Category Archives: Transhuman News

China #39;s Censorship Costs Western Businesses
China #39;s intense online surveillance doesn #39;t just affect Chinese Internet users and their ability to access information freely. As more and more western entit...

By: NTDonChina

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China's Censorship Costs Western Businesses - Video

Reporting from Moscow under strict censorship
Former CBS Radio Correspondent Marvin Kalb marks the 75th anniversary of the CBS World News Roundup, describing his experience reporting from Moscow under st...

By: CBSNewsOnline

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Reporting from Moscow under strict censorship - Video

Googles brand name made Reader work in Iranians favor.

Journalists and other professional nerds are angry thatGoogle is snuffing out its moribund RSS software, Reader. But as Quartzs Zach Seward points out, plain old normal folks in Iran used Reader quite a bit to get around internet censorship. And those users wont be helped by the Reader clones popping up in its wake, because Google Readers unintended power as an anti-censorship interface flows from its Google pedigree, not its Reader functionality.

Google Readers use of HTTPS makes it more difficult for censors to block than normal web traffic, which helps (sort of). But the bigger foot that Reader keeps shoved in the censors door is the google.com domain itself. To cut off Reader, as Seward writes, Iran would probably have to block all of Google and its many popular services in order to keep its citizens from using Reader. [See update below.] Even the censors dont want to do that, at least not now. So Reader persisted, an obsolete product providing unintentionally vital value to Iranians by riding like a remora on the rest of the google.com shark. Until July 1 2013, when Google does what the censors couldnt, and scrapes the remora off.

Google is a business, not a public utility, and its decision to kill Reader makes business sense. But was maintaining Reader really so much of a drain on Googles vast resources that it couldnt have let the little remora keep hanging on as long as possible, as a kind of pro-bono, dont be evil brand-burnishing project? Google didnt design Reader to be used this way, and couldnt have predicted that it would be, but there it is. Why extinguish the benefit?

Reader came out of Google Labs, which spun out interesting (or random) applications and inventions at a semi-alarming clip until Larry Page took over as CEO and shut it down. Labs didnt make much sense as a revenue-generating division. But what it was good at, with its throw spaghetti at the wall non-strategy, was creating opportunities for unintentional interfaces to emerge and catch on ones that, like Reader in Iran, could potentially fulfill Googles dont be evil moral imperative more clearly and cleanly than their on-purpose products do. (Of course, Google has been badly burned by unintentional UIs as well.)

But Labs is gone, and so is Reader. That google.com domain, though, is still as huge a boot in the door of Irans censors as it ever was[not necessarily for technical reasons, see update below]. Politicians often attach controversial riders to popular legislation because they know that their opposition wont throw the baby out with the bathwater. Google has been passively exercising similar power in Iran with Reader for a very good cause, and its a shame that it will come to an end. But maybe its a moment of opportunity for some Googlers to seize with their 20% time: what new thing on the edges of google.com might ride on it to do some unplanned good?

Update: I spoke to The Electronic Frontier Foundations Director for International Freedom of ExpressionJillian C. York, who pointed out that its not technically difficult for Iran to block Reader without taking down other Google services. (They can screw up, of course, she added.) Google Translate offers similar access around censored content by acting as a proxy. Google Reader offered much more convenience, she said, and an alternative US-based RSS reader set up in the same way could offer that same convenience. The problem is, how would Iranians find out about it? Theyre resourceful, but its a huge inconvenience, she said. In other words, the Google brand name is a significant part of that unintentional interface effect that helped Reader be a popular tool for circumventing censorship in that country. Replacing Reader in that regard would take more than just cloning the functionality. Would you have to be Google, and deliver it from a google.com URL, to pull that off? Not necessarily. But if interfaces are culture, then being Google certainly helps. Its just like here: [Google] ispopular, its trusted, York said. Which is why its unfortunate that Google would cut off so many users who use [Reader] this way.

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Unintentional Interfaces: Google Reader's Censorship -Busting Power Will Be Hard to Replicate

A new study analyzes how controversial posts are deleted in near real time from the Twitter-like Chinese social media service called Weibo, which hosts about 100 million messages per day. Credit: Photos.com/Rice University

(Phys.org) An analysis of censorship patterns on the Twitter-like Chinese social media service called Weibo gives the clearest picture yet of how the site's operator, Sina Weibo, finds and deletes controversial posts in near real time, despite a daily volume of 100 million messages. The study, which was conducted by an independent researcher and collaborators at Rice University and the University of New Mexico (UNM), is available online and undergoing peer review.

"Other people have explored censorship on Weibo, but this work is focused on the speed at which censorship happens," said lead researcher Dan Wallach, professor of computer science at Rice and co-author of a forthcoming study that was recently posted on the pre-print site arxiv.org.

A team led by Wallach and UNM's Jed Crandall worked with the study's lead author, an independent researcher named Tao Zhu. Their analysis indicates that Sina Weibo uses a combination of keyword-matching software and human censors to monitor and delete potentially controversial posts on Weibo. By closely monitoring individuals who frequently post controversial messages, Sina Weibo is able to delete many objectionable posts in less than five minutes, the study found.

Launched three years ago, Weibo, like Twitter, allows users to post 140-character messages with usernames and hashtags. About 300 million people use Weibo, which is China's most popular microblogging service. Users post 100 million messages each day on Weibo.

For the study, researchers began by following 25 "sensitive" users that they had discovered by doing a search for people who had used words previously banned by Weibo. To broaden their search, the researchers added more than 3,000 users who had reposted one of the 25 sensitive users more than five times. They then followed this expanded group for a period of time and measured how often and how quickly their posts were deleted. Any user with more than five deleted posts was added to the pool of sensitive users.

After 15 days, the sensitive group included 3,567 users. The researchers found that on average, about 4,500 posts by the sensitive users were deleted each day, including about 1,500 that were deleted at the network level by Sina Weibo. The team's censorship-tracking software was able to track, within one minute, the amount of time a post remained online before it was deleted.

The researchers found that deletions happened most heavily in the first hour after an original post had been made, and nearly 90 percent of deletions occurred within 24 hours. The analysis also revealed a sophisticated mechanism to remove all reposts of deleted posts, often within five minutes of the original post's deletion. Deletion times were found to be significantly shorter for a subset of users who tended to post deleted content most often, an indication that Sina Weibo actively monitors the activity of some users.

"Roughly 12 percent of the total posts from our sensitive users were eventually deleted," Wallach said. "We have enough of these posts to be able to run topical analysis algorithms that let us extract the main subjects that Weibo's censors seemed concerned with on any given day."

To date, researchers have collected 470 million posts from the Weibo public timeline and 2.38 million posts from a user timeline.

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Study shows just how fast censorship can occur in social media