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Googles brand name made Reader work in Iranians favor.

Journalists and other professional nerds are angry thatGoogle is snuffing out its moribund RSS software, Reader. But as Quartzs Zach Seward points out, plain old normal folks in Iran used Reader quite a bit to get around internet censorship. And those users wont be helped by the Reader clones popping up in its wake, because Google Readers unintended power as an anti-censorship interface flows from its Google pedigree, not its Reader functionality.

Google Readers use of HTTPS makes it more difficult for censors to block than normal web traffic, which helps (sort of). But the bigger foot that Reader keeps shoved in the censors door is the google.com domain itself. To cut off Reader, as Seward writes, Iran would probably have to block all of Google and its many popular services in order to keep its citizens from using Reader. [See update below.] Even the censors dont want to do that, at least not now. So Reader persisted, an obsolete product providing unintentionally vital value to Iranians by riding like a remora on the rest of the google.com shark. Until July 1 2013, when Google does what the censors couldnt, and scrapes the remora off.

Google is a business, not a public utility, and its decision to kill Reader makes business sense. But was maintaining Reader really so much of a drain on Googles vast resources that it couldnt have let the little remora keep hanging on as long as possible, as a kind of pro-bono, dont be evil brand-burnishing project? Google didnt design Reader to be used this way, and couldnt have predicted that it would be, but there it is. Why extinguish the benefit?

Reader came out of Google Labs, which spun out interesting (or random) applications and inventions at a semi-alarming clip until Larry Page took over as CEO and shut it down. Labs didnt make much sense as a revenue-generating division. But what it was good at, with its throw spaghetti at the wall non-strategy, was creating opportunities for unintentional interfaces to emerge and catch on ones that, like Reader in Iran, could potentially fulfill Googles dont be evil moral imperative more clearly and cleanly than their on-purpose products do. (Of course, Google has been badly burned by unintentional UIs as well.)

But Labs is gone, and so is Reader. That google.com domain, though, is still as huge a boot in the door of Irans censors as it ever was[not necessarily for technical reasons, see update below]. Politicians often attach controversial riders to popular legislation because they know that their opposition wont throw the baby out with the bathwater. Google has been passively exercising similar power in Iran with Reader for a very good cause, and its a shame that it will come to an end. But maybe its a moment of opportunity for some Googlers to seize with their 20% time: what new thing on the edges of google.com might ride on it to do some unplanned good?

Update: I spoke to The Electronic Frontier Foundations Director for International Freedom of ExpressionJillian C. York, who pointed out that its not technically difficult for Iran to block Reader without taking down other Google services. (They can screw up, of course, she added.) Google Translate offers similar access around censored content by acting as a proxy. Google Reader offered much more convenience, she said, and an alternative US-based RSS reader set up in the same way could offer that same convenience. The problem is, how would Iranians find out about it? Theyre resourceful, but its a huge inconvenience, she said. In other words, the Google brand name is a significant part of that unintentional interface effect that helped Reader be a popular tool for circumventing censorship in that country. Replacing Reader in that regard would take more than just cloning the functionality. Would you have to be Google, and deliver it from a google.com URL, to pull that off? Not necessarily. But if interfaces are culture, then being Google certainly helps. Its just like here: [Google] ispopular, its trusted, York said. Which is why its unfortunate that Google would cut off so many users who use [Reader] this way.

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Unintentional Interfaces: Google Reader's Censorship -Busting Power Will Be Hard to Replicate

A new study analyzes how controversial posts are deleted in near real time from the Twitter-like Chinese social media service called Weibo, which hosts about 100 million messages per day. Credit: Photos.com/Rice University

(Phys.org) An analysis of censorship patterns on the Twitter-like Chinese social media service called Weibo gives the clearest picture yet of how the site's operator, Sina Weibo, finds and deletes controversial posts in near real time, despite a daily volume of 100 million messages. The study, which was conducted by an independent researcher and collaborators at Rice University and the University of New Mexico (UNM), is available online and undergoing peer review.

"Other people have explored censorship on Weibo, but this work is focused on the speed at which censorship happens," said lead researcher Dan Wallach, professor of computer science at Rice and co-author of a forthcoming study that was recently posted on the pre-print site arxiv.org.

A team led by Wallach and UNM's Jed Crandall worked with the study's lead author, an independent researcher named Tao Zhu. Their analysis indicates that Sina Weibo uses a combination of keyword-matching software and human censors to monitor and delete potentially controversial posts on Weibo. By closely monitoring individuals who frequently post controversial messages, Sina Weibo is able to delete many objectionable posts in less than five minutes, the study found.

Launched three years ago, Weibo, like Twitter, allows users to post 140-character messages with usernames and hashtags. About 300 million people use Weibo, which is China's most popular microblogging service. Users post 100 million messages each day on Weibo.

For the study, researchers began by following 25 "sensitive" users that they had discovered by doing a search for people who had used words previously banned by Weibo. To broaden their search, the researchers added more than 3,000 users who had reposted one of the 25 sensitive users more than five times. They then followed this expanded group for a period of time and measured how often and how quickly their posts were deleted. Any user with more than five deleted posts was added to the pool of sensitive users.

After 15 days, the sensitive group included 3,567 users. The researchers found that on average, about 4,500 posts by the sensitive users were deleted each day, including about 1,500 that were deleted at the network level by Sina Weibo. The team's censorship-tracking software was able to track, within one minute, the amount of time a post remained online before it was deleted.

The researchers found that deletions happened most heavily in the first hour after an original post had been made, and nearly 90 percent of deletions occurred within 24 hours. The analysis also revealed a sophisticated mechanism to remove all reposts of deleted posts, often within five minutes of the original post's deletion. Deletion times were found to be significantly shorter for a subset of users who tended to post deleted content most often, an indication that Sina Weibo actively monitors the activity of some users.

"Roughly 12 percent of the total posts from our sensitive users were eventually deleted," Wallach said. "We have enough of these posts to be able to run topical analysis algorithms that let us extract the main subjects that Weibo's censors seemed concerned with on any given day."

To date, researchers have collected 470 million posts from the Weibo public timeline and 2.38 million posts from a user timeline.

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Study shows just how fast censorship can occur in social media

Media Censorship Of Boy Grabbing A Gun And Stopping The Murder Of His Family
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Media Censorship Of Boy Grabbing A Gun And Stopping The Murder Of His Family - Video

By Golnaz Esfandiari, RFE/RL

Iran has stepped up its already tough Internet censorship policy by blocking the most popular antifiltering tool used by Iranians to access blocked websites. Beginning last week, Iranian authorities began blocking virtual private networks (VPNs), which an estimated 30 percent of the country's Internet users employ to get around state censorship.

Communications tools that allow free phone calls, like Skype and Viber, and free text messaging, like WhatsApp, have also reportedly been disrupted.

The move, which was first reported by citizen journalists, was confirmed March 10 by Ramezanali Sobhani-Fard, the head of parliament's Information and Communications Technology Committee.

"Within the last few days, illegal VPN ports in the country have been blocked," Sobhani-Fard declared, adding that from now on only legal and registered VPNs may be used.

The ban puts in place an even higher hurdle for Iranians hoping to escape state censorship online.

VPNs allow millions of Iranians to gain access to the Internet via networks based outside the country. They can then visit the thousands of websites that are blocked in Iran for being deemed immoral or against the countrys national security.

These days, when one manages to log on to Facebook, it feels like being [Soviet space pioneer] Yuri Gagarin, reads a joke posted on a popular satirical Facebook page.

Washington-based independent Internet researcher Collin Anderson told RFE/RL that Irans decision to target the most widely used and secure antifiltering tool signals a ratcheting-up by the regime of control over what Iranians can see and say.

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Iran Targets Means Of Bypassing Online Censorship

MOSCOW, March 11 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) A Russian state watchdog accused of unfairly censoring thousands of websites defended its actions on Monday, claiming that censorship is an efficient way of preventing suicide among minors.

Figures for suicides and suicide attempts among Russian minors have grown 35 percent over the past few years, the Federal Consumer Protection Service said in a press release, without elaborating on the timeframe.

Online promotion of suicide is significantly influencing statistics of childrens suicides, the watchdog said, without providing any figures.

Some websites fail to support the campaign against suicide promotion, the service said. It named no names, but promised to publish, at an unspecified later date, a list of worst offenders.

Internet censorship became a topic of much online controversy in Russia after a new law that came into force last November allowed extrajudicial blacklisting of web content deemed to be promoting suicide, pedophilia or drug use.

About 4,500 websites are currently blacklisted by Russian governmental agencies, even though about 95 percent of them are not guilty of any wrongdoing, according to Rublacklist.net, a project of the unregistered Pirate Party of Russia that tracks online censorship.

Yhe Federal Consumer Protection Service, which runs the blacklist, blocks websites by their numeric IP address, which can be shared by hundreds of websites all of which are banned every time an offender gets targeted by the government.

Ban criteria have also been called into question: Websites blacklisted since November include a photo report about a political activists self-immolation in Tibet; a 15-year-old comic tune parodying Russian goth rock; and a YouTube manual of how to create slashed wrists make-up for Halloween. The make-up video prompted YouTubes owner Google to take the Federal Consumer Protection Service to court in February, the case currently pending review.

Sarcastic-minded bloggers have even produced a universal macros picture for blacklisting websites in Russian Federation, complete with innocent pictures of toddlers titled child porn and instructions on how to commit suicide by ramming a brick wall with ones head. The joke was lost on the authorities, which promptly blacklisted as many copies of the picture as they could.

The Federal Consumer Protection Service denounced online pranksters in a separate press release Monday, claiming that they undermine the governments authority. The agency also pledged to continue the blacklisting campaign in order to save childrens lives.

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Web Censorship Prevents Teen Suicide – Russian Watchdog