If you love google and other search engines...you might want to re-think that?

by Alpaca 12 Replies latest jw friends

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  Alpaca

  We have arrived at a time & place where we take access to information for granted. Easy, right...you type your query into the search engine and bam, you've got 100 gazillion hits on your subject. And, most of us are saavy enough to know that a preponderance of the info is total bullshit. Then it becomes a process of winnowing out the truth or at least the most accurate info you can find.

  But, what if the truth wasn't even in the returns? What if it had been deliberately removed so that all you had access to was the bullshit? Being human, you would end up winnowing and you would begin to draw conclusions based on the info you had available to you, but your conclusions would be irrelevant in the overall scheme of things, because the "truth" was unavailable to you.

  That is exactly the agreement the Chinese government has extracted from the search engines, like google or yahoo, that want to provide their services in China. The Chinese internet is connected to the rest of world across an electronic "gate" that has been deemed the "Great Firewall of China." It is literally a set of huge cables that convey electronic data between China and the rest of the world. Anything from outside the borders of China is highly censored at the "Great Firewall."

  I experienced this for myself when I was in China in 2006. If you type "Tianenmen Square" into any search engine all of the returns are about happy tourists and history, blah, blah, blah.....or if you type "Tianenmen Square Massacre" into the search engines, it will give you a message that says "your search returned no results." Any of the search engines that operate in China do so with a version that is distinguished by a ".cn" extension. All of the search engines are whores and they agreed to it because it meant they could make money in China if they agreed to the government's censorship standards. BTW, they had to create new programs and softwares that would automatically insert the Boolean operators that would restrict the results.

  Think it can't happen here?
• 

  Finally-Free

  Think it can't happen here?

  Sometimes I think it's already happened here to some extent.

  W
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  mkr32208

  I dunno type "gay republicans" and search google images and see the broke back mountain posters with cheney in them... As long as we can get that I think we're ok for now!!!
• 

  Hittman

  Think it can't happen here?
  
  It almost happened in Austraula, but was pulled at the last minute. The excuse, of course, was to protect the chillllllldereeeeeen. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see it happen in the US.
  
  If it does it will first be presented as a protection against kiddie porn. And then, little by little, things will be added to it, like bomb making materials, copyright movies and music, and a little more and a little more. . . .
• 

  Satanus

  China has had a central control concept since it's first emperer a couple of thousand yrs ago. China is the oldest and most stable country, possibly the most enduring. It's nature is to tend to things internal, nonexpansionism.

  The trend in the west, since the second world war has been the making available of more information. Dispite the best efforts of the recording companies, they have not been able to stop the sharing of music. W the increases in internet speeds, movies can now be shared. Books, the same thing. The nature of western civilzation is to externalise, to implement creativity in practical ways. The most creative tend to break things to see how they work. And so, i don't think that that kind of censorship will work here. What is working to an extent, is the adding of a lot of bs to truths.. It's a similar tactic to one used by a leperchaun in a kids' story. In it, a guy catches a leperchaun w his pot of gold under a tree. The guy ties a ribbon on that tree and makes the leperchaun promis to leave it there, while he goes to get a shovel and wheel barrel. The leperchaun promises. When the guy returns, he finds ribbons tied onto all of the trees. The truth is out there, it's just really hard to distinguish it from the bs.

  S
• 

  MissingLink

  Are there any good search engines who aren't soiled by this?
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  cameo-d

  I have seen evidence of information that was available last year which has been replaced, rewritten and "sanitized" .

  And now, each site that had info on that particular document has the very same "sanitized" version, with none of the previous commentaries by the website.

  Also, I have posted info from other sites and found the info I copied was immediately removed within a few days from the website where I obtained it!
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  beksbks

  Cameo, can you give some examples? I wanna check it out!
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  Seeker4

  If it happens here, some genuis rebel would set up another search engine that wouldn't be censored. It'sin our nature.

  But I agree, shame on Google and Yahoo and whoever else went along with this just to get access to the Chinese billions.

  Maybe they felt that something was better than nothing. At least get in there, then try to change the system.

  S4
• 

  Alpaca

  Thanks for all of the input.

  What scares the shit out of me is this...the founding fathers recognized that one of the ingredients of a healthy democracy is freedom of the press...ie., to allow the free flow of information without governmental constraints.

  We have entered an era that will probably witness the demise of most, if not all newspapers and news magazines. If electronic forums become the primary (only?) source of information available there is will be no way to know how information is being filtered at the behest of a government's "requests." The reality of "1984" can no longer be dismissed as remote or "quaint" in the way that it once was. I don't know about you guys, but I trust the American government to do the right thing only slightly more than I do the Chinese government.

  Dissenters might have no other choice but to go back to hard copy and share information through their networks the old fashioned way. Ironically, maybe new newspapers would flourish???

  In any event, I think it safe to say that we should question everything, and accept nothing at face value.