Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo Censors Tumblr Porn
coolnumbr12 writes "When Yahoo purchased Tumblr in May, Tumblr founder David Karp said Tumblr wouldn't be changing, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said, 'Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr.' But a new search policy went into effect Thursday that excludes all adult blogs from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines by disabling indexing of anything it tags as 'adult.' The policy effectively makes the content and 10 percent of Tumblr users completely invisible."
They didn't censor the content.....the just made it harder to find. Sensational headline.
I think the point is that they're not allowing spiders to crawl pornographic tumblrs. That affects everyone who uses a search engine that respects robots.txt.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
boo hoo?
"When Yahoo purchased Tumblr in May, Tumblr founder David Karp said Tumblr wouldn't be changing, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said, 'Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr.'
And Tumblr hasn't changed.
Yahoo's search index changed (if anyone actually uses it).
Why is this story worth babbling about? It's not news for nerds, and certainly not stuff that matters.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
More like 95% of Tumblr. Not reason to use it anymore....
Good thing I have already found my favorite Tumblr, Short Shorts Obsession.
it's sort of a half assed stance on the issue though.
pretty stupid too.
OOH NOW I GET IT! they're funding another search engine of their own that ignores robots.txt and will kill google off with that!
(seriously, that could be the only way googles search dominance will be beat).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I imagine a lot more interesting content is on that part of the network.
Unintended consequence - "adult" tag gets dropped
I dont think somehow this is such a bad idea. I mean, they could have just deleted all those pages really ( I know this is a not a good enough excuse). If you use Tumblr, you know most pages are inter-linked. So it is easy to go from one to next. Did they stop that as well? Also, I had noticed that most Tumblr pages did not have any warning for adult content.
My tumblporn is still turning up on google search...
That was really to stop two robots at either end fighting, forcing links to auto-generated pages to be instantiated, repeat ad infinitum. It wasn't really a censorship tool.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The summary fails. Not a big surprise, FTFA.
"Now, around 12 million Tumblr blogs marked "adult" have been removed from Tumblr's internal search; "
"Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin." --Teddy Roosevelt
Not only Yahoo's index, they're blocking indexing for Google and Bing also. Presumably via robots.txt or similar.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Really? Erm, I think we should be given a list so that, you know, we can, err.., check their data-collating algorithms for accuracy. Yeah, that.
"When Yahoo purchased Tumblr in May, Tumblr founder David Karp said Tumblr wouldn't be changing, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said, 'Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr.'
Yeah, and when an independent website gets purchased by a large corporation the executives never lie to the users of a new acquisition to keep them from doing a mass exodus. After all, the users themselves are a part of the deal.
and make your own blog. Or use Google blogger. Or any of a thousand different ways. Why is this even news?
I like pr0n as much as the next guy but a Slashdot groupthink seems to be developing that any entity restricting porn is bad evil censorship. Even if that entity is not government and it's not telling anyone else what to do except on its own site.
Try to replicate this behavior which was in place before the Yahoo buyout:
1. Place pornographic term in tumblr's own search engine
2. Receive lolcats
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Rendering 10% of Tumblr invisible is an improvement and a great start. Please get to work on the other 90%, too.
Isn't this the equivalent of buying Slashdot and then censoring "Anonymous Cowards"?
Yahoo decides a tag should be filtered out.
If you at some point in the several year history of your tumblr posted something with this tag enough times you account automatically becomes set to NSFW->Adult, you cannot change this once it has been set.
From then on any post from your blog is filtered from tag search results and from search engines (via robots.txt).
The site wholly functions on tags, you can't find anything without them. You might get lucky and see a reblog from another account you follow but much like twitter the only way you can follow topics and not individuals is by the tagging system.
Given that Yahoo only recently purchased tumblr this is shaking up the user community.
my robots.txt contains one item which doesn't exist.
If you try to access that item your IP is added to the firewall drop list. (until the next reboot)
I don't even have much hosted, just some pictures I don't want to give to flikr.
Not exactly hard to detect and bypass that. Just need 2 IPs.
Say it ain't so!!
Not only did you not read TFA, you didn't read TFS.
point is that they're not allowing spiders to crawl
No, that's tangential. The point is people have made different types of information publicly available, using a private service, and now that information is being effectively taken offline with no recourse. The content is content tagged as "NSFW" or "Adult" which could affect educational content, or content not approrpriate for minors -- which isn't always porn.
This is really falls into the broader category of censoring information which was previously publicly available. FTFA that's about 12 million sites apparently
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Someone should just create a replacement and let tumblr die off. Wouldn't take long to write either.
Yeah, but how do you know it's a honeypot, and not just a normal 404 situation? If you start excluding every site on the internet that has missing pages in one of its indexes, you aren't going to have a very good data set.
When they said "tumblr won't be changing", it's cute how ANYBODY believed them. Acquiring companies always say that. It's always a lie. In this case, most people even predicted it was a lie.
Don't worry, this is just step one. They'll totally wreck things later.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
It's not just blogs that feature posts tagged as "adult," it's the entirety of any blog tumblr has already flagged as NSFW or adult (the overall blog flag, not just posts). My personal photography blog has been branded as NSFW, as I sometimes post risque work. Basically, there will be no new discovery of my blog, since Tumblr's also blocked internal tag searches for such blogs as well (unless one is already following said blog). My rate of addition of new followers dropped precipitously after that. Bastards...like the occasional nipple is going to end the world.
That? That was a pigeon.
That could be interpreted as unauthorized access under the CFAA.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There is porn on Tumblr?
If only. Tumblr is incredibly awful in its design and execution, and it would be a blessing if it caused its users to flock to a better services, ideally leaving behind the social 'justice' thugs.
And, they are stipping the tags from those sites as well so that in internal search will not show those sites either. You have to either see their content through a reblog or if you're following them.
I got here through a series of tubes
David Karp insisted they weren't going to try and censor the adult blogs, while appearing on the Colbert Report just three days ago.
.: Semper Absurda
You need to be able to do a 301 redirect rather than a $5 website meta redirect. And when you redirect to tumblr, it's going to hit the same robots.txt you would normally.
came here to say this as well. He just said that they would keep it pure when asked exactly this question! Hopefully colbert calls him out next week, or today.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Ok maybe not to you, but Porn do matters. Specifically to nerds with poor social life skills. Regardless of sexual orientation.
If a corporation with market power over a particular medium uses a government-granted power to curate speech, is that censorship? For example, Apple and the game console makers curate their devices' respective stores, and they enforce this through anticircumvention provisions of copyright law.
Can you segregate your adult stuff into a separate blog, or is there a limit of one blog per account and one account per person?
Way to go yehaa, someone over there has f#cked up a beautiful picture sight for EVERYONE. Dick#eads. Greedy #ucknuts tearing the world apart for a database of peoples' pics that aren't even yours just because people loaded them onto flickr. Just like every other greedy corporation out there.
Slashdot is unusable without noscript.
is a really old signature, isn't it?
-- --
Yes, I don't change my sig often. I whitelisted slashdot in noscript, with the classic discussion system it's a lot better than it was when I wrote that. I will edit my sig, thanks.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Here are all these blogs that are tagging themselves NSFW. It doesn't mean they are all porn, it's just that it's more adult themed. I've seen quite a lot of "adult" tumblr blogs that are quite artistic. Instead of univiversally blocking them from search engines... They should innovate and start a robots tag that tags the site or certain sections NSFW. That could be carried through to search engines and "safesearch" options that the user selects. Just as much as I want information to be free... I want user choices to be respected.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Is it satisfying to show the world your bigotry and then have it tell you, in response, that it wants you dead (preferably unborn, but we're past that bit)?
Someone should make a search engine that *only* indexes the stuff that robots.txt suggests against.
I imagine a lot more interesting content is on that part of the network.
Yep. I want "Unsafe search" as an option for my search results - filter out all the mundane crap.
No sig today...
A new use for magnet links, perhaps?
While 10% of the blogs are estimated to be tagged adult.. It's actually closer to 25% of their traffic. I'm guessing internally they knew that tumblr's adult content was rising faster than the rest of the site, and they certainly don't want it to be primarily adult. It might be better for them long term, but there should be some brushback over this.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Someone should make a search engine that *only* indexes the stuff that robots.txt suggests against.
Those entries aren't "suggestions" - they are instructions I want search engine spiders to unquestionably follow.
#DeleteChrome
Despite their explicit promise "not to screw it up", the very first action Yahoo has taken as owner of Tumbler, is to ruin Tumblr. Major bummer! Looks like I'm going to have to remove all my - decidedly non-pornographic - content and find a new home for it. Any suggestions /. for a less prudish microblogging site?
Can someone explain to me why Yahoo is still in business? Do they have actual users/customers??
well said
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For Yahoo (an extreme zionist organisation, by the way)
Citation?
...as if millions of wankers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Seriously though, Yahoo has a knack for turning acquisitions to shit. Nobody should be surprised here. Expect more "improvements".
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I've never used Tumblr, but it sounds like they are saying that people with blogs marked 'adult' should mark their blogs as 'unicorns and puppys' so that they get indexed again?
We hate you back
Fine! I'm gonna go build my own image microblog, with blackjack and hookers!
Probably should make it distributed and censorship-resistant by design.
I propose this new site be named bendr!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
porn ... legal definition of obscenity
obscenity != porn
(or at least not necessarily)
Sure would be nice if the search engines let you choose which of the two (if any) you wanted filtered.
Pornography is one of the MAIN driving forces behind much of what shapes the web today. It may be a waste of space in your opinion, but there are hundreds of advancements in web design, storage, streaming, and so on that would not be where they are today without Pornography.
If you don't like it, fine, but give it credit when it is due. Don't dismiss it.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
This is brilliant. I'm going to set this up immediately on my own system. Kudos to your hacker mindset.
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
Most women can't stand porn? Are you a new kind of moron?
For a good discussion of this, see the following post at Eros blog:
http://www.erosblog.com/2013/07/19/tumblr-admits-then-denies-hiding-porn/
Eros reported on this back in May, and here has a good discussion of the evasions and falsehoods from Yahoo!
Wait, the internet still has ads?
::turns off my adblocker::
::visits a couple of sites::
::turns adblocker back on::
Oh right...wow...this has gotten a lot worse since I last checked...
Aaaahhhh...that's better.
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
Thank God. Tumblr really didn't have much of a point to it otherwise.
More likely the company is trying to make itself more "family friendly" because they have seen that Ballmer is completely batshit insane and with the Yahoo Search deal going out soon are hoping to get daddy Ballmer to open that big fat wallet to either buy Tumblr or the whole thing.
Personally if the sweaty one gets his mitts on yahoo some programmer here needs to set up a free email with the yahoo look and a similar chat as they'll slaughter, all that Skype bullshit has caused a LOT of folks to go running to Yahoo (seen that sudden bounce Yahoo had a few months back? Well there ya go) and if the ballmernator replaces Yahoo with "Windows Live Bing 3.0 powered by Skype" you are gonna have a HUGE audience that will be happy to come to you, just charge for a couple of extras and enjoy the money truck that backs up to your place every month.
Oh and if you do this and make a mint? For a small fee you can have "help powered by Da Feet" which while not always helpful at the very least it'll be entertaining.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I googled one of the nsfw tumbers I follow and this is what I got for the metadescription;
A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
I have no idea what business strategy this is following other than a grey moral high ground. They are going to wreck tumblr by pissing on the user base.
Porn is, by definition, obscene. Also, as a radio DJ who must be familiar with such things, the FCC says that things that are sexually explicit and have no "literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" are obscene (just like the earlier commenter posted).
I understand that the government isn't always right, and that the FCC theoretically only has jurisdiction over the United States, but the fact that a vague-but-menacing government agency also says that porn is obscene only helps to defend my (our?) point.
~Jarmihi
Doesn't matter in this case, because we weren't interested in the non-blocked stuff anyway.
Out of curiosity, how many hits do you get for this item and from which crawlers?
Also doesn't help that Mayer is a practicing Christian
Not surprising, this is the same thing they did after they bought egroups back in 2000, they waited a few months, then made the adult groups disappear from the listings and search.
Porn is just a word. The word refers to content some want to censor access to, not by themselves and any they have a legitimate right to control, but by Anyone and everyone (except themselves, who they imagine "able to judge"). This is censorship.
It is censorship that is Constitutionally illegal in the United States.
If "porn" can be censored, anything else can be also, based on the precedent that "porn" can and anything equally disagreed with, like other's politics, (e.g., communism), religion, criticism, etc.
Permitting corporations to censor for the public, for "consumers and potential consumers", who they have no rights to control, is another next step to a corporation-controlled corporatist state.
Me too
A DROP rule doesn't result in a 404, but a timeout.
Still wrong. The point is that yahoo has just killed the one use for Tumblr. Yahoo shutting down their search engine would be less surprising to me. Admittedly, I haven't looked at numbers on that, maybe people still haven't heard of this "google" thing, and maybe a lot of people love sharing cat photos on tumblr.
The censorship thing isn't important. There are one or two other websites on the internet where you can get porn.
Neat idea. How did you set that up? A custom fail2ban filter? Some other way?
Marissa is sure a cunning runt.
Tumblr's userbase is used to it.
All of the opportunity they have after winning the right to publish their private fight against the NSA and the PRISM program...all of the good publicity they could be reaping in...and bang, another shot straight to the same lead-filled foot they've been firing at the past five...six years? It's as if they're trying to succeed at exiting a business and failing at -that- too. I have no idea what they sell or why they're even still solvent, except for that they've just fucked over Tumblr, the only asset they own that I -have- heard of.
The people with porn Tumblrs don't need to move, they just need an easy way to be found. Why not a retro, Yahoo-style directory? That's how lots of us found things before search engines got so good. Just start tumblrporn.com (lawyers permitting) and list all the blogs Yahoo doesn't want indexed, in categories. Sell ads. Profit!
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
In my experience, many women on Tumblr enjoy porn that makes the average /.'er's porn look like Zoobilee Zoo.
Settings > Dashboard > uncheck "Browse tag pages in Safe Mode"
You're welcome.
my robots.txt contains one item which doesn't exist.
If you try to access that item your IP is added to the firewall drop list. (until the next reboot)
I don't even have much hosted, just some pictures I don't want to give to flikr.
On the other hand, you've just documented your disallowed content, so I actually don't need to access the content itself in order to index it -- I only need to know to download your robots.txt and shove it into my index.
As the service grows (assuming it does), then I can have a fleet of non-contiguous IP addresses which I use as "content verifiers" for the robots.txt contents (e.g. directories vs. files), and I can "burn" them against your site for content verification.
The arms race escalation is pretty obvious, and contains some interesting twists, but it's basically an arms race, and you will be as effective against it as the battle against SPAM has been so far (there are strategies there, too, but they involve forcing hosting of email bodies by the email sender and similar techniques).
So using the same tripwire technique that the phone companies used to use against wardialers (like I used to be, before it was a criminal offense, and then still, before I turned 18) won't prevent the eventual success.
Personally, I would never do this, since the stuff people think is very private, and then feed to robots in the robots.txt anyway, is generally not very interesting in the first place.
"Taken offline" is alarmist. The content is still publicly available, it just won't show up in search. I can't remember the last time I found a tumblr by searching, particularly image based tumblrs.
Especially now that Google has removed that math-undefined bug that basically acted as the opposite of safesearch, instead returning all porn...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I'm a little surprised that it's only 10% that are blocked. I figured it'd be only 10% that weren't blocked...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
There had been a bug in Google that essentially was smutsearch. Basically some kind of irrational math bug that would bring up only porn. They seem to have fixed it though.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It wont matter. Since, people *finding* your $5 website will be much harder than finding the real original tumlr site. sadly
So a search engine company just opened up a huge ass search opportunity for a competitor? I would sell their stock if I owned it. Bet this also means not only does Yahoo! search get another competitor but so does Tumblr.
This is enourmous work, but here goes,
1. *Copy* your entire Tumblr site to another site. Keep it offline for now.
2. Remove all NSFW content on your tumblr site to see if it can be accepted as non-NSFW...
*Keep* the entire page structure when possible.
3. Then start linking and rel=canonical from your tumblr to your new site.
4. Now make your new site go online.
(SEO sucks. But that is what makes it valuable, because so few does it right.)
The firewall may redirect to an all-404 host instead of blocking.
it's a decent compromise between not wanting to appear as a smut hub but still allowing free speech for users.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
That's why she's hiding the porn instead of removing it.
Me three
Especially those who didn't migrate to something like Blogspot or Wordpress as soon as Yahoo grabbed Tumblr. Eight years ago I dumped Flickr when Yahoo took it.
I knew they would fuck it up and they didn't disappoint me. Yahoo is a cancer on the internet, and should be cut out.
You think that people only use Tumblr for porn? I know a few Tumblr users that are now being marked NSFW for fairly ridiculous reasons such as partial nudity. So far, it hasn't reached levels of Facebook stupid (photos of breastfeeding bad, photos showing violence against women good). I never liked Yahoo. Yet, I've used a quite a few services that ultimately got bought by Yahoo and changed for the worst. It's like I'm constantly running for my life with Yahoo chasing me. Seriously, Yahoo, fuck off.
Wow. I have no idea what Tumblr was supposed to be for primarily, but the only thing I ever visited it for was soft porn - i.e., tasteful photos of beautiful young naked women. RedTube and so on are really tedious. This Marissa Mayer is turning out to be a top-notch hypocrite and control freak. Everybody suddenly has to work on site, but only one person gets their own personal on-site crèche. Yahoo is a write-off, and she's just making it worse. For historical reasons relating to my ISP, I'm stuck with a Yahoo mail account, but I'm working on migrating away from it. Too bad, because Yahoo was ground-breaking at its inception back in the nineties.
Porn doesn't matter? Heathen!
Jonathanjk.com
I was thinking that too. I wasn't aware that there was anything on tumblr that wasn't porn.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Says one thing, does the opposite...
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/427790/july-16-2013/david-karp
So now if there is a blog on Tumblr that I disagree with, I post a comment and tag the post as adult, and the blog goes away. Most users have auto post turned on. Great.
I kind of do that, except that I have the directory named in the robots.txt file handled by a CGI that generates a list of random email addresses along with a randomized "link" to follow that includes a depth count. If they follow the link, the CGI delays a little bit of time proportional to the depth, and gives them another page of bogus email addresses with yet another link. The idea is to tarpit their stupid bot, and if they happen to be crawling for email addresses, give them lots of those.
It won't be long. Someone will just make another free-for-all porn host. The die has been cast. Yahoo will have spent a billion dollars for the privilege of watching some new site spring up and take back the golden goose. As for the concerns about moving to a new blog, I doubt seriously that it will be a difficult process. Word travels pretty fast round these parts.
Wait, there was a reverse safe search???
That's why she's hiding the porn instead of removing it.
Jokes on her; I fap to this.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Jesus saves etc.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I think you've posted from the wrong account, hairyfeet. You almost sound negative toward Microsoft. You should have used your billygates account... at least people expect it to be random and nonsensical with a hint of monkeys getting lucky at the ol typewriter feel.
maybe they should do a movie about censoring zombies. that'd be cool.
That really only works when you can count on hosts to not abuse robots.txt - if I were Google, I'd start ignoring all robots.txt on Tumblr. You can more or less expect them to be malicious, so you make rules to limit the damage. Easy peasy. You abuse it? Well, that's why you can't have nice things.