10.15.05
Study Says Software Makers Supply Tools to Censor Web
Study Says Software Makers Supply Tools to Censor Web - New York Times: “Microsoft, Cisco and Yahoo, for example, have all come under fire recently for providing technology or otherwise cooperating with the Chinese government to enable it to monitor and censor Internet use.”
I suppose technically these comanies are within thier rights to be sleazebags. But they are still sleazebags for doing this.
How do I respond? I don’t use MS now except in the rarest of cases — if I have to test something work-related. I can stop using Yahoo. I’m sure my packets pass through Cisco hardware somewhere, so I can’t do much about that. So I feel better about using Google more, but that’s small consolution due to Google calling Taiwan a province China.
(This is another reason I’m still not 100% sure about using blogger.com as my blogging service, despite its convenience. Someone at google could decide they don’t like my blog and *poof* it’s gone. Do I subtly, unconsciously censor myself because of this?)
It depends, however, on how Google resolves the issue. This article notes, in Google’s defense, that “generally follows international naming conventions, such as ISO-3166” and that “United Nations, for example, officially uses “Taiwan Province of China,” according to the U.N. Web site.”
So… Google: good. Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco: bad.
