theory of disease, or special relativity, or plate tectonics. If your creationist is claiming that we can't really know evolution is true, he's right, but then, we can't really know any of those things as well; they're just the best theory we have right now.
Also, a good source you may be interested in is talk.origins's Index to Creationist Claims, which has explanations about some of your creationist's points. (See CB901 "macroevolution has never been observed", and CB902 "macroevolution is distinct from microevolution", for starters.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'm not sure what you're asking for. I showed you evidence that two chimp chromosomes were tacked together to make one human chromosome. I pointed out the mechanism by which a reduction in chromosome count occurs, and that it actually occurs with surprising frequency. (Though, and I'm reading between the lines of the article here, so I may be very wrong, the mutation is usually not passed on because two people with the same mutation don't usually breed, and viable offspring between a mutant and a non-mutant won't carry it.) Also, the mutation isn't a split, as you put it, but rather a fusion of two chromosomes.
The probabilities you're asking for are in the the article I linked to, as well as in the parent post. Are you sure that you're actually reading? I don't understand what you're asking for that I didn't provide, and that wasn't covered in the linked discussion. If there's something you don't understand, the Wikipedia Reference Desk is usually a good place to start.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Go ahead and read the article and the follow-up comments; any explanation I give here won't be nearly as good, because I'm not a biologist--whatever I know, I got from there. If you still have questions, you might want to try the Wikipedia science desk; they've answered all sorts of questions for me, including whether or not I should risk eating some expired meatloaf. (Seriously!)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I can't really read those diagrams (as I said, I'm not a biologist) besides being able to tell that the black and white bars indicate some sort of pattern that matches up between the chimp and human chromosomes, and that the pinched parts are centromeres. There are a lot of numbers on each side, and while I'm sure they mean something, I haven't a clue what. (I also don't know what you mean by "ended in 2"; there are a lot of 2's in that graphic.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Well, yes, I'm convinced by the gross structure of the diagram without knowing what the three levels of numbers written around the chromosome diagram mean. As I said, I don't understand the details of it, but the gross structure makes a blindingly good case for the origin of chromosome 2. I don't think I ever represented myself as knowing anything more than that. You're nitpicking, in that the object of your contention has little to nothing to do with the point you're debating. I'm not convinced by the little numbers, and never said I was; I'm convinced by the large, honkingly obvious black and white stripes. (These show up when you use Giemsa staining in the process of making a karyotype, which is a diagram of an organism's chromosomes. Photograph here.)
Also, you have a pretty odd atheist friend; I know a number of atheists, and they've invariably said the opposite of what yours did. Was there context to that?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca