Rebecca Mackinnon has the goods on Yahoo. By going through proxies, she’s discovered that Yahoo, unlike Google, actively censors results. For example, if you search for “Tiananmen massacre” (in Chinese) with either Yahoo or Google within China, you get no results. But if you do the same search by getting to the Chinese versions of the search engines but without using Chinese ISPs, you get results from Google but not from Yahoo. Conclusion: Chinese ISPs filter out results from Google, but Chinese Yahoo does the dirty work itself. So, if you’re in China and manage to find a way past your local totalitarian ISPs, Yahoo still won’t give you results, but Google will. Or, as Rebecca more clearly puts it:

What do these screenshots illustrate? They show that Yahoo! actively filters politically sensitive terms from within its own service. Even if a Chinese user finds a way to access Yahoo from outside China or via a foreign proxy server, they will still get filtered search results on politically sensitive terms. By contrast, Google does not actively filter. The filtering of Google search results is done only by the Chinese ISP… although Google helps hide this process from Chinese users by choosing not to show results that the Chinese user would be unable to access.

I understand that life is complex. I would have been happy to read that Google had decided not to do business with China, but I am fine with Google’s decision to engage there. Likewise for Yahoo. And once you’re doing business in a country, you have to follow its laws. We would accept no less of a foreign company doing business in the US. But someone in Yahoo got a list of search terms the Chinese want blocked. They looked down the list and saw “Tiananmen Massacre,” “Dalai Lama,” “Falun Gong,” and maybe “democracy.” “Yup,” this person thought, “Our product can do that. No problemo.” Thus Yahoo wrote into its code the repressive values of the Chinese government. More important, it actively sealed off a way for the Chinese people to route around fascism.

As a netizen, I’d like to hear from Yahoo about why they took this particular step. And then I’d like to hear about what they’re doing about it.

(Here‘s a report on the sites China filters)

[Tags: yahoo google china RebeccaMackinnon]

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Gary Lerphaut of Prodigem, a marketplace for Torrents (which I blogged about here), has put together the Prodigem Enclosure Puller ( which he blogs about here), an example of Prodigem’s new API. Give it a feed — say, the del.icio.us feed of popular videos — and it will create torrents of every enclosure it finds. As Gary points out, in this example the world (= del.icio.us users) chooses its favorite videos and PEP automatically makes them available as torrents. Again as Gary puts it, it’s Web 2.0 at work, stitching together new apps out of old. [Tags: prodigem delicious folksonomy web2.0 bittorrent]

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Quicken has been around since 1775. It is in version #2,356. How can it still have stupid, irritating, data-swallowing bugs in it?

Using the latest version, I have in the past ten minutes hit three bugs.

1. Write a check to an online payee for whom you use the curly braces to embed a hint that’s invisible to the recipient. E.g., You might have an account such as “Cingular {The mother-effing home account}.” Press “Record Check” because you’re done. Quicken pops up a reminder that the stuff in curly braces won’t appear on the check. I’ve been getting that message for 176 years, which is fine. The problem is that after you click on the message’s OK button, every time it gives you the same message again. Now that‘s annoying.

2. Start to fill in a check. Choose one of the memorized transactions. It fills in the name. Have a moment of doubt about the name. So, go to the list of online accounts and check out the name. It’s fine. Go back to the check-writing window. You get a dialog box that says “You have changed the last transaction you were viewing. Save it now?” Yes, no, or cancel. Since you want to fill it in, you don’t want to save it yet. You also don’t want to not save it. You want to cancel the dialogue box. Press Cancel. You get the same dialog again. The Cancel button is a no-op.

3. This is the REALLY annoying one, but I’m not sure I remember the exact sequence. It goes something like this: Fill in a check’s name and click on Split so you can enter multiple entries because you’re trying to pay off a credit card. (Oops, make sure you fill in an amount first or else it won’t let you get to the Split window, even though you may want to fill in the entries and have Quicken figure out the amount. Oh well.) Spend ten minutes filling in the entries. (Be sure to consolidate some of the entries because after 4,000 years of existence, Quicken still arbitrarily limits splits to 30 entries.) It’s a pain in the neck but the tax folks need to know the breakdown. Press the “Adjust” button so that the amount of the check equals the sum of the entries. Perfect! Now you’re back at the check writing window. Type your account info into the memo area of the check. Click “Record Check.” You get a dialog box telling you that the check’s total does not match the sum of the entries even though you are 100% certain that you pressed the “Adjust” button. Click on “Split” so you can re-press the Adjust button. Quicken has now replaced all the entries with the entries from the previous check you wrote to that account.

4. Say aaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhh!

[Tags: quicken bugs whines]

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Salon’s Tim Grieve has the story of the Bush administration’s appointment of a male trained as a veterinarian to head up the Office of Women’s Health, an announcement that seems to have been quickly un-announced in favor of the appointment of a woman Associate FDA Commissioner. (Ok, so Norris Alderon, the guy, has also been an FDA Asssociate Commissioner for Science. But, jeez, he’s also listed as the Federal Lbaoratory Consortium’s current Lab Representative for the Center of Veterinary Medicine. I mean, he still has one hand up a horse’s butt.)

BTW, Alderson is listed on the Health and Human Service’s official page on Women’s Health as “Acting Director, Office of Women’s Health” under the FDA. Since HHS has an Office on Women’s Health and the FDA has an Office of Women’s Health, it’s a little confusing for the likes me. I breathlessly await intricate explanations, which I also won’t understand. [Tags: politics]

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The Times has a good editorial on the normalcy of gay marriage. Apparently here in Masachusetts, a year of legalized same-sex marriage has not led us down the slippery slope of incest, child rape and bestiality. Despite the warnings of some conservatives, it turns out that we Americans are not so easily led into sin.

Of course, the United States is #42 (and falling) in the world when it comes to low infant mortality rates, so I can understand why it’s so important for the protectors of family values to focus on making sure that the reproductive equipment of loving couples meets their standards for sufficient differentiation.

[Note to the literal-minded: The above paragraph uses a familiar literary technique in which one says the opposite of what one means in order to make a point. In case you have trouble decoding sarcasm, I’m saying that there are far more important family-oriented issues than same-sex marriage. If you are still confused, please send $10 to the ACLU and they’ll be happy to explain it to you.] [Tags: gay homosexuality politics]

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The Berkman Center now has a page for its podcasts. Yay! (Thank you, Danny Silverman.)

Here’s the podcast of Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi‘s 45 minute discussion at the Center. Dr. E is AT&T’s CTO. Everyone in the discussion believes passionately that the Net needs to be free and open. But the disagreement about what those values mean and how to instantiate them in bits, silicon and policy was stark and deep. (And polite.)

The discussion centered on whether we need to change the Internet’s architecture to solve some of its problems. Do you have to make it intelligent by putting sensors into it to prevent viruses from spreading? Do businesses need the AT&T and Intel reference chip that will shut down a computer rather than run a downloaded malware program that has not been certified? Would this become a tool by which policy makers could decide that, say, a P2P client is malware because it could be used to circumvent DRM or circumvent a totalitarian government’s desire to filter all conversation? Are open wifi hotspots theft? (See John Palfrey’s account of the discussion for a good, fair overview.)

The topic of the discussion is central to the fate of the Internet. There were surprising moments. I think it’s worth a listen. [Tags: HosseinEslambolchi berkman internet]

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I met with Siderean‘s Robert Petrossian and Brad Allen a couple of days ago to hear about where the company is going. They’re up to some very interesting stuff that might both spread tagging and make it more useful. Siderean says it sells navigation software, by which they mean their stuff helps users navigate big, complex sets of information. At its heart, Siderean is a faceted classification provider. [Note: If you already understand faceted classification, skip the rest of this paragraph and the next.] FC is hard to explain without a demo, but here goes: Take a set of data with multiple categories of metadata, or, if you prefer, multiple columns. Expose to the user the categories plus the sets of values. E.g., a database of restaurants might have columns for type of food, review stars, and price ranges. The faceted system would show you all the values in each of those three categories of metadata. If you click first on “Price Range: Cheap,” you’ll see a list of all the restaurants that match that criterion. On the side there will be a list that lets you click on values in Review Stars or Types of Food. If there are no Cheap restaurants that have 5 stars, you simply are not given the 5-star option.

Whew. If you want to see faceted classification in action, the Resource Connection is a Siderean customer with a site you can try.

So, faceted classification lets users walk through a complex tree of data, choosing which branches, without ever coming to a branch with no leaves. The tree is not pre-computed. It constructs itself as the user decides first to go down this branch and then down that. That’s incredibly useful, especially as the data sets get large, because the owners of the information don’t have to dictate what the proper (= only) path through it is. Siderean has always allowed their customers to embed hierarchical trees within their faceted classification system when appropriate. E.g., if someone is navigating via the geography category, the system can know that SoHo is in NYC which is in NY state which is in the US. And Siderean has shown an early curiosity about tags: Its fac.etio.us thought-experiment/demo turns del.icio.us bookmarks into a faceted system. Now, I learned, future releases of their navigation software are going to incorporate tagging more directly, enabling users to annotate/tag the data they find. This is exciting not just because, culturally, tagging breaks the old assumption that the owners of information own the organization of that information, but also because a faceted system might add a right amount of organization to a pile of tags, making that pile far more useful. Imagine a folksonomic faceted system. Now draw it on a hyper-napkin and send it to me, because I have trouble imagining it. Of course, it all depends on the particularities of Siderean’s implementation… [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous taxonomy siderean tags tagging]

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Tom Matrullo points to two portraits of life in the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. The better — more vivid — is a 12 minute piece by John Burnett on All Things Considered. The Washington Post article is good but far more confined. It is horrific. I only wish it were beyond belief. It seems only the Arabian horse liposuction guy is going to be held accountable. [Tags: HurricaneKatrina]

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Wimp.com has a mockumentary (by Otis Productions) about the person who writes the Bushisms. It stars Andy Dick and I think it’s funny. [Tags: GeorgeBush humor]

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The September issue of Premiere runs its list of the 20 most overrated movies of all time. Their list, which they run in alphabetical order:

2001
A Beautiful Mind
American Beauty
An American in Paris
Chariots of Fire
Chicago
Clerks
Easy Rider
Fantasia
Forrest Gump
Field of Dreams
Gone with the Wind
Good Will Hunting
Jules and Jim
Monster’s Ball
Moonstruck
Mystic River
Nashville
The Red Shoes
The Wizard of Oz

Some I totally agree with (American Beauty). Others I’d forgotten were ever considered particularly good (Moonstruck). Some I think were put there just to be controversial. I mean, knocking The Wizard of Oz for “Technicolor at its most garish” sort of misses the historical perspective that a film magazine ought to provide, doesn’t it?

Anyway, here are some I’d add to my own personal list, in no particular order. ((bp= won Best Picture)

Animal House
Dances with Wolves (bp)
Titanic (bp)
The Usual Suspects
Fight Club
Barton Fink
Platoon (bp)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
It’s a Wonderful Life
Norma Rae
Braveheart (bp)
Young Frankenstein
The Piano
Seventh Seal
Being There
Gladiator (bp)
The English Patient (bp)
The Third Man
The Third Man’s zither music

This list was compiled at great expense, involving a team of white-coated researchers and the latest in nanotechnology. Thus, it cannot be wrong. [Tags: movies]

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