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January 31, 2006

links for 2006-01-30

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January 30, 2006

links for 2006-01-29

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January 28, 2006

links for 2006-01-27

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January 27, 2006

links for 2006-01-26

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January 26, 2006

Testing the "Castrated" Google

Xiao Qiang at China Digital Times has just posted a translation of a Chinese blog post calling Google.cn the "eunuch version."  The author of "Zhengweekly blog" is reassured that Google.com can still be accessed by those who know how to change their user preferences. However, he is worried that things are going to get worse quickly:

...the non-castrated version of Google still can be visited. The Google company statement is understandable and can be accepted: "While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.”

But I have heard some terrible news, which I cannot verify: In the future, for mainland users, only the Eunuch version will be available. If you type in www.google.com, the system will automatically switch you to www.google.cn

That will be terrible. If Google does this, it will be dammed. This company that self-claims "don't do evil" will become the son of Satan completely. It will not only be condemned by global users, but will also be marginalized in China.

It's true that representatives of Google, when talking to me and various journalists, have been making much of the fact that Google.com will remain available to users inside China. If it becomes completely unavailable, and Google does not try to fight government moves to block Google.com, they will have gone several more steps in buttressing the Chinese Firewall.

Meanwhile, people are starting to test out the new Google.cn and see how Google's censorship compares to other people's censorship. It will be interesting to see how things evolve over the coming weeks. After playing with various search strings the Open Net Initiative's Nart Villeneuve concludes: "This filtering is quite similar to the filtering conducted by domestic Chinese search engines." He provides a list of websites (like Human Rights Watch, Radio Free Asia, etc.) which he concludes have been "delisted from Chinese Google."

My colleague Ethan Zuckerman has a long analysis of the Google China situation, and also did a bit of testing with the Chinese characters for "Taishi village" - one of the several villages in Southern China where villagers have been in conflict with local authorities over corruption issues. He describes his results:

You’ll notice that the top results for the search on the US search engine are for wikipedia pages. Wikipedia is currently blocked in China - evidently, Google.cn is not providing links to these wikipedia pages in compliance with the wishes of the Chinese government - Google.cn results don’t include the wikipedia pages. It’s also worth noting that the Google.cn search lists about 11,000 matches while the Google.com search lists almost 50,000 matches. That’s a pretty major disparity.

My schedule over the past 24 hours has been nuts so I havent had the chance to play with Google.cn I would have liked, but I went on Google.cn and did a search with the Chinese characters for "Dong Zhou" village - where police recently shot unarmed villagers - to see what would happen. The search turned up a number of results talking about the incident as a "blood crime" or "massacre".

At the bottom of each page of results there is a notice to the user: "In accordance with local law, regulations, and government policies, a portion of search results are not shown."

Google_dongzhou_search_cropped

A search in Chinese on google.com, not surprisingly turned up a lot more results critical of the shooting - including pages from dissident websites that have been removed completely from the Google.cn search universe.

Similar results for Dong Zhou on Yahoo and the popular Chinese search engine Baidu showed only benign tourist and commercial information - on the first few pages of results anyway. There is no notification to the user anywhere that results have been filtered.

Going forward, it will be interesting to see whether the Google.cn search results begin to resemble Yahoo's and Baidu's more closely over time, or whether Google.cn's filtering remains looser than the competition's.   

If Google wants to show that it is truly serious about doing the right thing in China it should:

1. Make its "block list" public, and disclose the laws, regulations, and procedures that have required these specific words and URL's to be blocked. We're respecting Chinese law, right? So name the laws you're respecting and how you're respecting them.

2. Fight to prevent Google.com from being blocked, and if it does become completely blocked, consider discontinuing Google.cn.

3. If the Chinese government makes unreasonable requests for search result data, do the same thing you did to the U.S. Department of Justice: just say no. Othewise, you'll be sending the message that you respect U.S. users much more than you respect Chinese users.

4. Establish clear procedures for your local China-based staff: if a government official calls your Beijing office demanding particular information be blocked or handed over, the request must adhere to strict company protocols and procedures so that senior management can rest assured that the request was indeed made and handled in accordance with laws that actually apply to the situation at hand, and whether the information in question even falls under the jusisdiction of those laws - and that any action taken by the company was done in keeping with the company's code of conduct.  It's pretty common for low and mid-ranking officials in China to make orders on their own initiative to protect their own personal interests or interests of their friends (or people who bribe them) - these are often orders that don't actually reflect central policy. Major multinational companies should not be rolling over and playing dead every time some cop picks up the phone and says "boo."  Right now most information technology companies operating in China don't even defend the rights and interests of their users to the full extent of Chinese law.

Will Google try to be different?  Will they succeed in being different? Or will they submit passively to full castration like the others have done?  Let's see.

Posted at 02:41 PM in Censorship, China, Corporate Responsibility, Freedom of Speech | | Comments (16) | TrackBack (12)

Sex at Davos

No I'm not at Davos this week, in case you hadn't already guessed. I went three years in a row, but was not invited back this year. I'm in very good company, and agree with Joi Ito's perspective on being an ex-Davosian. Some people have asked me whether I didn't get invited back because I actively blogged about the Eason Jordan incident last year. Hard to say. Rony Abovitz, who initially blogged Jordan's ill-fated Davos remarks, was invited back as a member of the Technology Pioneer program which he is entitled to be part of for three years. (Rony has been blogging about his reflections one year later here and here.) At any rate, I am glad to see that the Davos Blog is still going, although they're not letting people post directly without first having their content vetted. This year, the blog-nannies will be making sure that anything meant to be off the record stays off the record... and that things don't get too out of hand...

So it's up to out-liers like me to pass on juicy tidbits of Davos gossip. Which brings me to the real subject of this post. While I can confirm that sex does indeed happen at Davos, it appears that many of the type-A overachieving attendees could use a little help. A source of mine who is in Davos right now forwarded me the description of a panel scheduled for Thursday afternoon:
------

All You Ever Wanted to Know about Relationships -- But Were Afraid to Ask

Date:  Thursday, 26 Jan 2006

Time:15.00 - 18.00

Location:Rotary, Hotel Belvédère

Relationships and sexuality may be the only truly universal part of human life. Early childhood attachments and experiences can result in patterns that sometimes need to be relearned if we are to build lasting relationships in an increasingly stressful world. Join this session with a leading sexologist to discuss what makes relationships work.
1) Why is emotional self-knowledge such a taboo in society?
2) Why does the way we allocate our personal time often threaten our relationships and sex lives?
3) What are some of the tools to overcome old patterns and keep desire flowing?

Presented by:

Dagmar O'Connor      Psychologist      Dagmedia Corp.

----
I'll be curious to hear whether many CEOs show up for this one...

Posted at 08:44 AM in Davos | | Comments (7) | TrackBack (2)

links for 2006-01-25

Posted at 01:18 AM | | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

January 25, 2006

Google in China: degrees of evil

So it has happened. Google has caved in. It has agreed to actively censor a new Chinese-language search service that will be housed on computer servers inside the PRC.

Obviously this contradicts its stated desire to make information freely available to everybody on the planet, and it contradicts its mission statement: "don't be evil."  As Mike Langberg at the San Jose Mercury News puts it: their revised motto should now read "don't be evil more than necessary."

Everybody and their dog is reporting on this new development, and I've even been quoted. But as of this writing the new Google.cn service has not actually gone live (right now when you type Google.cn into your browser you are re-directed to: http://www.google.com/ig?hl=zh-CN , which is their Chinese language service hosted in the U.S.). Nobody has yet had the chance actually to see this Google.cn. So what do we know? We know that they - like everybody else doing internet information services in China - are committing evil.  But I want to get a better sense for exactly where they rank on the evil scale. To give them a score, I need to see and play with the search engine, but since it's not up yet, I can't.

(UPDATE AT 8:40am EST Weds: I still can't access Google.cn but apparently some in China now can. The Chinese blogger "Undersound" has some initial Chinese blogger reactions over at Global Voices. He includes a link to a screenshot showing what the censor message looks like in the search results.)

What we do know at this point is that Google seems to be trying to minimize it's evilness in several ways, according to how their statements describe the service:

1.  Google says they will put up a notice at the bottom of the search page informing users when the results have been filtered. To my knowledge, none of their competitors in China are doing this. Therefore, while not escaping evilness, they do get a brownie point for being more transparent and honest with Chinese users than their competition. But to see how big this brownie point should be, we need to look at where that notification is placed on the page and how obvious it is to the user. We also need to see whether the Chinese government tries to get them to remove that notice, and if so whether they hold their ground.

2. They say that they will have a link somewhere on the Google.cn page enabling users to access the U.S.-hosted version at: http://www.google.com/ig?hl=zh-CN. So that Chinese users who prefer can opt for the pre-Google.cn experience. The question is: how prominent will this option be on the page and how well explained will it be? Will it be something that only a very small number of people know to use? Or will it be promoted and clearly explained as an option?   Also, what happens if the Chinese netnannies use the existence of Google.cn as an excuse to block the U.S.-hosted Google entirely? That would be very bad. And if that happens, how will Google respond? Will they shrug their shoulders and sigh? Or will they push back?

3. Google says it has opted not to provide any services such as email or blogging services that would require hosting user data inside Chinese jurisdiction. This is a clear choice they have made to avoid having to turn users over to the Chinese police as Yahoo did or to censor bloggers as Microsoft does. Will they stick to this choice or will the lure of business draw them deeper into evilness?

I don't like the fact that Google is censoring in China at all. Google spokespeople liken what they do in China to the filtering they do in France and Germany - censoring porn and Nazi sites in compliance with their laws. I do not believe you can compare compliance to laws in democratic societies to what they're doing in China. In France and Germany, there is some connection between the laws and the user's consent. People in those countries have the ability to vote out of office the politicians who make unpopular laws. Chinese users have no way of punishing their government for its censorship policies by voting the current group of leaders out of office.

But now that Google is censoring, I think we need to watch very closely to see how transparent it will be about what it's censoring and why: how honest it is going to be with Chinese users? One of the big problems with the search experience in China right now is that if you use Yahoo or Baidu or Sina search, you have no way of knowing that information exists out there that you've been denied access to. Google will at least be letting people know: "hey, there's a lot more out there which people outside China can see, but your government won't let me show it to you." That is at least a positive step towards honesty and respect for the Chinese user's intelligence. Will that lead to greater user trust and thus greater competitive advantage? If so, might that force other companies to be more honest with their users as well?  Or is this all wishful dreaming?

At the end of the day, this compromise puts Google a little lower on the evil scale than many other internet companies in China. But is this compromise something Google should be proud of? No. They have put a foot further into the mud. Now let's see whether they get sucked in deeper or whether they end up holding their ground.

On another related development: Today the Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) that technology companies seem to be discussing a possible industry-wide code of conduct for doing business in China:

...some U.S. tech companies are working behind the scenes to craft for the Internet in China an equivalent of the Sullivan Principles, guidelines formulated in the 1970s that helped mobilize U.S. corporate divestment to protest South African apartheid.

It will be very interesting to see if that really ends up happening.

Posted at 12:49 PM in Censorship, China, Corporate Responsibility, Freedom of Speech | | Comments (20) | TrackBack (24)

links for 2006-01-24

Posted at 01:17 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Now posting my del.icio.us links to this blog

I am not the world's most prolific blogger but I am a heavy user of the del.icio.us bookmarking system. I frequently bookmark things that I want to blog about, but then never wind up having time.

Fortunately the folks at del.icio.us have solved my problem by setting up a cool new feature that will automatically post the stuff I'm bookmarking directly to my blog every day.

That's why, for the past couple of days, you've been seeing posts with lists of links. I hope people find it useful. Sometimes it may get a bit random - but it's my way of saying: here are the interesting things I came across on the web today.

Instructions for setting up the service on your own Typepad blog can be found here and here. I have seen the same feature appearing on Wordpress and Movable Type blogs, and I'm sure it's possible to figure out how to do it on other platforms as well.

Posted at 12:50 AM in Daily Links | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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