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Following In Bing's Footsteps, Yahoo! and Flickr Censor Porn In India
bhagwad writes "Following recent news on how Bing decided sex was too sensitive for India, Yahoo! and its associated site Flickr have decided to do the same. While it's true that this is because of India passing laws that prohibit the publication of porn, no complaint was ever launched (and never will be), and glorious Google still continues to return accurate and unbiased results. So why is Yahoo! doing this? Is it because of its tie-up with Bing? I assume this is the case. Indian ISPs have already told the government and the courts that it's not their job to restrict porn and it's technologically infeasible too. In the absence of a complaint, I can only assume that Yahoo! has decided to do this of their own volition. Given that the 'sex' search term is searched more in India than in any other country, isn't it the duty of Yahoo! to provide accurate results to its customers? It can always plausibly deny control of its results and claim that filtering porn is infeasible. Since Yahoo! already has a low search market share in India, this will drive it even lower."
Bing!
Given that the 'sex' search term is searched more in India than in any other country... Based on population, I can only assume that India, at number 2 aspires to overtake China.
Clearly, if you have to google "sex", you already know what it is.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Remember when the Internet was all porn (1994)? Yeah, it's really gone downhill since then...
Shh.
No no, the summary contains paranoid Microsoft bashing, not India bashing. Not to mention the hilarious part about filtering being infeasible (I guess it would sort of suck for Indians if search engines started returning only white-listed results, but it isn't exactly hard to think of a way to filter output that you control (but the end result might suck for the searcher).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Didn't the Kama Sutra come out of India?
In this case, I don't see this as a 'Bing and Yahoo are bad' issue. If Google does not comply, that is business decision, just like Bing and Yahoo.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
We all know that there is no sex in Bollywood. It is a chaste and pure place where the pixies and fairies cavort in peace, love and mung beans.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It can always plausibly deny control of its results and claim that filtering porn is infeasible.
Well it's obviously feasible if they're actually doing it.
Since Yahoo! already has a low search market share in India, this will drive it even lower.
I suspect the executives at Yahoo! don't share your opinion. It's not like they did this because of their personal moral codes; this is probably a calculated risk, based upon the societies public values, intended to increase market share by appearing to be more family-oriented and appropriate. The goal is to spawn conversations such as: "Oh, you're using Google? Haven't you heard about the immoral content it tries to force upon users?"
I don't know if it will work, but it's not like it's downright stupid. Some people will consider this feature desirable. Others will consider the fact that people think they like this feature to be desirable. It's all a psychology game.
person I've completely had it with India and Indians dictating how to implement technology. F@#k'em!!!!
A large percentage of the Indian population are poor illiterate farmers/village-folk. A very tiny percentage of their population (my guess is single digits) is online and most Indians I know would never support such policies. Most likely this is just their internal politics (similar to the abortion and LGBT posturing we have here) to appeal to the conservative populace. Heck they tell me some morons even tried to ban Valentines day as it imposes liberal "western" values ! (It didn't work)
Is bhagwad someone famous, or someone with particular insight into the Indian ISP situation, or someone who has some other qualification that would make it worth having most of the submission be his blithering speculation on the subject?
It would be really nice of Slashdot were to hire some editors to actually edit the submissions.
Not nearly as paranoid as it could be. Tighten your tinfoil hats and consider the following insane hypothesis:
Microsoft, in their limitless greed and avarice, has an insatiable desire for cheap H1B and outsourced programming labour. India is a major source of this labour; but has rising incomes and standards of living, which threaten to make that labour more expensive. Pornography reduces birth rates by providing the sexually frustrated an alternative to procreation. If Microsoft(and its subservient minion Yahoo) can cut off India's porn supply, they can insure a bumper crop of future programmers. Supply and demand being what they are, the more programmers born, the less Microsoft has to pay, per programmer!
See? It's all very simple when you recognize the sinister conspiracy at work...
isn't it the duty of Yahoo! to provide accurate results to its customers?
You make the mistake of assuming that the users are the customers, rather than the product being sold.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
There shouldn't be any bashing at all in this article.
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India is a democratic country -- their laws are by definition reflective of their social values. If they want porn cencored, they are within their rights to want it. I don't agree with it -- but it's their call. If at some point in the future there is a change in social attitudes towards porn in India, they can vote for a government that will change their laws accordingly.
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If you want to bash anyone, bash Google for not respecting local laws -- but even that would be stretching it a bit.
It's entirely reasonable to criticize governments when they enact stupid policies, whether they're democratically elected or not. As I recall one or two foreign entities on occasion said less than complimentary things about the Bush administration; were they wrong to do so?
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
India is a democratic country -- their laws are by definition reflective of their social values.
This is a fallacious correlation. Just because laws have been arrived at through a democratic process does not necessarily mean that they represent social values. There are much more important driving factors for legislation in a democracy than these social values. There are many ways (for example, lobbyists/bribery) that groups can influence democratic legislation, even in directions contrary to social values. The only possible government in which your ideals of democracy would be upheld would be one that's extremely limited socially so that no one's social values could be trampled upon.
If they want porn cencored, they are within their rights to want it.
I disagree with this. This is a case where your social values are at odds with personal liberties and just because such regulations would be arrived at through a democratic process doesn't mean that it's okay to take these liberties away. You could make the same case with racial segregation, where only a few really wanted to integrate, but the views of the majority democratically determined that segregation was legal and allowable. Another example could be gay marriage, where a majority is often against it, but since it is (arguably) within a gay couple's right to marry, these social values should not influence the democratic process to take their rights away.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
This is a case where your social values are at odds with personal liberties and just because such regulations would be arrived at through a democratic process doesn't mean that it's okay to take these liberties away.
The thing here is, you are making a value judgement. You're also making a value judgement when you say that racial segregation is bad. I happen to agree with that judgement, but it is still a judgement. Who is there to say that your values are correct and some other person's values are incorrect? Unless we have absolute truth, we cannot know these things.
You are confused about the point of democracy: it doesn't exist to protect what you consider to be liberties, it actually exists to avoid some of the problems we have with kings (violent regime changes), and to have government that roughly represents the will of the majority. It is hard living in a single place with a bunch of people: if you think about it, even living in a family is hard, and how many more people are there in a country? Democracy solves the problem better than anything else so far, but still if the majority decides to take away your personal liberties, they can because there are more of them than you. You may think it is 'wrong,' but once again that is a value judgement.
Qxe4
I'm Indian so I can say this - Indians want porn, all classes and all backgrounds. Actually, it's only some of the uppermost class (class = money & background) that don't want or like it and it's social-suicide to 'rally' for porn or anti-censorship.
Notice how many 'Indian girl' porn vids have started coming up over the past 2-3 yrs? Yeah. And the summary already pointed out that Indian ppl (pun intended) search for sex more than any other country.
It's all very two-faced and about what you show rather than what you are. Pomp and Show are very big in India, so it's self-righteous to say you're against porn. Porn is not the only issue and India is not the only country.
On another note - seems Indian police don't know the difference between 'illegal to publish' and 'illegal to have'. If they raid you for say, pirated software, and find porn as well, that's gonna make it worse for you.
If one has a cultural framework in which on values males over females (in spite of the fact that India, at least from my reading of PBS programs, has a high respect for females). If you check the CIA World Factbook, regarding the "People" ratios it becomes fairly obvious. Sex selection is occurring in India taking place either by implicit or explicit actions (the most explicit actions being the clandestine abortion of female fetuses). If one has a sex selection process going on (and one could argue the same thing is taking place in China) then there is obviously going to be a demand for online "sex" information, esp. if one has rations involving 10's of millions of males with respect to females. And if you happen to think that constraining search engine results (presumably what the governments or the puritanical U.S. search engine providers might think) is going to constrain access then you fail to understand what outside of the box thinking of millions of individuals can accomplish. You cannot correct the problem by constraining internet access, you can can only correct it by changing the culture (a slow and difficult process, but one which the "west" has been through) or by changing the fundamental nature of human beings (clamping down on the natural desires to mate, etc.) which probably requires genetic engineering beyond our current capabilities.
Thus complaining about this (at least from a "West"ern perspective) is pretty much of a no-op / noise). Complaining about this from an "East"ern perspective (India/China) (combined population 2+ billion people or 30+% of the world's population) simply gives the creative individuals information required to do what they do best (i.e. work around the "system"). I could within a few hours easily work up a Perl script which figures out which keywords are blocked and which are not and the best way around such systems. Until government officials learn that attempting to "censor" the thought paths of their populations is relatively pointless exercise in an internet world, then conversations like this one (at least in the "West"ern world are relatively pointless). The paths to change (where females and males are valued as equal) have to come from within the individual cultures.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." - The Declaration of Independence.
Upon that very clear value statement America's founding fathers overthrew Colonial rule and founded what is still in-arguably, despite recent lapses, THE model for Democracy. They did not assert political or religious authority, as clearly evidenced by the very carefully chosen words 'their Creator.' The words 'We hold these truths to be self evident' are a clear indication that there are principles that transcend even a law that is 'democratically' implemented. In other words, tyranny that is implemented Democratically is still tyranny.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
You mean you don't have a host on you local network dedicated entirely to porn and thus named porn? You might want to reconsider your /. membership.