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Google Cache Makes Murdoch's K-12 Site Look Obscene
theodp writes "Rupert Murdoch's Amplify Education site is all about the kids, so it's understandable that the site's Terms of Use bans abusive, pornographic, obscene, and vulgar content. But if one uses Google to do a site search of Amplify.com (e.g., site:amplify.com donkey) you may get quite an unexpected eye-opener (redacted, but still NSFW). So, does someone at Amplify really want to "@&^$" your "a**"? Of course not. But this does serve as a cautionary tale of the perils of buying a second-hand domain name when pages of the shuttered site may live on in cache-land. Prior to its conversion to a site for kids' education, Amplify.com was a social sharing product that allowed users to clip favorite sites from the web and add their own commentary. Google does note that removed content may still show up in Google's search results in certain situations (removal requests can be made)."
Update: 04/08 17:04 GMT by T :
Stephanie Chang writes (in a comment below):
"Hi, I’m the editor of Amplify.com. We purchased our domain name in February 2012 and took ownership of the site in July 2012 for use as our company's home page. Prior to that, the domain was used by its previous owners as a social-sharing site. As a result, some old content dating back to the previous domain ownership still shows up as cached on certain search engines. Amplify Education, Inc. did not produce the cached content in question nor do we in any way endorse it. We’re working with Google and other search providers to make sure caches of our site are up to date. In the meantime, we apologize to anyone whose attempts to locate information on amplifying donkeys resulted in a negative browsing experience."
Thanks! I'm looking for suggestions for other good porn sites - preferably free, although I'm not opposed to paying a little if the content is particularly high quality. Good job /.!
If you want to establish your own site after you take it over, always throw a deny-all robots.txt to clear out it's google cache and archive.org entries for a couple of weeks
Rupert Murdoch doesn't want to f_ck your a_s - he wants to f_ck your access to impartial press.
Google's webmaster tools can limit issues like this.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
Google's webmaster tools can limit issues like this.
As can wary domain buyers who know to look at a domain's history as part of the valuation.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
...if the previous residents of my house liked to decorate the windows with pentagrams? Or do people understand that different people live at the same address at different times?
It's basically equivalent to quoting a portion of a work for a book review, which is fair use. Google's profitability is irrelevant.
People should be thankful for having an opt-out robots.txt at all. It would in most cases not violate copyright for Google to ignore it completely (it might violate the site's TOS, but it is questionable whether even this holds any weight); they are just courteous enough to honor it. robots.txt is there mostly to prevent servers from being overloaded, or to keep content private, not to enforce copyright on publicly-facing content.
No one cares what you "find weak" or "struggle understanding." I'm sure there's quite a bit.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Note also that the argument that "getting your stuff copied" should be an opt-out situation (as in "well, you can always put a robots.txt" or "you can always do steps x y and z") i find weak. this is what in essence we have with the DMCA and youtube -
Don't post your information publicly if you don't want search engines to find it. Put it behind a password, or a paywall or some other way to protect it and search engines won't find it - no robots.txt needed.
If you're going to tape the pages of your book up in a public park, don't be surprised if some of the public write it down or take a picture of it for their own use.
and you see it takes all of an instant from the time that any given video is taken down to the time that it's up again in some other form Rightsholders have to have *full time* people involved in policing sites like youtube.. something just isnt right about that.
What's the alternative? Copyright holders have always had the burden of protecting their work. Should youtube be shut down because someone might post copyrighted content? Should theaters be shut down because someone may read a copyrighted book or play copyrighted music?
Linking is republishing? Bullshit. It would be easy for the "rightsholders" to remove their content from Google search -- just put up your robots.txt. They don't do this because they are *dependent* on these links. What they want is to force Google to tithe for this privilege, since they know they need it more than it needs them.
Face it concern troll, Google is doing "rightsholders" a service, not the other way around. And if that were not true, we would start seeing robots.txt instead of bleating about how we need regulatory capture.
Actually, they CHOOSE to have full time people do this. They also choose to have some inadequate software do it too. They don't have to do it. They have some fear (grounded or unfounded, brilliant or misguided) that "people will see our stuff and we won't profit from their eyeballs". This may be true. But it is their choice to produce stuff and their choice to limit distribution in the way that they do. If those choices then result in them choosing to try to put a genie back in a bottle and attempt technical and social engineering means to enforce artificial scarcity on the things they produce - well, that was all their choice. They don't "have to" do it.
I happen to agree with limited copyright protections (maybe 10 years, maybe 20 - there are good arguments on either side), and, as a rule, don't violate copyright and actively educate the minors in my household about respecting copyright laws. But that doesn't make me blind to the crazy choices that these distributors make in limiting distribution of content and then expecting people to not be criminals. Lots of people are criminals. Heck just look at all the red-light runners and speeders on the road. Look at all of the shoplifting that goes on. Then take copyright violation (which many people don't even consider to be immoral) and what would you expect to happen when you attempt to artificially limit the avenues by which content can be legally acquired? Yep. Violations. Lots of them. If hiring people to police web sites is the price of the business decisions they've made - well, sorry, but they made their bed. Now they get to sleep in it. And by artificially limiting distribution - here is what I mean summed up pretty well - http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
Look - I know many of you *philosophically* justify copyright as something beyond a government granted privilege. Fine. Whatever.
Eh, I guess I'll leave it at that. There's just no arguing with fanaticism.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"Fair use" is about the recipient (a.k.a. the user, the buyer, the reseller and such terms), and other second and possibly third parties, holding some limits on the rights holder's ability to enforce copyright under certain circumstances. Saying Google's actions pass "no test of fair use whatsoever" because they might be opposed by the rights holder, or even cause some objectively verifiable problems for the rights holder, is like saying 'innocent until proven guilty' should be abolished because it doesn't help the state get convictions.
If your only goal is that the copyright holder be able to act without checks and balances, you've already answered the question you posed, your way. If a "user's standpoint" doesn't count from a "copyright standpoint", then the only rights left to count are the copyright holder's. You've just redefined fair use into non-existence, and moved it completey out of copyright law. For the rest of us, the user's rights are part of copyright law. People who have no philosophical opposition to copyright in general can still be opposed to taking away the checks and balances given by fair use doctrine. People who really know a bit about the law know that fair use exceptions stem from common law, including, (for the US), unchallenged English common law from pre- constitutional times, and are at least partially codified in Title 17 along with the rest of copyright law. Some of us also know about the fair use clauses in the Berne treaty. That means your "from a copyright standpoint" really means 'from a copyright standpoint, but ignoring all the common law outside that section, and all current US copyright treaties, and any references inside Title 17 I don't like'.
I note too you put 'caching' in double quotes, so you're apparently claiming Google isn't really caching, they're really doing X and calling it caching. Saying the people you disagree with are lieing wihout actually calling it lieing is a basic dirty trick in rhetoric. Just what are you claiming it should be called instead? There are way to many people here on Slashdot that understand such tricks to let it go unchallenged. You did the same trick with "philosophically" as well.
That's sad, because I think you have a valid point about the differences between opt-in and opt-out. Why aren't you sticking to fair methods to try and make that point?
Who is John Cabal?
That's why it's amusing. And how long should a cache hold an old site? You want to be able to pull it up years later, but don't want to pull it up years later. Maybe clear on transfer of ownership? But then, how can I refer to the "old" site if the cache is wiped on transfer?
So, if this is a "Google issue" then what's the solution? You'll piss off someone somewhere, no matter what you do. That's not a Google issue, that's an issue with all opinions.
Learn to love Alaska
You realize you're on Slashdot stating you think Slashdot is illegal, right? Good, now that we're through that... This isn't really a copyright issue, at all. Information was posted in a public forum, and it ended up staying public. This is like someone's kid putting an offensive sign on their lawn and someone else took a picture before they took it down. It's perfectly legal from any standpoint. As for "philosophically" being opposed to copyright, I'm not, I'm only opposed to the way the laws are currently structured and from what I've seen most people on this side of the argument are in the same boat. I write as a hobby, if I struck gold and had a book published, I should be able to keep other people from copying and redistributing that book for profit for a few years. But, my children's children should not be able to sue people for using my characters forty years after I die. Reasonable people support reasonable copyright laws. But, again, this story has nothing to do with copyright, the archived material was posted publicly, not in some members-only section. Does it make Amplify look bad? Sure. Is it Google's fault? Nope, Amplify should've implemented a decent filtration system that flags comments like that for review before making it on the site, it's not as if the technology doesn't exist.
What is the point of replacing 'fucking' by 'f****ng', 'ass' by 'a**' and 'dick' by 'd**k'? In the context you can still clearly tell what the words being used are.
To clarify, I realize I was mistaken stating Amplify should've had filters in place when they didn't run the domain at the time, I lost myself a bit in the rant, sorry. But, that doesn't change anything else I said, and doesn't alleviate Amplify of their responsibility, as it should be common practice to investigate any name you're intending to use for a product, even more so a specific domain you know has been used.
Posting something publicly has nothing to do with copyright. And taking a picture of something for private use has nothing to do with redistributing content.
All search engines have to take a copy of page to run it through their ML algorithms to create the index thats used to serve a users query. And this copy is also used sometimes to generate the content in the snippet.
WebArchive could be a even serious problem here.
Google's cache are temporary. WebArchive aims to be eternal. :-)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
I don't think google cache should necessarily be used for looking into a websites history especially beyond an ownership change when the site is completely different. That's something for the Internet Archive project. I think people should be able to request any previously cached pages be removed (can they already? the notion of pages being removed on request was vague enough that I don't know if it's ona per-page basis or can be per site) and updated with modern content. It doesn't need to be an immediate process, just a queue that Google goes through.
It's like the linking bullshit, we all know that if Murdoch wants to stop Google indexing his propaganda all he need do is fix his robots.txt. Same deal here, the process/facts are irrelevant when you are trying to paint the enemy as an irresponsible pornographer, a brazen thief, a despicable leach, or whatever bad news story he can dream up where Google are trampling all over his delicate sense of entitlement.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'm sorry for the confusion, but you're talking about something totally different, that has literally nothing to do with the story. This isn't even an entire page, it's exactly what you see for results in the picture, and a dead link. Go try it. Sure, from there maybe you can find the actual cached page, and you can search all you want for a legal precedent showing that Google cache (which has been going on for, what, a decade?) is actually illegal, I welcome it, but it will still have nothing to do with the story. That's why I thought you were stating Slashdot is illegal, because this story is more like finding an old Slashdot story on the same site that quotes a few lines in a forum post. As for it being posted publicly, if you can dig out the TOS for that old site and show me they can't do whatever they want with what you post, or some evidence they didn't want the PUBLIC to see their page in every form possible (even cached by Google, usually ads are intact from what I've seen) then maybe, maybe the cached page is illegal. But considering time-shifting TV shows is still happening legally, I'm not worried about time-shifting websites. But even if it is, the key thing for you to understand right now, is it will still have nothing to do with this story. This is not a copyright issue.
http://archive.org/about/faqs.php#14
You spell "a***", not "a**". For f***'s sake, learn English!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
There really are some spectacularly stupid children given mod points.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
As for "philosophically" being opposed to copyright, I'm not, I'm only opposed to the way the laws are currently structured and from what I've seen most people on this side of the argument are in the same boat. I write as a hobby, if I struck gold and had a book published, I should be able to keep other people from copying and redistributing that book for profit for a few years. But, my children's children should not be able to sue people for using my characters forty years after I die. Reasonable people support reasonable copyright laws.
Reasonable people obey the law, and if they don't like a particular law they try to get it changed. You don't get to choose which laws you obey, that's anarchy.
Frankly, I'd be more impressed if someone objected to the idea of copyright completely, rather than using the specific terms as an excuse to flout the law.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Let's all pick fights over things that aren't happening! Nobody said don't respect the law, all I said was I'm opposed to the way it works now. You really are being a dick for the sole purpose of being a dick. Nobody's trying to impress you, and nobody is using anything as an excuse. You are making shit up and being an idiot, congratulations on being remarkably stupid even for the Slashdot crowd. Bravo.
How long? "Until next page update, or as short as possible after it occurs".
Google Cache is a backup resource for the case the site is temporarily down, not a history resource to show how the site looked like before. If the site goes missing, keep until it's deemed gone permanently. But if the site changes, apply the changes and don't hoard expired pages.
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Hi, I’m the editor of Amplify.com. We purchased our domain name in February 2012 and took ownership of the site in July 2012 for use as our company's home page. Prior to that, the domain was used by its previous owners as a social-sharing site. As a result, some old content dating back to the previous domain ownership still shows up as cached on certain search engines. Amplify Education, Inc. did not produce the cached content in question nor do we in any way endorse it. We’re working with Google and other search providers to make sure caches of our site are up to date. In the meantime, we apologize to anyone whose attempts to locate information on amplifying donkeys resulted in a negative browsing experience.