19.591 Google

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 19, No. 591.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2006 09:46:28 +0000
         From: Maurizio Lana <m.lana_at_lett.unipmn.it>
         Subject: Re: 19.583 Google

At 08.10 01/02/2006, jochen wrote:
>Google also censors French, German, ...,
>indices, as do all other search engines, if only
>for legal reasons (as saying certain things
>is a crime in Germany, for instance Holocaust denial). Have a look at:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2360351.stm

going to the above URL i saw that the article is
partly based onto the research conducted by
Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, Berkman
Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School.

you can find some of their work at these URLs:
Documentation of Internet Filtering Worldwide,
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/
Real-Time Testing of Internet Filtering in China,
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/test/
Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in
China, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/
Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi
Arabia, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/saudiarabia/

the extent of the censoring activity is awesome,
"Google or not Google". i was sad and discouraged
after reading those pages by Zittrain and Edelman.
but at the same time we can - through their
research, and through the Internet - know all
this, speak of it on the base of documented
evidence; and we can save and print on paper
those web pages in order to remember. we are in
debt to the censored people all over the world
and we, who can't do nearly anything for them
directly, can partly pay our debt remembering what happened to them.

too much pathos? but what about too little?
maurizio

Maurizio Lana - ricercatore
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici - Università del Piemonte Orientale a Vercelli
via Manzoni 8, I-13100 Vercelli
+39 347 7370925
Received on Thu Feb 02 2006 - 05:25:52 EST