On June 4, 2009, Google.cn blocked all searches for "Tiananmen Square," even ones not related to the massacre that took place on that date in 1989. It refuses to say why.
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)
Google was going to help democratize data in China. Instead, about three years after entering the Middle Kingdom, the search company still finds itself in an uncomfortable working relationship with government censors.
For about eight days between June 3 and June 11, Google.cn blocked all results that might come from searches for Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Not just politically sensitive results, not just historical accounts of the hundreds of deaths on June 4, 1989, but every single result--including directions to the square--with an error message that read "Search results can not be displayed as they may contain contents that do not comply to related laws and policy."
As of Thursday, things had appeared to return to normal. A search for "Tiananmen Square" in either English or Chinese brought up links to shops in the area, historical documents about one of China's most storied places, and images of fun, happy times in downtown Beijing.
So how did Google know that it was supposed to drop the hammer on all results for Tiananmen Square for that brief period of time? And how did it know that it was once again safe to reapply the limited filter?
Google isn't saying, beyond pointing to previous interviews and statements it has given on its tricky balancing act in China. "Google.cn complies with Chinese laws. The differences in search results over time in China are the result of a variety of factors, including the content that is available on the Internet and the regulations we follow in China," the company said in a statement last week.
But it has confirmed that Google has dropped a previous method of determining how to self-censor its search results--pinging the so-called Great Firewall of China to see what sites are blocked--in favor of a new self-censorship method that the company refuses to disclose.
Difficult choices
Google's formal entry into China in 2006 with Google.cn forced the company to strike a difficult balance between its stated goal of making the world's information widely available and the requirement that all Internet companies doing business in China adhere to government regulations regarding censorship.
In some ways, Google has improved the flow of information in China. Upon entering the market, it made sure to include a disclaimer like the one above alongside search results for sensitive queries, something even Baidu does now. That decision allowed Chinese Internet searchers to know they weren't getting the full extent of what was available on the Internet for a given query.
In addition, a study published by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab in June 2008 found that Google is actually the least censored search engine in China. Google is the second-most widely used search engine in China, behind Baidu.
In the past, company executives have justified Google's censored presence in China with a glass-three-quarters-full analogy: it's better to offer Chinese Internet users access to a wealth of information they might be otherwise unable to find at the expense of "pulling a few books out of the library," so to speak. They are also, of course, unwilling to miss out on perhaps the greatest Internet land rush of the 21st century as China's massive population continues to come online.
However, determining which books to leave and which books to pull is not an easy task. Google representatives over the past week pointed repeatedly to an article in "The New York Times" from 2006 that described Google's methodology for making those tough choices.
From the article:
Brin's team had one more challenge to confront: how to determine which sites to block? The Chinese government wouldn't give them a list. So Google's engineers hit on a high-tech solution. They set up a computer inside China and programmed it to try to access Web sites outside the country, one after another. If a site was blocked by the firewall, it meant the government regarded it as illicit -- so it became part of Google's blacklist.
That system is no longer in place, Google representatives confirmed. Despite repeated inquiries, no information was made available about the new system: whether it involves taking direct cues from the government, self-selection by Google engineers, or something else.
In a way, Google's reluctance to talk about censorship and China is understandable. The Chinese government's regulations seem to be written in a deliberately vague way as to encourage Internet companies to censor more than the government would actually like to see pulled from the Internet.
In 2006, CNET's Declan McCullagh noted that Google.cn censored far more search results than seemed necessary, which was proven when Google restored access to Web sites like Budweiser.com following the article, with no apparent repercussions from the Chinese government.
The Times article from 2006 also noted the existence of weekly meetings between government officials and Internet companies known as the "wind-blowing" meetings; as in, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows in China, you need a bureaucrat. During those meetings, government officials would discuss upcoming events and hint at the ones they'd prefer to go unnoticed, according to the article.
Relevance lost
Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square, it seems several such meetings took place. Web sites across China were forced to shut down for a brief period of time in the days surrounding June 4, which many of them sarcastically dubbed "Chinese Internet Maintenance Day."
Unlike Twitter, Google's YouTube, and Wordpress, Google.cn was not shut down during the days surrounding the anniversary. But it was certainly far more stingy with search results than it was before the first week of June, or at present.
Whatever filter Google is using is both flexible and imprecise. Searches for obvious terms like "Tiananmen Square" and "Tank Man" returned no results between approximately June 3 and June 10, but as of last Thursday once again returned generic results unrelated to the events of June 4, 1989.
However, during "Chinese Internet Maintenance Week," searches on Google.cn for "June 4 incident" (the Chinese term for the events of June 4, 1989), "Goddess of Democracy" and "Tiananmen Square massacre," all returned results that one might think would be frowned upon by the Chinese government, including images of the Goddess of Democracy--a Statue of Liberty-like figure constructed by student protesters--staring defiantly at a portrait of Chairman Mao above the Tiananmen Gate.
Google's new filtering method allows Google.cn searches in English to produce results the government might not like. The same search in Chinese does not lead to Wikipedia.
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)And during that week, a search for "June 4 incident" on Google.cn actually returned (and still does return) links pointing to Wikipedia's article on the subject as well as a YouTube video with bloody images of the government's crackdown on student protesters in the top two positions. A search for that term in Chinese returns what appears to be censored results with the "According to local laws and regulations and policies, some search results are not displayed" disclaimer.
Perhaps that's why the Chinese government has announced plans to require all PCs sold in the country to have filtering software preinstalled that would block Web sites and even monitor keystrokes in word-processing applications. Whatever new filtering method Google has chosen, it may not be enough to satisfy the government's desire to keep certain topics out of the public eye.
Google has justified its presence in China as part of its lofty mission; this is a company that really does think it's engaged in business to better the world. But doing business in China while maintaining the moral high ground could well be more difficult than digitizing all the world's information.
That's right, Wikipedia now has 10 million articles. But participation in this global brain-share is restricted in China.
Wikipedia being blocked is news to no one in China, but there's a bit of a catch-22 even for those who use proxies to get around the restrictions: many proxy URLs and anonymizers are banned from editing Wikipedia to reduce vandalism.
When I want to see an article on Wikipedia, I pop it into the Anonymouse Web site, and the content comes right up. But if I see a mistake in an article, I'm unable to make my contribution.
Vandalism on Wikipedia is a serious issue. People turn entire pages into insults directed at their subject. Others insert more insidious misinformation that's hard to detect. The community is generally very good at catching these things, but banning open proxies was seen as a good way to reduce the number of people doing these things with impunity. If you don't want your own IP to get banned for vandalism, maybe you'd use a service that hid your identity.
Tor is perhaps the best known relatively robust anonymizing tool online. The Global Voices Online project promotes it in its guide to anonymous blogging. (It's in English, but not blocked in China.) But Tor nodes, too, are usually blocked for editing.
This means that people in China would have to display exceptional ingenuity to participate in the great compilation of information going on at Wikipedia. Some time ago, I wrote a review of now-Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein's book Infotopia. Sunstein focuses his book on the great potential, and potentially great downfalls, of online information gathering by massive communities.
To his reservations, I add one. By no means am I the first to point this out, but when Wikipedia excludes most Internet users from the most populous country on Earth, it's got a long way to go before its relative robustness in English is matched in Chinese. Of course, the billions of individuals not online around the world are also missing their say.
Here's to 10 million nodes in this emerging body of knowledge, but idealists should be careful to note the limits of the project. I just hope the franchise extends more and more. If nothing else, I have a lot to learn from people who aren't yet participating.
A federal judge in California has pulled the plug on Wikileaks.org, a Web site that specializes in posting leaked documents often provided by whistleblowers.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White on Friday ordered that the domain name be disabled at the behest of a group of Swiss bankers who filed a lawsuit alleging that confidential information appeared on Wikileaks.org.
Ticked off that the United States gave the Dalai Lama the prestigious Congressional Gold Medal this week, China may be taking out its aggression by "hijacking" American search engines.
There's speculation that the Dalai Lama's recent award from President Bush (their meeting, pictured above) has prompted Net users in China to be rerouted from U.S. search sites to Baidu.
(Credit: White House)Over at Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan reports that numerous users trying to access Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft search engines from within China or using Chinese Internet service providers are being redirected to Chinese-owned search engine Baidu.
Sullivan says it's not exactly clear how that process is working, but he cites a news report from 2002 that indicates this sort of thing has happened in China before. At the time, a Baidu official denied having any part in the rerouting.
So is the Chinese government to blame? After all, its extensive attempts at censoring what its citizens view on the Internet have been well-documented.
It's worth noting, however, that the reported redirects may not have any direct link to the Dalai Lama events. The Associated Press reported earlier this week that Beijing has been ramping up its filtering of political sites in an attempt to stifle political dissent leading up to the Communist Party Congress, a meeting in which leaders are selected to serve under the president for the next five years.
Thailand has lifted a ban on YouTube about five months after videos mocking King Bhumibol Adulyadej prompted the military-installed government to block domestic Web surfers' access to the site.
But there's a catch, of course.
Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Queen Sirikit
(Credit: Thai Royal Embassy)In a Friday interview with the Financial Times, the Southeast Asian nation's information and technology minister attributed the restoration to an agreement that the Google-owned service will block any clips that the government flags as illegal. Thai law, among other things, forbids mocking monarchs, an act punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
According to the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, Thai authorities have a record of conducting round-the-clock surveillance of Internet content and instructing Internet service providers to blacklist sites that present contrarian political messages.
The situation supplies yet another example of the balancing act that American Internet companies must attempt when doing business in countries with stringent restrictions on free speech--and that has earned them repeated scoldings from those who believe their business decisions are too complicit with the bidding of oppressive regimes. Yahoo, for instance, is now fighting a lawsuit filed by two Chinese journalists who accused the Web portal of "willingly" coughing up information about their online political writing to the Chinese government, which works hard to suppress such expression.
Some leading companies have urged the U.S. government to help, rather than leaving moral judgments entirely up to the private sector. Google, for its part, has suggested treating censorship as a trade barrier and writing anticensorship pledges into free-trade agreements.
Update at 11:30 a.m. PDT: In response to my query, a YouTube representative sent the following statement: "We are pleased to hear that access to YouTube in Thailand has been reinstated. We appreciate the constructive dialogue we have had with the ICT Ministry. YouTube remains committed to removing videos when they violate our content policies, and we will continue to work closely with authorities in Thailand."
Update at 11:50 p.m. PDT: When I asked how YouTube would go about complying with the Thai government's requests--say, whether it would immediately pull down content authorities deemed illegal or inject its own analysis into the process--the YouTube representative had this to say: "We always welcome constructive discussions with local governments around the world on similar issues.We are committed to addressing these questions in ways that both respect relevant laws and cultural concerns and are consistent with our global content policies."
Admist some of last week's hullaballoo regarding Flickr's censorship on some of the photos of its German language users, it's timely that the creators of The Pirate Bay, the popular BitTorrent tracking site, have recently launched their own censorship-free image-sharing service called BAYIMG. It's similar to other image-hosting services like ImageShack, TinyPic, and DivShare, with one exception--the only person who's able to remove uploaded photos is you. That is, assuming you don't forget the secret removal access code you picked when uploading.
Despite this well-advertised stance on free speech, the service claims that if contacted by the law, it will take down illegal photos, which means no sneaky shots of unreleased operating systems, or anything else that's under copyright law. However, it's unclear whether these laws are by local country, or Sweden.
Like other modern photo-hosting sites, BAYIMG employs tags to let users sort through shots, but that's about as far as the user friendliness goes. It's basically been designed as a way to send your friend a photo with a URL. There's no user login system to keep track of uploaded shots, and no way to keep track of viewing statistics. There's also not a way to browse or search for shots besides grouping other people's photos by their tags.
Despite these shortcomings, BAYIMG is getting quite a bit of attention for its stance on free speech and censorship. It's also pretty generous with its file formats, with compatibility for 140 different types of image files, and a limit of 100MB per upload.
I do find it depressing censorship has reached such a level that mainstream photo hosting sites don't, and seemingly can't, offer censorship-free service. Time will tell how long BAYIMG sticks around before being shut down or sued out of existence. If it's anything like The Pirate Bay, it should be fun to watch.
Note: since many of the images on BAYIMG may be intentionally mis-tagged (or random), you're bound to run across potentially objectionable content. If you're perusing the site while at work, or if you get offended easily, you may want to steer clear.
[via Download Squad via TorrentFreak]
Flickr just found a downside to adding support for seven languages to its photo-sharing site: limits on photo sharing and resulting accusations of censorship.
A Flickr protest image
(Credit: Flickr)Flickr launched sites in seven languages Wednesday, expanding beyond just English. But because of a German law, the company decided it had to restrict the photos German members could see to those that had been marked "safe" by members using Flickr's filtering ability that arrived in March. That restriction triggered a forum discussion thread, "Flickr now censoring all moderate and restricted photos from Germany," and an "Against Censorship at Flickr" group.
According to a posting by Flickr staff member Heather Powazek Champ, Flickr had hoped to find a way around a general safe-image restriction for Germans, but "the solutions did not come together."
"The decision to change the Flickr experience in Germany was never about censorship--it was made to try to ensure that Yahoo Germany was in compliance with local legal restrictions," she said. "The central problem is that Germany has much more stringent age-verification laws than its neighboring countries and specifies much harsher penalties, including jail time, for those with direct responsibility," namely Flickr's German office staff.
But Flickr members are still outraged. In the words of user "Remmy1," one comment among the thousands on the subject, "Instead of investing money to solve the issue technically--as so many other companies that are doing business in Germany have obviously done--they are limiting a whole nation (not to forget our affected friends in Austria and Switzerland)."
Flickr hopes to fix things soon, Powazek Champ said.
"We're not perfect (as much as we'd like to be), but everyone on the team is resourceful, fair-minded and determined to find the solution to this," she said.
Meanwhile, she urged Flickr members to trust the company to do the right thing. "We've made and admitted to a couple of big mistakes lately, and as many of you have commented, we should have handled this issue differently. Believe me when I say that we'd rather not make mistakes in the first place, but when we do, take hope in the fact that we always listen, always respond, and often change the system as a direct result of your input," Powazek Champ said.
Flickr founder and general manager Stewart Butterfield has publicly apologized for two mistakes. In the first, Flickr deleted a picture by Icelandic photographer Rebekka Gušleifsdóttir. She said the photo was being sold without her permission by an unaffiliated company, and discussion about the matter had grown heated, leading Flickr to delete the photo.
"The photo was deleted--again, mistakenly--because of the direction the comments had gone, which included posting the personal information of the infringing company's owner and suggestions for how best to exact revenge. It is an emotional issue and most people were there to support Rebekka in a positive way, but some of the angry mob behavior crossed the line," Butterfield said in a forum posting. "There are several policies which will be changing as a direct result of this incident and the goal is that nothing like this ever happens again."
The second incident involved restrictions on photos from sex writer Violet Blue. Butterfield apologized in that case as well, and the company removed most of the restrictions.
Setting appropriate and legal publishing restrictions is a common issue on the Internet, which connects so many vastly different people. As Flickr's Powazek Champ said, "We're all getting really uncomfortable that the words 'Flickr' and 'censorship' are being jammed together with increasing frequency because that is so far from the direction we're trying to move in."
And Flickr has been on the receiving end of censorship actions. Flickr images are being blocked in China, Butterfield has said.
SAN FRANCISCO--The Chinese government has begun blocking access to Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site, but co-founder and general manager Stewart Butterfield has a tip on how to get around it.
China is blocking only Flickr's images, Butterfield said in an interview here Tuesday during a party to celebrate the company's expansion beyond the English-speaking world and the launch of the 24 Hours of Flickr book. The way in which the country is doing so means that the Firefox Web browser, augmented with the Greasemonkey plug-in, can automatically bypass the block.
Specifically, Greasemonkey needs to run a script that changes the Flickr server name into its numeric Internet Protocol address, Butterfield said. That would indicate that the China block uses the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates alphanumeric addresses such as "Flickr.com" into the numeric addresses actually used to route packets of data over the Internet.
Zooomr CEO Thomas Hawk also pointed on Friday to a plug-in that can enable Firefox to bypass Flickr blocks in Iran, China, Saudi Arabia and other places.
On Flickr's official discussion site about the China censorship, the company said it's trying to take care of the problem.
"We know images from Flickr are still blocked and definitely care very much about our friends who cannot access pictures. We have been contacting people to hopefully get a positive resolution with restoration of photos, but this of course has not happened yet," the company said on Monday.
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