this is of course of much more concern than "free speech zones." On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 6:05 AM, Robert Munn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Looks to me like Obama supporters want to stifle dissent... > > > ====== > > http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=1182 > > Yesterday, Americans celebrated Independence Day - and I got to spent too > much of the day loafing around paging lazily through a whole bunch of more > or less nutty political sites. > > One of things I noticed was the marked difference in treatment accorded a > particularly nasty little controversy around whether or not google was > purposely shutting down anti-Obama sites on its blogger.com network. > > Here's the salient bit from what appears to have been the first blast of the > whistle - by Warner > Huston<http://www.stoptheaclu.com/archives/2008/06/29/google-shuts-down-anti-obama-sites-on-its-blogger-platform> > > It looks like Google has officially joined the Barack Obama campaign and > decided that its contribution would be to shut down any blog on the Google > owned Blogspot.com blogging system that has an anti-Obama message. Yes, it > sure seems that Google has begun to go through its many thousands of blogs > to lock out the owners of anti-Obama blogs so that the noObama message is > effectively squelched. > > A bit after writing this he added this update above his original story: > > Update: Perhaps it isn't google, but Obamaniacs taking advantage of google's > faulty sytem. A commenter explains: > > The problem with blogger is that a group of people with an ax to grind can > report any blog as spam and after enough complaints, it's automatically > suspended until a real live human being can get around to examining it. If > enough complaints are registered with blogger, you might get a response > within 5 days but it takes a concerted effort. This is a huge problem with > blogger and something google needs to get a handle on. > > Regardless who is at fault, this shutting down of free speech is > disturbing. > > As it turns out the person who wrote the comment appears to have been > correct: blogger.com, and many of its righter users, seem to have been the > victims of a co-ordinated attempt to silence perceived opponents. > > At the personal level the resemblence to groklaw's policy of presuring > editors to shut up writers critizing them struck me as "a > birds-of-a-feather" problem, but what was actually most interesting about > the whole mess was that it produced an uproar in the right wing blogosphere > but went largely unmentioned, and certainly uncondemned, in the much more > populous liberal blogosphere. > > The story made headlines, for example, at > hotair<http://hotair.com/archives/2008/06/30/now-just-imagine-blogger-was-the-fec>but > appears > to have gone > unmentioned<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=blogspot+google+shutdown+anti-obama+sites++%28site:huffingtonpost.com+OR+site:moveon.org+OR+site:dailykos.com%29&start=30&sa=N>on > dailykos, the huffingtonpost, and > moveon.org. > > The specific issue is unimportant to most technology managers, but in more > general terms this is a problem affecting all of cloud computing: trust your > business to an Amazon, a Microsoft, or a Google, and you become vulnerable > to a wholly new kind of denial of service attack - one that can be triggered > by essentially unrelated employee actions or opinions and hold your entire > business hostage to the service provider's business processes. > > "Five days" with "a concerted effort" is the guy's description of google's > remediation process - and if you don't think a business contract on > something like email will ever be treated the same way: think about your > business relationship with monopoly suppliers from telcos to Microsoft. > > >
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