Google - News + Hate + Lurve

[IainB]

After all that ridiculous compulsory Google+ stuff, bullying and control freak behaviour from Google and to hell with your privacy concerns, would you believe it, but: (my emphasis)
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)

Google+ kills off “real names” policy | Ars Technica
Users can now make up whatever identity they please on the social network.
by Casey Johnston - Jul 15, 2014 10:07 pm UTC

Google has decided to reverse its long-standing policy requiring users to use their real names to make profiles on the service as of Tuesday, according to a post shared on the official account. The move comes after Google+ head Vic Gundotra suddenly departed in April, marking the beginning of a shift for the service.

"When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile," the post begins. As time went on, that rule softened to allow "established" pseudonyms and let YouTube users to bring their usernames over from the service.

Google+ has been criticized not only for preventing users from protecting their real identities, but causing confusion among them. In January, one transgender woman tried to send a text message to a colleague but sent a Hangout from her Google+ profile instead, outing her.

"We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users," the post continues. "For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be."

(For more information and some larfs, go to the article at the link and follow some of its hyperlinks.)
That last bit (emphasised) rather looks like belated damage control and BS. Having tried to coerce users to conform to their ridiculous rules, and having found that that left them (unsurprisingly) with a relatively empty Google+ theatre (empty seats), they are trying the "We're so welcoming and inclusive, see?" approach.
Yeah right.

But it is arguably a good sign, and the word "excited" wasn't used once.
What's that I hear you say? You thought that an apology would have been in order? Hey, who are you kidding? An apology from Google? Don't make me larf.
(I wonder if they realise they've just re-enacted Aesop's fable "The Wind and the Sun"?)

I'm not taking off my coat just yet, thanks.
______________________________
By the way, where the post says:

The move comes after Google+ head Vic Gundotra suddenly departed in April, marking the beginning of a shift for the service.

- it is referring to Vic Gundotra - Google Vice President, Engineering Social.
He headed up the Google WAVE debacle project and the Google+ project (amongst other things).
Resigned 2014-04-24 after 8 years at Google.

[IainB]

From: http://www.mafiaafire.com/quick_note.txt
I think this was in the early stages when the MAFIAFire add-ons were being made.

Ok, here's a very rough alpha.
I'm a total virgin to extensions programming in Chrome so if I have taken the long or unorthodox route to get these results... feel free to send me YOUR code to make the corrections!

It may not be pretty but I am a results oriented person and well, this works like i want it to.

Send any bugs, complaints, praises and everything in between via our contact form: mafiaafire.com/contact.php

A pat on the back to Google and it's Chrome team; this was far easier than expected and got me running pretty damn fast - getting me from zero to the speed I wanted and the results I expected in hours. Porting this from FF was a breeze!
Thank you, you guys rock! (As do the Mozilla team).

[IainB]

The above post reflects that it was in the early stages when the MAFIAFire add-ons were being made.
Later on there were some pretty harsh words for Google such as this from torrentfreak:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)

Google Censorship Initiative Thwarted by ‘Gee! No Evil!’ Add-On
   By Ernesto on June 13, 2011

Earlier this year Google launched a piracy blacklist and began filtering keywords from its Instant and Autocomplete services. A necessary measure to counter online copyright infringement according to the search giant, but not everyone agrees. To partially undo Google's censorship efforts, the “MAFIAA Fire” team has now released the "Gee! No evil!" Firefox add-on.

geenoevilWhen Homeland Security’s ICE unit started seizing domain names last year, a group called “MAFIAA Fire” decided to code a browser add-on to redirect the affected websites to their new domains.

A perfect illustration of John Gilmore’s famous quote: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Releasing the browser add-on was a statement more than a technical breakthrough, but it had a bigger impact than the MAFIAA Fire team could have ever hoped for. ICE asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site but Mozilla denied the request, arguing that this type of censorship may threaten the open Internet.

This victory for the MAFIAA Fire team encouraged them to come up with more anti-censorship tools. Today the team lived up to that aim by releasing a new Firefox add-on named “Gee! No evil!” which targets Google’s recent censorship initiative.

Starting a few months ago Google began filtering “piracy-related” terms from its ‘Autocomplete‘ and ‘Instant‘ services. The unpublished blacklist includes “torrent”, “BitTorrent”, “uTorrent” and “RapidShare” and was updated with the term “Mediafire” last week.

According to Google, the blacklist is an effective tool to curb online piracy, even if the terms themselves are not exclusively linked to copyright infringement.

“While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online,” Google spokesman Mistique Cano told TorrentFreak.

“This is something we looked at and thought we could make some narrow and relatively easy changes to our Autocomplete algorithm that could make a positive difference,” Cano added.

But not everyone agrees that censorship is the preferred solution here. The MAFIAA Fire team, for example, believe that Google has simply caved into pressure from the entertainment industry.

“Although typing a few extra letters is not a big deal for most, the fact that a non-innovative industry like the music industry has so much clout to pressure one of the icons in one the most innovative industry in the world was too much for us to ignore,” a MAFIAA Fire representative told TorrentFreak.

“We had to do something about it, just out of principle,” he added, and so today they released the “Gee! No evil!” add-on for Firefox. As with the redirector add-on, a Chrome version may be released later when enough donations come in.

The plugin reverses Google’s filter and adds the banned keywords to Autocomplete as soon as the user types in the first letter. It also kicks in if the second keyword is on the blacklist, so if a user types “Linux t” it will suggest “Linux torrent.”


“Gee! No evil! at work”

gee uncensored results

In addition to restoring censored keywords, MAFIAA Fire are also considering promoting other P2P services and cyberlockers with the add-on in the future, the opposite of what Google is attempting to accomplish. Site owners who want to support the initiative are welcome to apply.

With “Gee! No evil!” the MAFIAA Fire team have once again made a censorship effort defunct. But Google is not their main target, the pro-copyright lobby (MAFIAA) is what they are after. And their message is clear.

“Our message to the MAFIAA is this; the law of unintended consequences is very much alive. You took down Napster and what’s taken its place is far bigger. You are trying to censor little bits and pieces, but you inspired us to release more tools that will make you cringe for a very long time.”

“Censoring common words like “torrent” to help an outdated business model is not the right approach… and where does it stop? Who decides what goes on this slippery slope?” the MAFIAA Fire representative told TorrentFreak.

The above comment rightfully accentuates how subjective and risky censorship often is. While the U.S. Government is supporting tools to provide anonymous Internet to citizens of repressive governments, they also support drastic censorship measures at home. Although some may argue that it’s not fair to compare apples and oranges, censorship is censorship no matter how you frame it.
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And this from http://www.mafiaafire.com/quick_note2.txt :

I think the US-DHS is quite impressive, mainly because I get impressed with a lot of capital alphabets in a row,
even more so when they have few or nearly no vowels.

I guess that's how the DHS and MPAA/RIAA (MAFIAA) got the vice president to say copyright infringement is "outright theft"
or get the Canadian Mounties do them "favors" which resulted in a young man taking his own life.

Now,  because my idea, which took less than a week to create - and the chrome version 2 days, makes them walk around with egg
on their face after the millions spent (it cost me less than $100) they went running to Mozilla for another favor.

No court order no nothing, which just goes to show how little they have legally - because if they did have something to pin
on MAFIAAFire they already have a sweet lady judge (##Link to article about former RIAA spokesperson now in judges seat##) who is a
former RIAA employee to sign off on it.

They did not even try to contact us.

Hat's off to Mozilla for sticking up to them, at first we were afraid if Mozilla would even host it due to its controversial nature
but they truly backed up their open source supporting words with actions.

Our response:
MAFIAAFire redirector for Chrome is ready (and improved!!)
Our domain is mirrored: MAFIAAFire.ezee.se
The source for BOTH the plugins are now open!
We are going to add more domains to the list

A note to the DHS - as a government entity you are supposed to act within the law, even though the domain seizures were deplorable
you made the (embarrassing ##Link to  article on the screenshots of torrent-finder### ) effort to get some (totally unrelated) screenshots
and go through the courts to give it some semblance of a lawful act.

Have you now dropped the whole facade and are just going to act like the hired goons you are by "requesting" people censor the internet for your bosses?
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[IainB]

Following the MAFIAA FIRE projects (do a search "mafiaafire dhs" and see their projects Redirector, and Gee! No Evil!), we knew that Goggle was probably NOT your friend (censorship).
So I was rather amused by this Samizdata post:

Name me one good thing about Brexit…
tags: European Union, Internet, Media & Journalism, Science & Technology, UK affairs
January 26th, 2020  Natalie Solent (Essex)
Start with this:
Article 13: UK will not implement EU copyright law

Universities and Science Minister Chris Skidmore has said that the UK will not implement the EU Copyright Directive after the country leaves the EU.

Several companies have criticised the law, which would hold them accountable for not removing copyrighted content uploaded by users, if it is passed.

EU member states have until 7 June 2021 to implement the new reforms, but the UK will have left the EU by then.

The UK was among 19 nations that initially supported the law.

That was in its final European Council vote in April 2019.

This Samizdata post from March 2019 contains a list of links to other posts that give the background.

I see that the Brits have celebrated this event with a choreographed triumphal little dance given by a traditional Morris dancing group from Sunderland – famously the first place on the 23rd June to vote leave: