Posts
Attention readers in New Zealand and Australia
Country Specific Blog Censorship by Google; Twitter Employs Censorship as Well; Echo Comments Not Working on Redirects
Country Specific Blog Censorship by Google; Twitter Employs Censorship as Well; Echo Comments Not Working on Redirects
5 February, 2012
Blog Redirects
Today I learned my blog is being redirected to another URL name in some countries. This is a new "feature" in Blogger that Google added beginning a few weeks back.
Instead of exposing a single "Blogger" to the world then censoring it to meet the requirements of local governments, Google decided to mirror content into country-specific domains then redirect users from foreign countries to the mirror associated with their country. If that country decides to censor something, it will somehow be noted on any page so the reader knows they're seeing a filtered view.
Readers can also try surfing to the original blog URL by appending /ncr (No Country Redirect) after the main name, such as
The above approach assumes a country doesn't filter on that pattern and block the request. For example: my blog is blocked in China so appending /ncr is unlikely to accomplish anything.
Google's Explanation
Q: Why is this happening?
A: Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.
Q: How will this change affect my blog?
A: Blog owners should not see any visible differences to their blog other than the URL redirecting to a ccTLD. URLs of custom domains will be unaffected.
Q: Will this affect search engine optimization on my blog?
A: After this change, crawlers will find Blogspot content on many different domains. Hosting duplicate content on different domains can affect search results, but we are making every effort to minimize any negative consequences of hosting Blogspot content on multiple domains.
The majority of content hosted on different domains will be unaffected by content removals, and therefore identical. For all such content, we will specify the blogspot.com version as the canonical version using rel=canonical. This will let crawlers know that although the URLs are different, the content is the same. When a post or blog in a country is affected by a content removal, the canonical URL will be set to that country’s ccTLD instead of the .com version. This will ensure that we aren’t marking different content with the same canonical tag.
Echo Comments Not Working on Redirects
I was unaware this was happening until today when readers in New Zealand and Australia informed me that comments were no longer working.
Sites With Lost Functionality So Far
The "key" within Echo's database that associates comments to a blog entry is the full blog URL (site name + post permanent URL).
Filtering off the language code alone is insufficient because for some reason Google changed the suffix for New Zealand from ".com" to ".co".
I will get an email into Google to see if they can implement a scheme to only add a suffix. Then I still need to get Echo to do something or alternatively write a Java script to strip off the language code.
Anyone using Echo with blogger is going to have these same issues.
Twitter Employs "Filtering" as Well
Tech Week Europe reports Google To Censor Blogger Sites On Country-By-Country Basis
Google follows Twitter’s lead and will use country-code top level domains to censor content as required.
Google has revealed that its Blogger service will now be able to block content on a country-by-country basis, just one week after Twitter announced that it would implementing a similar filtering strategy.
“Migrating to localised domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law,” wrote Google on a help page. “By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.”
Twitter’s decision to introduce this selective censorship attracted criticism from users last week, suggesting that the site was effectively aiding oppressive regimes squash freedom of speech. Google’s implementation has been lower key, and whilst critics will argue the same points, the company has emphasised that the measure will prevent blanket censorship of content whilst keeping them in line with the law.
The BBC reports that Google will initially roll out the changes to Australia, New Zealand and India, but plan to apply the measures globally.
More Tech Week "Tweet" Articles
Twitter said that it must begin censoring tweets, if the company was going to continue to continue its international expansion. Twitter has been blocked by a number of governments, including China and the former Egyptian regime after it was used to ignite anti-government protests.
Big Brother is watching.
However, it's too late to worry about 1984. The worry now is if the next stop is the Year 2525 where "Everything you think do and say is in the pill you took today".
Judge Denies Twitter Data Block Request
A decision in US federal court means Twitter will have to cooperate with prosecutors in their ongoing WikiLeaks probe
10 January,2012
A federal judge has denied a request that would have temporarily blocked Twitter from turning over account data to United States prosecutors investigating the whistleblower site WikiLeaks and its publication of classified government documents. The request sought to prevent the transfer while a federal appeals court was considering the case.
US District Court Judge Liam O’Grady denied the request because he felt the appeal has little chance of success since the law “overwhelmingly” supported the government’s case.
“Litigation of these issues has already denied the government lawful access to potential evidence for more than a year,” O’Grady said in his ruling.
Grand jury investigation
In connection with its grand jury investigation into the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, the Department of Justice issued a “secret” order last year to Twitter demanding account information belonging to Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of the Icelandic parliament; Rop Gonggijp, a Dutch activist; and Jacob Appelbaum, a computer security researcher who supports WikiLeaks. The three were named because they had supported WikiLeaks publicly on Twitter in the past.
The order demanded information such as subscriber names, contact information, billing records, user activity such as when the user connected and for how long, IP addresses and email addresses.
The order also included a “gag,” which prevented Twitter from notifying the implicated users about the request for information.
Twitter fought the original order in court and won the right to inform Jonsdottir, Gonggjip and Appelbaum about the government order. However, a federal judge in Virginia ruled in March last year that Twitter still had to hand over account details to the government.
Judge Theresa Buchanan, in the Eastern District of Virginia, ruled that because the government was not seeking the content of the Twitter accounts, the subjects could not challenge the government’s request for the records.
Standards
Governments should be required to meet a high standard before demanding private information about users from online services, Cindy Cohn, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights advocacy and legal organisation, said at the time.
“The court is telling all users of online tools hosted in the US that the US government will have secret access to their data,” said Jonsdottir in a statement.
Data posted on social-networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook are increasingly being used as evidence in court, and judges have upheld previous requests for user data from various companies.
The government successfully obtained Appelbaum’s account data from Google and Internet service provider Sonic.net in November. Google was directed to hand over the IP address Appelbaum used to log into his Gmail account as well as the email and IP addresses of anyone he communicated with going back to 1 November, 2009.
The Sonic order sought the same type of information, including the email addresses of people with whom Appelbaum communicated but not the contents.
EFF is also concerned about the increasing pressure on Twitter to shut down user accounts from the micro-blogging site. EFF cited a recent article in The New York Times in which anonymous United States officials claimed they “may have the legal authority to demand” that Twitter shut down an account associated with a militant Somali group, requests from Senator Joseph Lieberman to remove accounts allegedly run by the Taliban, and the threat of a lawsuit from an Israeli law firm over accounts supposedly affiliated with Hezbollah.
Censorship
“If the US were to pressure Twitter to censor tweets by organisations it opposes, even those on the terrorist lists, it would join the ranks of countries like India, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Syria, Uzbekistan, all of which have censored online speech in the name of ‘national security,’” Jillian C. York, director for international freedom of expression at the EFF, and Trevor Timm, an EFF activist, wrote on 6 January on the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
Shutting down activity on a “neutral communications service” like Twitter would set a dangerous precedent, “like criminalising pens and pencils or typewriters and computers based on what people choose to say when using them,” York and Timm wrote.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.