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Posted by: pandy Mar 9 2018, 06:45 PM

Christian is probably the only one that knows about this, but Google has been in the news a lot lately here in Sweden.

Someone has created an antisemitic "hate list" with names and info about Swedish Jews, all well known people with positions mostly in finance and media. There's a typical blurb about "Jewish power", but no threats. Just some facts like what they do and have done for a living and sometimes if they have been a member of some political party. It's not like Sweden is a deeply antisemitic country and these people are hiding. I knew all but a few of them were of Jewish origin, so no big secret there. And so what? Who cares?

Now there is an outcry, google should remove the site from their search results. They have refused so far. They have agreed to remove the site from the results when you search for specific names. First they did that for two of the names and now I think they've done it for all names involved, but they still refuse to remove the site from the results when you use other search terms.

The site is easy enough to find. It's on wordpress.com .

What amazes me is that as hate sites goes, this one is pretty lame. And what the heck does it have to do with Google? Call wordpress.com if you think the site should be removed! It's on their servers, not Google's.

Don't misunderstand me now, I don't like hate sites, no matter what group of people the hate site is about. I have absolutely nothing against Judaism, if anything I find it and Jewish culture interesting. If a hate site is very offending and in some way a threat to the people it targets, then maybe it should be removed. Physically removed from the server it lives on, not just the from searches.

So should Google and other search engines start to police the internet and censor it? I say no, and I don't understand how anyone can see it differently. And why is everyone mad at Google alone? The site can be found through the other SEs as well. Of course it can.

I'm no longer a fan of Google, but that's for totally other reasons than that they to their job and indexes what's out there.

Posted by: Christian J Mar 10 2018, 04:10 PM

Didn't pay attention to this story, but haven't all those Internet sites fallen out of favor with Western mainstream media lately (and not just in Sweden)? For example, Facebook and Twitter have been accused of allowing Russian agents to target Americans with propaganda, Youtube may have been accused of showing ads next to terrorist videos (can't quite remember). This might be part of a new anti-Internet giant sentiment in the West, but I'm not sure who's behind it (journalists are just tools).

As for Sweden, 2018 is election year, so political parties will try to make Google censor their enemies OR appear as victims of such censorship (pick your poison).

Posted by: pandy Mar 10 2018, 05:01 PM

Nah, this is different.

It's only the tabloids that are free online now, but I've seen the same crap in the morning papers. Goggle, google, google. No mention of Wordpress, Yahoo, Bing and so on. Are journalists 'stoopid' or do they just think their readers are?

Google has indeed became what they stated they never would - evil. But they have not created a lame antisemitic hate site.

What will they demand that Google removes from searches next time? Remember the days of NetNanny and the like, programs that should protect children against the evil stuff of the Internet? I remember for example that they didn't let them read about things like contraception, menstruation, breast cancer and a lot more a girl can wonder about. I don't want Google to become the world's NetNanny.

Posted by: Christian J Mar 10 2018, 07:12 PM

I can at least read DN with Noscript. Seems they're after Google (both the search engine and Youtube) for several different things, not just that list of Swedish Jews. No doubt all political sides have learned from the US election, and now everybody's trying to use Google in the Swedish election too. A slippery slope, to say the least.


Both.

Here's a psychological theory. Mainstream media is making less and less money from advertizing, being outcompeted by Google. The resulting fear of being laid off probably causes long term stress, burnout and paranoia among journalists, similar to how Hitler must have felt in 1945 when the Red Army approached Berlin. So far that paranoia has been directed against nazis (real or imagined), but perhaps journalists and media owners have now begun directing it at Google too (for helping nazis, of course, not for stealing their advertizing money).

Posted by: pandy Mar 10 2018, 07:22 PM

You can read DN? When they started with "pay walls" I got in everywhere by disabling JS or using a VPN (go figure). But not now. Must try again.

It isn't Google that makes them redundant. The Internet is. The tool is SEs of course, but any SE will do. I think maybe G is the only SE they know of.

Posted by: pandy Mar 10 2018, 07:23 PM

Just sayin'.

Posted by: pandy Mar 10 2018, 07:27 PM

It worked with DN! Maybe they are smart, making it easy. They will get all the readers when this gets out.

BTW can JS be turned off by other ways than NoScript in FF these days? And what about Chrome? I want to pass this on to my friends who don't know what K-Meleon is. K-Mel of course has it right on a toolbar.

Posted by: Christian J Mar 11 2018, 07:54 AM

I didn't mean that you can find information elsewhere on the Internet (that's true also), I meant advertizing revenue, where Google and Facebook dominates totally. Media sites stopped making money from print long ago, and now makes less and less from advertizing too. Online subscriptions don't seem to work very well either. Meanwhile Google scrapes their news while making money from it. And the media sites can't ban Googlebot either, since they'd get even less traffic then.

Posted by: Christian J Mar 11 2018, 08:03 AM

I doubt it, it used to work with SvD too but then they changed it. And who wants to read DN anyway? It's a madhouse.


I don't know, FF changed their entire addons engine recently, so the updated addons are not the same as they used to be. I'm using Tor browser, which still runs the old FF addons. No idea about Chrome, but I'm sure there must be some addons for it?

Posted by: pandy Mar 11 2018, 10:40 AM

Of course, but that's the same thing. Ads go where readers go.




Well, it's nice to get some kind of news. Better get it from DN than from the tabloids.



Yeah, I suspected native ways to turn JS off were gone.

Posted by: Christian J Mar 11 2018, 01:34 PM

It's one thing that news sites make less money due to fewer readers. But I think the primary cause of lower profit is direct competion from Google on advertizing budgets. In other words: advertizers rather spend money on Google than on newspapers, the latter must then lay off staff, quality declines, readers disappear, and even fewer advertizers spend money on newspapers.


Firefox removed that from the Preferences five years ago, but you can still change it in about:config. I assume Chrome works the same.

Posted by: CharlesEF Mar 11 2018, 01:57 PM

Firefox still supports the old way (about:config) of turning off Javascript. No add-on needed. See https://www.wikihow.com/Disable-JavaScript page.

Posted by: pandy Mar 11 2018, 02:50 PM

Thanks! Dunno why you need to be a super user. Why not just put it on a menu? Oh, I forgot. Menus aren't cool anymore.

Posted by: Christian J Mar 11 2018, 02:56 PM

See http://forums.htmlhelp.com/index.php?showtopic=19250

"Checkboxes that kill".

Posted by: pandy Mar 11 2018, 09:19 PM

Yeah. It's been going on a while.

Too be honest, I'm loosing interest in the web more and more. It's all the same now.