Google continues to face battle in Indian courts for user generated content on their network.
The courts are asking them to censor blasphemous stuff on their networks where users are allowed to post freely.
In addition, they are also being asked to screen every piece of content before it is published only.
Screening content is of course not logistically possible looking at the number of people who are active on various social networks.
And Google has clearly said that they are not going to censor the web. The company pretty much shut down their operations in China because of censorship reasons and India is not going to get any special treatments.
We cannot censor the Web. We cannot censor the ability of people to express themselves around the world.
You are asking not just censor the Web in India, you are asking to censor the entire world wide web. The Web has no borders.
I think the idea of censoring everything and pre- clearing everything is going to fundamentally, sort of, taint the growth of the Indian economy in India and vis-a-vis the world.
Greenhost has released a new WordPress plugin named RePress.
This plugin is pretty powerful as it turns the WordPress blog into a capable internet proxy.
You can essentially use it to bypass blocks on web services in your country.
The developers spoke about this plugin:
We believe in an Open Web and gladly make it possible for everyone to defend their human right to the free flow of information. By installing this plug-in you are doing your part to keep the Web Open.
Our plugin still requires some technical skills to employ, but next to none to use. Any WordPress powered website with this plug-in will immediately start functioning as a proxy for the censored websites. Thus opening them again for the big audience.
Facebook.com has released a new mobile app for the Apple iPhone named KLIK.
It is essentially a camera app that offers face recognition. The app can recognize known faces while taking photos and from existing phones on the phone.
The idea is to have an automated name tagging system on your iPhone that saves you the hassle of doing it manually.
Users can tag people it fails to recognize to further improve the recognition engine.
The app connects to the user’s Facebook account to collect information about friends and their photos.
It is one thing to protest using Twitter by continuously tweeting about a subject like SOPA. But it is pretty hard to protest against Twitter by not tweeting at all.
Twitter is unlikely to change their stance considering the decision was to response the laws and regulations of individual countries.
Remains to be seen how widely the censorship applies in the coming months. It would be sad to see general tweets getting censored just because they are critical of something very obvious.
Reporters without Borders has posted an open letter to Twitter Executive Chairman Jack Dorsey about their recent decision to implement regional censorship based on complaints.
RWB said in the note:
We urge you to reverse this decision, which restricts freedom of expression and runs counter to the movements opposed to censorship that have been linked to the Arab Spring, in which Twitter served as a sounding board. By finally choosing to align itself with the censors, Twitter is depriving cyberdissidents in repressive countries of a crucial tool for information and organization.
We are very disturbed by this decision, which is nothing other than local level censorship carried out in cooperation with local authorities and in accordance with local legislation, which often violates international free speech standards. Twitter’s position that freedom of expression is interpreted differently from country to country is inacceptable. This fundamental principle is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It is a very well-known fact that Twitter has been one of the key tools used by the common people to protest against anything and everything. It has been used for protests against dictatorships and we recently saw how people used Twitter to protest against the SOPA legislation.
By opening declaring support for censorship to meet local laws and regulations, Twitter is just asking for more complaints from companies and law authorities around the world. It is going to become very messy for them and their users.
Twitter is already seeing major protests by their users on their network itself.
Flickr has updated the pricing of their paid Pro plans.
One year plan remains at USD 24.95. Two year plan is now a bit cheaper at USD 44.95.
They have added a three month plan for USD 6.95.
I like the idea of a three month plan as it would come handy when you need to access your Flickr archive in case you have moved on to a different platform for your photos.
I have personally moved from Flickr to Picasa. I did manage to get back my photos from Flickr using SocialFolders but I still wait for the day when Google would offer a direct import feature to import my entire Flickr archive properly directly from Yahoo servers.
Windows Live team has blogged about why you should consider switching from Gmail to Hotmail.
And here I was thinking that we are done with the email war. Everyone has an email account that they plan to stick to forever.
But Microsoft does not think so. ಠ_ಠ
In any case, here are the features they highlighted that might want you to make the switch:
Hotmail has Facebook integration.
Hotmail has SkyDrive integration.
Hotmail has Office Web Apps integration.
Hotmail has Sweep feature that can get rid of annoying mails.
I guess if you are a Facebook addict and use SkyDrive and Office Web Apps, you might give it a thought. For most of us, Google’s web services are just fine.
One thing I would admit… Hotmail user interface is insanely fast today. Though you would have to get used to the annoying graphical advertisements.
Apartment List is a web based service powered by Google Maps and a host of third party networks.
It is designed to enable you to find that perfect apartment in USA based on your requirements.
You begin by telling it the city you are moving to. And then answer a bunch of questions. The service would generate a list powered by multiple databases.
The service claims to have more than 1.8 million listings in its database from various networks.
Google representative Nelson Mattos has updated the company’s position on the Mocality fiasco.
He said that the company has now completed their investigation. There are probably some firings. Policies have been changed. And they are sorry for what happened during the entire event.
We’ve concluded our investigation into the serious allegations about our use of data from Mocality’s website in Kenya. We’re very sorry this happened. We’ve taken appropriate action with the people involved and made changes in our operations to ensure this doesn’t occur again.
