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The Internet Bubble, And How To Escape It

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:55:32 +0000

Many search engines are no longer tools that you use to find unfiltered results. Modern search engines like Google Search or Bing filter results for each individual user to display what they think are the most useful results for that particular user. This means that ten people who search for the same search phrase at the same time may get ten totally different results.

How do they do that? Search engines use a variety of factors, including a user’s search history, likes, browser or location to filter results. While this may seem harmless at first, it has consequences that are hard to detect.

It first means that websites and services may get demoted in the results if the search engine thinks they are less useful to you. This in turn may limit access to information, as results are moved to the back pages. It may also mean that you will see more news and information that you agree with and less that you would disagree with.

Companies like Google are also pushing more of their own content into the results, either by favoring sites such as YouTube or Google+ in the results, or by plastering ads in so many locations that it becomes harder to distinguish them from the search results.

But it is not only the search engines that filter information for users. Facebook does it to, by looking at a user’s likes and links that get clicked on. You may as a consequence see more news that some users post, and less that others post.

This algorithmic approach has its flaws, which many users may not realize immediately. Many may feel confirmed in their believes and ideas when the majority of information they see are tailored to their likes. The danger here is that these users will only see one piece of the puzzle, that they will miss out on information and that this leads to uneducated decisions.

Take a look at this Ted Talk video about the Filter Bubble concept:

Escape

It is not easy to escape the bubble completely. When it comes to search engines, you can move to engines that do not filter or personalize results. This means no Google, no Bing, no Yahoo but search engines like DuckDuckGo. But search engines are not the only ones that filter and personalize results.

Switching to another search engine is one thing, but what about sites like Facebook? You could obviously move to another social networking site or none at all, but most users are likely not willed to make that step. One option would be to contact the site owners or support to let them know how you feel about it, and that you want unfiltered news and information.

The thing is, if you want access to unfiltered information, you need to compromise. And this means letting services and websites know how you feel about the issue, and if nothing changes switching to other services that do not filter data in that extent.

Filters are not that far away from censorship and manipulation. And that’s scary.

What’s your take on the matter?

Explicit Web Contents Soon Opt-In In The UK

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:22:25 +0000

In the latest Orwellian move to restrict the rights of their citizens, the UK government has come to an agreement with the four largest Internet Service Providers to censor explicit contents on the ISP level. The standard – it is for the best of the children – argument has been made to justify the censorship of web contents.

The four ISPs that have agreed to block explicit web contents – read porn at the time of writing – are Sky, British Telecom, Talk Talk and Virgin according to The Guardian newspaper. Subscribers to those ISPs need to opt-in to be able to view explicit contents on the Internet.

It is expected that the prime minister David Cameron will announce further moves like restricting “aggressive advertising campaigns and certain types of images on billboards”. Those obviously will come without opt-in options.

The government furthermore plans to unleash a website called Parentport to the public which citizens can use to “complain about television programmes, advertisements, products or services which they believe are inappropriate for children”.

It is interesting to note that the government believes that they can filter out all explicit contents on the Internet this way. Web filters, even on the ISP level, have weaknesses. This includes not only that they will never have a 100% detection rate, but also that the likelihood of false positives is high.

It is also not clear at the time of writing if individual web pages will get blocked or the entire domain.

That’s beneficial for the Orwellian phantasies of the British government in two ways. They first have established censorship on the ISP level, supported by parts of the population. The term explicit contents, adult contents or even porn is vague at best which leaves lots of room for interpretations. Will this only include images and videos or other forms like texts as well.

Vagueness actually is a common denominator in public state-driven censorship. From a concerned citizen perspective it all boils down to the question of power. Who has the power to decide what to censor and what not to, and what quality objective guidelines are available to base that decision on?

Others might say that violence, drugs, computer games, weapons, Tom and Jerry, The Simpsons or Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet should also fall under that censorship.

It is also interesting to note that part of the users who would opt-in won’t because of fear of landing on “the country’s perverts list”.

It is not clear yet how users can opt-in. Do they have to phone their ISP asking for permission to watch porn on the Internet? The opt-in cannot be anonymous, and it would not make sense to display options to opt-in right on the blocked web page.

Update: BBC now contradicts earlier reports stating that parents can opt-in to filter specific types of websites during sign-up (presumably like Open DNS offers packages to block certain types of sites).

Australia delays controversial web-filtering

Mike Halsey MVP — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:52:31 +0000

The Australian government is delaying the implementation of controversial web-filtering to conduct an independent review of websites that are due to be blocked the BBC has reported.

The filter is part of a long-standing plan by the Australian government to block the countries access to dangerous and inappropriate web content, but it has come under repeated attack from Internet and privacy activists who claim that it is a breach of people’s civil liberties and human rights.

The country’s Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, said the review was needed to see if the scheme “reflects current community standards”.

He said the review would look at what content should fall under the “refused classification” rating that would result in it being banned. The Australian government has yet to vote on making the censorship mandatory for all ISPs.

In Australia, films that feature a high level of sexual or violent content or that deal with “drug misuse, addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena” and that “offend the standards of morality” are rated RC and banned. This rating system also applies to video games but critics argue that it is not appropriate to apply the same rules to the Internet.

The move would make Australia the world’s only demoncratic country to block portions of the Internet. The only other countries to do so tend to be communist or opressive regimes such as China and North Korea.

While the idea behind the move, which would make it much harder for people to access images of, for instance, child abuse is laudable, the move is still seen as deeply unpopular with one Australian Senator suggesting that the review is a way to “clear away bad news” in the run up to a general Election.

Pakistan Blocks YouTube

Mike Halsey MVP — Thu, 20 May 2010 15:37:44 +0000

There have been an increasing number of internet censorship instances in the last couple of years including China blocking access to news sites during the Beijing Olympics to that terrible opponent of free-speech, Australia. Now Pakistan is on the case, blocking YouTube for what it calls “growing sacrilegious content” the BBC has written.

This is not the first website to be blocked in Pakistan. Facebook was previously blocked due to…

”a row over a competition involving caricatures of Prophet Muhammad”

The Pakistani government has issued instructions to all the countries Internet service providers, instructing them to block access to the popular video website with immediate effect.

It is also being reported that some pages on Wikipedia are also being blocked.

Internet censorship, especially in democratic countries such as Australia and Pakistan will inevitably come under increasing scrutiny in the coming years after the United Nations’ recent announcement that unrestricted Internet access should be considered a “basic human right”. The UN has yet to issue a statement, though we can assume that private discussions may well be taking place between Pakistani and UN officials in New York or Geneva.

So what does this mean for freedom on speech and freedom of expression? I don’t believe anybody should get too concerned about countries such as Australia and Pakistan censoring certain websites over religious or adult content sensibilities at the moment. The Internet is such a vast, and completely free (some would even say anarchistic) wonderland, that all countries around the world, including the US and western Europe, are still trying to figure out how this all fits in with their own privacy, copyright and defamation laws.

The time is coming though for the United Nations to set out what is and is not acceptable on the Internet. This will give countries guidelines for blocking content that other people will consider perfectly acceptable.

Google Government Requests

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 08:34:44 +0000

Google yesterday released a new tool that they call Government Requests tool which is a visual representation of the request Google received from government agencies to remove content or provide information about users of their services and products.

The map shows the number of requests that Google has received between July 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009. The numbers are slightly misleading as they refer to single requests which may have asked for the removal of more than one url or disclosure of more than one user.

The data is divided into data requests and removal requests. Data requests ask for information about Google users or products while removal requests ask for content removal in Google Search or other Google products.

The statistics also do not cover all categories of content removal. Child pornography and requests for removal of copyrighted material are not included for instance.

Brazil tops the data request table with 3663 single requests followed by the United States with 3580 requests and the United Kingdom with 1166 requests.

Brazil again tops the chart with 291 removal requests followed by Germany with 188 and India with 142. The United States are fourth in the listing with 123 removal requests.

A click on any country in the list will display additional information about that countries data and removal requests with the removal requests broken down to Google services.

Government requests is only a representation of the requests Google receives. It does not take into account other means of information retrieval or blocking. China for instance is not in the list which is understandable as they block information directly in their infrastructure.

The FAQ contains additional information about the statistics.

Google To Stop Self-Censoring Search In China [Google, Censorship]

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:45:42 +0000

Google’s Chinese search engine was launched in January 2006. Google agreed back then to censor some of the results which in their opinion was better than not offering access to the search engine at all in China. Google’s stance on the issue has changed lately with the uncovering of a targeted attack on the infrastructure of not only Google but at least 20 other large American companies. A primary goal of the attack was to access Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists which – according to Google – did not succeed as only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed.

This incident “combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web” have led Google to conclude that they should review their business operations in China. “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China” says David Drummond, SVP, Google’s Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer.

Is Google really going all or nothing in China? Not really. Google explicitly stated that they will have talks with the Chinese government about this which means that they are willing to negotiate. It is also clear that Google does not have a problem with censorship if you look at Google’s search engines in other countries.

German Web Censorship Law Passed

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:04:35 +0000

The German web censorship law passed the German Bundestag earlier today. This could mean that German Internet providers with more than 10.000 customers have to create filters based on a secret list that is provided by the German Federal Criminal Office. Users who access Internet sites that are included in the list will be presented with a stop sign instead of the website itself. The traffic details will be recorded but cannot be used for criminal prosecution. The police does have the right to check the data on suspicion.

The German Federal Criminal Office has the authority to add new websites and domains to the list. A website can for instance be added instantly if it is hosted outside of the European Union. A committee has been designated to perform spot checks on the list every three months.

The law itself was pushed mainly as a law to fight child pornography on the Internet. It was always denied that it would be used to censor websites for different reasons although some politicians have already mentioned that they would like to include violent video games or hate sites in the list as well.

Internet providers have the sole responsibility to provide the infrastructure and maintain the web censorship filters. This includes organizations like Universities but also some businesses with more than 10000 employees. The technique employed to filter websites that are on the web censorship list is simply blocking the domain name. Users who enter the IP can visit the site normally. (via Heise (German))

Nationwide Internet Censorship Planned In Australia

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 11:29:23 +0000

The democratic west, with all its ideals of free speech, free religion and believes, is on the forefront of demolishing those ideals for the greater good as politicians like to call it. The greater good can be terrorism, child pornography, pornography, different believes, different political views, violent video games or anything else that politicians might feel inappropriate to be viewed by the general public.

Plans came to light recently that described a nationwide Internet censorship initiative in Australia to protect the children from the Internet. One could say that parents should take care of that but the Australian government does not seem to have much faith in Australian parents and decided that a far better way to protect the children would be to ban selected websites completely in Australia meaning if you are of legal age to view a website you might not be able to by normal means because of the censorship to protect the children.

One common denominator is always the vagueness of those plans. Questions like who will select the websites that should be banned, how will they be banned, who will decided what is appropriate, who will maintain the blacklist, what can be done about false positives or who will have access to it are not addressed at all.

Current plans favor the use of two blacklists, one for material unsuitable for children and one for illegal material. It is possible to opt-out of the first but not the second. No definition of illegal was given and it is likely that the blacklist will contain websites that might not be illegal but considered illegal.

Nationwide Internet censorship puts Australia right in the midst of elusive countries like China and Iran who censor the Internet for different reasons. Australians who want to fight this plan can head over to the No Clean Feed site for more information and calls to action.

GPass Bypass Censorship and Restrictions

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:45:16 +0000

Censorship is a huge problem in many countries of the world but especially rampant in the Middle East and Asia. If websites and information are censored the local population has a hard time accessing them from within the country. This usually involves the use of proxy servers or vpn solutions to bypass the country’s restrictions.

Restrictions on the other hand are usually implemented by an Internet service to prevent access to the service from users that do not live in the target area. Some prominent examples are the Internet Radio Pandora and the streaming video services Hulu and ABC.

Gpass is a free software that provides an encrypted connection to bypass Internet censorship and restrictions. It makes use of encrypted socks tunnels to launch applications and can use Skype and Tor as backup tunnels.

Every application that connects to the Internet can be used with Gpass. Most run out of the box without having to enter details into the application. Some require that the proxy server (localhost:8000) is set in the application itself.

Gpass provides links to a few applications like Firefox, Internet Explorer and the default email client in it’s program interface. The user can drag and drop additional applications in the interface so that they can be launched to bypass restrictions as well.

Gpass works with Hulu, ABC and Pandora but the connection is rather slow and the viewing experience therefor limited. The main use of Gpass is therefor to access information on the Internet without difficulties and reprisals.

Users can check if Gpass is running properly by looking in the title frame of the application that they started. It should state [via Gpass] which is the indicator that the service is working. The IPs of the service are located in the United States.

Internet Filtering Checks and Maps

Martin Brinkmann — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 10:27:34 +0000

Is your country / ISP filtering the Internet ? That’s a question that not many users in the Western Hemisphere are asking themselves assuming that Internet filtering is more of a method of oppressive regimes to control the information flow in their countries. Countries like Iran, China or Syria are known to filter the Internet but it is not that widely known that other countries filter the Internet as well. Not on the same level though but in my opinion one filtered website is to much.

The Opennet website offers a form where users can enter a url and check if it is banned in a country. Not every filtered url is know and not every country of the world can be selected, I guess it would be an impossible task to keep up with every countries filtering efforts. Just take a look at Turkey and Youtube if you know what I mean, feels like they ban and unban the video portal every other day.

The main emphasize lies on countries that are known to filter the Internet heavily which amounts to a list of roughly 20 countries currently. The website offers a global Internet filtering map that displays the level of political, social, conflict / security and Internet Tools filtering for each country in the world.

The website offers additional research which is more valuable than the two tools that I described before. Extensive country profiles are available for selected countries which give a in depths analysis of the current filtering situation in that country with lots of sources at the end of each report. It is furthermore possible to read regional overviews, articles about the subject, book recommendations and general news.

Use Picidae to access blocked and censored websites

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:23:09 +0000

Picidae is offering a new method of accessing websites that are either blocked or censored in your country, including countries that are known for censoring the Internet such as China, Iran and many other countries. Instead of just supplying a proxy that is used to disguise the original url of the website that is blocked Picidae creates layers of the website displaying all clickable links as image maps in one layer.

All forms are added as well in another layer, including search boxes and the like for instance. The Picidae test server is really fast and was able to deliver an image of Ghacks in just a few seconds, did not take much longer than loading the websites normally. The script is offered on the website as well and everyone may setup a Picidae server on his own dedicated server.

Even webspace owners can take part by offering an additional layer of protection. They can install a Picidae proxy that is connected to a Picidae server. This would mean that even if the server would be blocked it could still be accessed by using a Picidae proxy.

Picidae is especially useful when searching Google or other search engines in a country that is know to block certain search results. The Picidae script is able to query the search engines that are outside of your country which means that you will receive uncensored search results.

Internet Censorship 101 – DNS Server Filtering

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 13:55:59 +0000

I decided to start a Internet Censorship 101 series of articles that takes a look at and explains the various methods of censorship on the internet and possible solutions to this situation for the user who tries to access information that are blocked / censored. I’m going to start with a relatively weak form of censorship called DNS Filtering.

Whenever you try to access a website you type its url into the address bar. The url is then send to the DNS server who looks up the IP for that website and sends it back to your browser to be able to make the connection to the website. To censor one would simply return no IP or a different IP that redirects to another website. (something like, no no, this is no website that you should visit, bla bla)

This means that the website that you want to access exists of course but the information on the dns server was changed to prevent access. There are two options that let you access the website. The first would be to simply enter the IP address of the website that you want to visit instead of the url. You can use scripts that are freely available on the internet to lookup the IP of an url.

This method is only working if there is only one url that is using that IP. You are out of luck if many websites are hosted on the same server. The second method which is reliable and working for all occasions helps us in this case.

If you change the DNS server that your computer is using to lookup the IP you will receive the correct result. Let us say that you life in China and that China banned access to Wikipedia. Instead of using a Chinese DNS server you use one from the United States which has the information that you need to access Wikipedia.

OpenDNS, a free service, would be one alternative as would be the following list which I have taken from freerk.com

dns2.de.net – 194.246.96.49 (Frankfurt, Germany)
ns1.de.eu.orsn.net – 217.146.139.5 (Hildesheim, Germany)
resolver.netteam.de – 193.155.207.61 (Alfter-Impekoven, Germany)
sunic.sunet.se – 192.36.125.2 (Stockholm, Sweden)
master.ns.dns.be – 193.109.126.140 (Leuven, Belgium)
ns1.lu.eu.orsn.net – 195.206.104.98 (Belvaux, Luxembourg)
merapi.switch.ch – 130.59.211.10 (Zurich, Switzerland)
prades.cesca.es – 192.94.163.152 (Barcelona, Spain)
michael.vatican.va – 212.77.0.2 (Vatican City, Italy)
dns.inria.fr – 193.51.208.13 (Nice, France)
ns0.ja.net – 128.86.1.20 (London, UK)
nic.aix.gr – 195.130.89.210 (Athens, Greece)
ns.ati.tn – 193.95.66.10 (Tunis, Tunisia)
ns1.relcom.ru – 193.125.152.3 (Moscow, Russia)
trantor.umd.edu – 128.8.10.14 (College Park, MD, USA)
ns1.berkeley.edu – 128.32.136.9 (Berkeley, CA, USA)
merle.cira.ca – 64.26.149.98 (Ottawa, Canada)
ns2.dns.br – 200.19.119.99 (Sao Paulo, Brasil)
ns2.gisc.cl – 200.10.237.14 (Santiago, Chile)
ns.uvg.edu.gt – 168.234.68.2 (Guatemala, Guatemala)
ns1.retina.ar – 200.10.202.3 (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
ns.unam.mx – 132.248.253.1 (Mexico City, Mexico)
ns.wide.ad.jp – 203.178.136.63 (Osaka, Japan)
ns.twnic.net – 192.83.166.11 (Taipei, Taiwan)
ns3.dns.net.nz – 203.97.8.250 (Wellington, New Zealand)
box2.aunic.net – 203.202.150.20 (Melbourne, Australia)

Changing the DNS Server is a matter of minutes. It depends on the operating system that you are using. In Windows XP you open the control panel and click on network connections. You right-click your connection and select Properties from the context menu.

Select the Internet Protocol (TCP / IP) and click on Properties in that menu. Click on use the following DNS server addresses and enter a preferred and alternate DNS server into the fields. Make sure you enter the IPs. Apply and close the menu and restart your computer. Once that is done you are using the new DNS server which should bypass the censorship.

Danish Provider Tele2 forced to block allofmp3

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 18:42:28 +0000

Danish Provider Tele2 has to block access to the Russian mp3 website allofmp3 after loosing a civil lawsuit against the IFPI
(International Federation of the Phonographic Industry). The complete story can be read at slyck news. The question that naturally arises is if this can be called censorship. Music Industry and it’s lobbyist groups claim that allofmp3 is illegal although it is perfectly legal according to Russian law.

I can not recall a court ruling about the legality which should mean that the website itself is legal unless the case would be examined in court. Blocking a perfectly legal website is censorship in my opinion. Where is the difference to countries like China who block websites that express different kind of views about China ? The only difference I see is that this kind of censorship has purely economic reasons while the one in China is politically motivated.

Many European countries have their share of censorship which is not known to many of it’s citizens. Germany and France ban Nazi websites and sites that deny the holocaust and other countries most likely have their share of websites that simply get blocked.
Censorship does not get better if a democratic country uses it to suppress websites because of political or economic reasons. It simply does not feel right.

Why don’t they sue allofmp3 in Russia if they think the service is illegal ? Maybe because they do know that a Russian court would rule that it is a legal service ?

The best thing the big media companies could do would be to offer a similar service on the internet. That would of course mean that high pricing items would come to an end. Suppose they fear that more than to piss of a few more ~~customers~~ criminals.

Should Search Engines censor certain keywords ?

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 16:15:06 +0000

The user AccuraCast at the Searchenginewatch forums started this thread which is also discussed at Threadwatch.com.

It mainly deals with the question if Search engines like Google and Yahoo should censor their searches for topics like “suicide searches” and deliver some handpicked anti-suicide sites before the other search results.

Both sides are represented in the thread, the people who think its ok if a search engine would censor such requests mainly argue by pointing out the moral aspect while the nay-sayers fear this might cause a precedence for more severe censorship.

I for one would prefer unfiltered search results but allowing for instance anti-suicidal sites to deliver ads for free somewhere on the page when someone uses the keyword suicide. This should satisfy both sides.

It should be clear that the only authority that decides if something has to be banned should be the law and not a search engine.

Search engines in recent years have started to filter out search results that they deem inappropriate. The majority of results are however related to copyright infringement. Search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo are not displaying links to hotlines or help sites that could help people that search for suicide related topics overcome the issues.

Update: Search engines have remained neutral in the matter it seems. They do not display anti-suicide ads or pages when you are searching for suicide related terms such as “how to kill myself”.

I’d advise anyone to consult professional help services and resources like Help Guide or Suicide Prevention Lifeline for suicide help and information.

Another resource is Suicide Hotlines which offers toll free 24/7 phone support for suicide prevention and emotional crisis. Hotlines are available for all US states, Canada and even international.