Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
The InvestigateOSphere vs. The ProtectOSphere
Doug Ross: "Put simply, a tabloid and the blogosphere -- both of which have been ridiculed for years by the MSM -- broke and publicized an immense story regarding a major presidential candidate and potential cabinet member."
Ross presents his evidence and it's damning--for the Mainstream Media.
Exhibit A?
The above chart showing the number of people searching for information on "Rielle Hunter" on Google over the last nine months--because the only place they could get that information was in the pages of the Enquirer [John Edwards Love Child Scandal] and the few sites in the blogosphere who covered it for more than a day or two after the Enquirer printed its December 18 story. [Mickey Kaus at Slate, Doug Ross and DBKP all three covered the story after the initial reaction to the Enquirer story on the blogs.]
Number of times "Rielle Hunter" was mentioned on any MSM newscast--other than a few FoxNews mentions in July and August--or in any MSM newspaper, Time magazine or Newsweek prior to late July: zero.
The National Enquirer first revealed Hunter's name in December. A few blogs, including DBKP and this humble journal, picked up the story because there were a variety of variables that all pointed to the fact that Edwards was a sleazebag.
How the National Enquirer and the Blogosphere Forced John Edwards to Confess
Edwards' Drilling Problems
A comment on Ann Althouse's July 22, "Today is Fitzmas for Mickey Kaus":
David said:
"Do you suppose Edwards went to the hotel to see if he could drill himself out of the problem?
He certainly seems to have drilled himself into it."
by Mondoreb
image: DougRoss@Journal
Explain this Away
Spam Attack came from barackobama.com
Were There More?
At least one of the attacks in the latest wave of blog shutdowns this past week came from IPs assigned to barackobama.com.
We have reported twice in the last two weeks about the attacks on anti-Obama websites. ["Google, Blogger, Obama: Obamanation Shut Down My Blog!"]] & [BabbaZee's "Anti-Obama Blogs Shut Down by Google, Obamabots"]
Speculation on who was behind the attacks has ranged from "Obama supporters" to "it's no one, just a glitch" "to it's a browser problem".
A few liberal blogs and Instapundit have said there is no connection between this latest wave of blog shutdowns and the Obama camp.
Speculation can now be set aside--at least, in one instance.
We came across this post by MacRanger at MacsMind [Macsmind Hacking UPDATE] yesterday, where Mac presents "one fact that can’t be explained away".
On July 22-25 Macsmind was DOS’d (Denial of Service) that originated from three IP addresses that are assigned to Barack Obama’s website. This isn’t a theory but was confirmed via law enforcement through an inspection of the site logs from those dates. The IP address in question; 66.39.4.254 66.39.143.229 216.146.206.181, are all registered via “Go Daddy” under the name barackobama.com.
On those dates, beginning at At 5:48PM Central on the 22nd, the hosted server that contained our site was hit by a 1.6 gigabyte flood of illegitimate traffic. The attacks never abated and only stopped when our host provider took us off line.
Spam traffic originating from three IPs assigned to the barackobama.com would seem to be compelling evidence to the disinterested reader. We haven't been able to reach MacRanger yet, but the real question isn't "Is the Obama camp involved in this?"
It's "Will this story be publicized?"
MacsMind finishes with
Speculation is one thing, but facts are another. This time however we’ve taken protective measures to prevent this from happening again. Additionally the investigation will continue and appropriate interstate authorities have been notified.
Texas Hill Country [] makes the comment, "Translation: People using computers at the Barack Obama Campaign are using them to systematically hack, attack and shut down websites that don’t agree with him. This is so messed up. It’s some Orewellian type business and it’s stuff like this that makes Obama scary as hell…"
As DBKP's Blogger site was locked down Thursday night by Blogger for being a spam site, we can attest that it was not a problem with our browser that prevented us from posting there for approximately 36 hours.
It wasn't a browser problem that caused the following message to appear when trying to post at our DBKP Blogger site.
Site Meter didn't post the two messages and lock down our blogs.
One question: "Did the spam messages that shut down DBKP@Blogger originate with the same IPs that shut down MacsMind?"
A second question: "Will Blogger and Google check?"
A final question: "If Google finds the attacks came from the IPs at barrackobama.com, will they let anyone know?"
We're not holding our breaths for answers to the last two.
by Mondoreb
image: sandia; DBKP
We're able to publish again!
Blogger: "Oops! We did it again!"
Last week, we published Babba Zee's Anti-Obama Blogs Shut Down by Google, Obamabots. Thurday, Blogger locked our original (and still quite robust) site, DBKP at Blogger for being a spam blog.
One would think Blogger would have a system in place before shutting down blogs with any kind of Google Page Rank. After all, your average spam site doesn't acquire much of a page rank.
But, apparently, one would be wrong. Our original site is PR5.
In Obama's Netroots Supporters Continue "Blog Burning", Confederate Yankee isn't happy:
"Tell me once more how progressives love free speech. Online activists thought to be loyal to Barack Obama are once against using Google's software tools to target rival political blogs for elimination as spam blogs. This occurred earlier this year when Democratic bloggers with a preference for Hillary Clinton also found themselves locked out of their own blogs, all because of spurious and apparently orchestrated claims that these blogs are spam blogs. Pro-Obama activists were blamed for those attempts at censorship as well."
Blogger Buzz at Blogger had this to say:
We've noticed that a number of users have had their blogs mistakenly marked as spam, and wanted to sound off real quick to let you know that, despite it being Friday afternoon, we are working hard to sort this out. So to those folks who have received an email saying that your blog has been classified as spam and can't post right now, we offer our sincere apologies for the trouble.
Of course, it may have been, at least partially, a response to a comment I posted in the Blogger Help Forums Thursday night that began, "ARE YOU HIGH?"--or was that in one of the letters that Blogger written to Blogger
While Confederate Yankee offered an apology, we're still in no mood. Blogger's "powerful anti-spam fighting tools" apparently begin with a goofy Captcha box--many times it takes 5-6 attempts before it will allow a post to be published--and ends with shutting the blog down.
Good to know that human judgment plays such a large part in the decision-making process before Blogger will shut a blog down.
Libby, at liberal-left NewsHoggers, insists being pro- or anti-Obama had nothing to do with it.
Following up on yesterday's Blogger lockout, it appears that the problem was wide-spread and not confined to one category of blogs, so it wasn't that you were posting any particular content. However, the lockdown does remind me this morning about the importance of internet neutrality. If we lose it, this sort of thing could happen all the time and it could easily be content related.
Blogger problems update
I don't know enough yet about the category, numbers, etc. to disagree--at the moment. She also updates with, "Update: This is amusing. A lot of rightwing blogs were also affected and shockingly, immediately blamed the vast left-wing conspiracy and/or Obama supporters."
Only amusing, Libby, if you're able to write your updates and publish about how amusing it all was.
On June 30, Miguel Helft of the NY Times, wrote in the paper's Tech section about the Obama supporters shutting down anti-Obama blogs: [Google and the Anti-Obama Bloggers]
>Did Google use its network of online services to silence critics of Barack Obama? That was the question buzzing on a corner of the blogosphere over the last few days, after several anti-Obama bloggers were unable to update their sites, which are hosted on Google’s Blogger service.
The bloggers in question, most of them supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and all of them opposed to Senator Obama, received a notice from Google last week saying that their sites had been identified as potential “spam” blogs. “You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog,” the Google e-mail read.
Many of the bloggers were affiliated with JustSayNoDeal.com, a Web site that opposes Senator Obama. They include http://bluelyon.blogspot.com, http://comealongway.blogspot.com, http://hillaryorbust.blogspot.com and http://mccaindemocrats.blogspot.com.
We agree with one angry blogger, cited in the Times' story, GeekLove:
“Without any notice, apology, or explanation, my posting privileges has been reinstated,” wrote the author of the blog Come a Long Way, who identifies herself as GeekLove. “Blogger’s ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach is appalling. As bloggers, it is a good thing we still have choices, and I have exercised my choice to leave Blogger and establish a new home at WordPress.”
"Without any notice, apology, or explanation" covers our experience as well.
Bloggasm relates anti-Obama bloggers (again, former Hillary supporters) have also been the target of more than just having their Blogger blogs shut down. [Who’s responsible for shutting down a number of anti-Obama Blogspot accounts?]
When it comes to butting heads with Obama supporters, perhaps nobody has more experience than Larry Johnson. If his name rings a bell, it’s because Johnson, who worked for the CIA in the ’80s and now does military consulting, was the origin of the famous “whitey” claim. Not long ago he reported on his website that people connected with the McCain campaign are in possession of video footage of Michelle Obama saying derogatory things about white people. However, he admitted that he hadn’t actually seen the video and his two sources hadn’t seen it either. He quickly became a target of bloggers from both the right and left.
“The problem with these people who had their Google accounts shut down, they’re intimidated by it,” Johnson said. “They don’t want to get themselves in a situation so they would be identified. Some of these people who get identified, the Obama folks start picking up the phone and calling. I had phone calls into my office, threatening me, saying that you’re going to be fired, let me talk to your boss. I told them to go fuck themselves, because I am my own boss. It helps to be self-employed.”
If readers are interested in reading more, Google (with an ironic, bitter smile, perhaps?) "obama shut down blogs", and any the articles on the first three-four pages should bring them up to speed.
Did Obama supporters shut us down?
Can't say with certainty at this point. We can say that it all may have been a coincidence this time. But, the previous spate of blog closings weren't.
In light of their previous actions, we'll take a page from Blogger's flawed spam policy: Obamanation is guilty until proved innocent.
by Mondoreb
image: RidesAPaleHorse
Google's Shoot the Hopium Pogrom
by BabbaZee
Leningrad Cowboys ~ My Way
Nokia Balalaika Show 1994
Hat Tip: PSaturn
Google Shuts Down Anti-Obama Sites on its Blogger Platform
By Warner Todd Huston | June 29, 2008 - 15:22 ET
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. Thus far, Google has terminated the access by blog owners to 7 such sites and the list may be growing. Boy, it must be nice for Barack Obama to have an ally powerful enough to silence his opponents like that!
It isn't just conservative sites that Google's Blogger platform is eliminating. For instance, www.comealongway.blogspot.com has been frozen and this one is a Hillary supporting site. The operator of Come a Long Way has a mirror site off the Blogspot platform and has today posted this notice:
I used to have a happy internet home on Blogger: www.comealongway.blogspot.com. Then on Wednesday night, June 25, I received the following e-mail:
Dear Blogger user,
This is a message from the Blogger team.
Your blog, at http://comealongway.blogspot.com/, has been identified as a potential spam blog. You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
It turns out that there is an interesting pattern where it concerns the blogs that Google's Blogspot team have summarily locked down on their service. They all belong to the Just Say No Deal coalition, a group of blogs that are standing against the Obama campaign. It seems the largest portion of these blogs are Hillary supporting blogs, too.
All I can say is, WOW! If Google is willing to abuse its power like this even against fellow leftists, what does it plan against conservatives, the folks Google hates even more!?
Here is a list of the Blogspot blogs that have been frozen by Google thus far:
* Blue Lyon @ http://bluelyon.blogspot.com
* Come A Long Way @ http://comealongway.blogspot.com
* Hillary or Bust @ http://hillaryorbust.blogspot.com
* McCain Democrats @ http://mccaindemocrats.blogspot.com
* NObama Blog @ http://nobamablog.blogspot.com
* politicallizard.blogspot.com @ http://thelizardannex.blogspot.com
* Reflections in Tyme @ http://reflections-in-tyme.blogspot.com
FERAL KRINGLES FIGHT DA POWA!
There's an update at NewsBusters now:
I have been hesitant to post this update because I cannot find a link to prove the claim, but it is starting to look like this Blogspot shut down of anti-Obama sites occurred because of a concerted effort by Obama supporters.
What they did was go to the Blogspot addresses found on the site of the NoObama coalition called Just Say No Deal and constantly hit the "mark as spam" link so that Google's Blogger would be flooded with spam warnings. This caused Google/Blogger to freeze the sites marked.
Apparently, this campaign merely took advantage of Google/Blogger's flawed system of finding spam blogs. So, it looks like what we have here is an Obama dirty trick to shut down political opposition. Looks like Obmatons aren't much for that whole democracy thing, eh?
Once I find a link to an Obama site talking about this attack, I will post it.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/war...logger- platform
by Babba Zee
Want more Babba Zee--with the full Stereophonic, Hi-Fidelity multigraphic effects? Try these recent posts from the Outraged Spleen of Zion: * I will fight against them with the sword of my mouth... * Classical Gas * Apocryphal Dreamer |
images: Outraged Spleen of Zion
Sources:
* Google's Shoot the Hoopium Pogrom
* Google Shuts Down Anti-Obama Sites on its Blogger Platform
Google "Censorship" and you get "Google"
While surfing by The People's Cube to see what shenanigans the comrades were up to, the following post caught our eye. It also changed our minds about the topic of this post.
The People's Cube is not the first to bring up Google's holiday logo nuttiness. Little Green Footballs is a regular Google-watcher on holidays. NewsBusters also noted that Google ignored Memorial Day (Google Ignores Memorial Day). Michelle Malkin noticed that Google honors World Water Day, but not Easter.
So, instead of some light-hearted tomfoolery, "Google and censorship" was now in the air.
This Day in History: An Open Letter to Google
Dear Google comrades Sergei and Larry!
The Party looks kindly at your attempts to correct and improve history by unobtrusively modifying the Google logo on notable calendar dates. For years you have zealously informed the masses about progressive and useful events like Earth Day or Earth Hour, while purposefully ignoring Memorial Day (no logo change on this reactionary American holiday). Most recently, you enlightened the unwashed about the Spanish artist Velázquez on June 6 without mentioning the Allied Invasion of Normandy on D-Day, a celebration of which would indeed be offensive to National Socialists.
~
The time is ripe for us to reinforce your amateurish efforts with our brand of historical revisionism that stands on a firm scientific foundation of the Party doctrine. The next big holiday is Independence Day. Review the following list of Party-recommended events and logos for mandatory inclusion.
After a list of suggested logo topics Google might use for the Fourth of July, instead of Independence Day, TPC wound up with the picture below.
The reader is sent to a page entitled, "Google Purges The People's Cube Worldwide". This is how it began:
Dear comrades at Google:
At some point, quite recently, our popular site "The People's Cube" (ThePeoplesCube.com) was purged from Google search results. MSN , Yahoo and other search engines still have it - but Google has erased/blocked any link to the site in its database. One can still find links to us from other sites - but not even one from Google to ThePeoplesCube.com. We tried American, French, German, British, Australian, and Russian versions of Google - they used to give us traffic only a few days ago - but all we got was the same line in various languages: Sorry, no information is available for the URL thepeoplescube.com. And if we clicked on Find web pages from the site thepeoplescube.com we got Your search - site:thepeoplescube.com - did not match any documents.
Sad and outrageous--both at the same time!
"Those bastards!" is the first thought that came to mind. The second was to Google "Google + censorship".
We got over 330,000 references. Including one by Search Engine Watch about Google cooperating like a good lackey in censoring Chinese users. Picture Says 1000 Words About Google's Censorship In China by Danny Sullivan.
Plenty are writing and writing about Google's agreement to censor results for China. But pictures perhaps better illustrate the differences that Google now endorses.
Google Images Censors Too in China from Google Blogoscoped shows you how a search for [tiananmen square] on Google Images China provides happy scenes while over at uncensored Google Images, there are tanks rolling in.
I took a look for just [tiananmen] at Google Images China versus Google Images. Here's a side-by-side:
Below are a few of the forbidden pictures the Communists and Google forbid the Chinese surfers to see.
The comrades at the People's Cube will survive nicely the Soviet-style antics by a search engine apparently full of hubris. Google is the darling of Wall Street--for the moment. But those things have a way of changing when a company is unresponsive to its customers--of which the People's Cube is but one.
The Googleteers are on top at the moment, but stunts, such as pulling the web pages of the brave workers at the People's Cube from its search engine, will land Google in a place that familiar to many companies that were once on top: on the bottom.
Just 20 years ago, K-Mart was the number one retailer, light years ahead of Wal-Mart. Just 45 years ago, Carling's Black Label beer was mopping the floor with Budweiser. How long will it be until "Google" is only a funny-sounding stock worth pennies?
Not as long as you think--if the search engine company keeps trying to finesse freedom and censorship.
Whether it occurs in China or the People's Cube.
by Mondoreb
Source/images:
* This Day In History: An Open Letter to Google
* artforprofit
* photobucket
* fas.org
* Picture Says 1000 Words About Google's Censorship In China
What Google Tells Us About the Candidates
If you're the kind of voter who casts their ballot according to the candidates' stands on Internet issues, this story might just be your ticket.
If you're the kind of voter who casts their ballot according to how popular the candidates are on-line, this also might be the story you're looking for.
Obama has 271,000 MySpace friends, compared to Hillary's 181,000, and McCain's disappointing 44,000.
Jason Lee Miller has written a piece for WebProNews on how the candidates stacked up based on their appearance at Google's HQ in California.
He looks at Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats, and John McCain for the Republicans.
It's interesting and a video of each candidate at Google was found on YouTube.
This was the summary of each.
OBAMA
If you're the type of person who listens to what President Bush says and thinks we should do the opposite, then Obama's your man. In this Editor & Publisher report, Bush called McCain a "true conservative" (a statement Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingram and Coulter might all disagree with), and said Hillary was "well-prepared for the job." And Barack? Bush doesn't like Obama's lack of foreign policy experience. And if anybody knows about bad foreign policy, it's Bush.
That's the last time. Honestly.
Obama's well-liked at the Googleplex, especially since he was the only candidate to answer correctly CEO Eric Schmidt's Google employment question, which is about "the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers."
He answered "I think the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go." That's apparently correct because the crowd applauded. Giving me a math problem is like putting a chimp at the helm of an atom-smasher. Still, I think this is the correct answer: "Give them to a Google employee."
Net Neutrality is a big Internet issue at the moment.
Google employees wanted to know about how the candidates felt about that particular issue, and Lee fills in the blanks.
During that interview, Obama voiced support for Network Neutrality (a topic you're unlikely to hear about off the Internet), and unveiled his technological plan for the nation, which included the appointment of a Chief Technical Officer to help make the government more transparent online.
As far as utilizing the Internet in his campaign goes, he's been early and aggressive online, making use of YouTube, MySpace, and Google AdWords, especially to ward off a smear campaign suggesting he was Muslim. That question, by the way,—whether he's Muslim—is the top Google suggestion for "Obama is…."
"Smear" here is in the eye of the beholder. There are legitimate questions concerning Obama, religion and his religious advisers. None of those questions constitute a "smear" in the classic sense of the word.
However, "smear" has come to mean "any unpleasant questions" in the modern political lexicon.
McCAIN
Google Suggest suggests that McCain is an insane, liberal traitor, or at best an old conservative. But if you're the type to go against anything MoveOn.org says, which has thrown it's support via donated money and advertising to Obama, then McCain's your man.
And he's earned your support. For every dollar McCain's campaign spent online he earned $4 in campaign donations. Not a bad return at all. His email campaign did better, pulling $189 average donations at a cost of $8 per donor. He's savvy when it comes to Internet campaigning, utilizing AdWords, AdSense, and MySpace to bolster support.
His ads don't always hit the mark. Some of his AdSense flyovers ended up in enemy territory thanks to some faulty contextual targeting. And he had to diffuse a McCain googlebomb at some point, which seems to have been unsuccessful. His attack on Hillary worked pretty well though.
While visiting the Googleplex, Schmidt let McCain off the hook by not making him answer the efficient bit-sorting thing, and McCain struck a cord with Googlers with this nugget:
“If Google is going to be able to maintain its supremacy in the world, it is going to have to continue to get the best and the brightest from all over the world, and I accept with your gigantic egos, that you are the best…we need an H1B visa program that works.”
But he wasn't pandering. Soon after, a Googler got the "McCain story" Rick Santorum was talking about as the two of them argued about the war in Iraq. And McCain wasn't exactly gentle. And he's still kind of mad at Google and Yahoo for their involvements with China.
He's against Net Neutrality, believing the market will right itself without government intervention. That might be why he took in $0 from Yahoo, and just $1,550 from Google. Don't feel bad for him though, McCain has mentioned making Cisco CEO John Chambers a cabinet member. Cisco doesn't like Net Neutrality either, especially with all the network filtering equipment they make.
And lastly, Hillary Clinton showed up at the Googleplex to talk to the Google employees.
As per usual, she came with a set of pre-conditions.
CLINTON
Google Suggest isn't kind to Sen. Clinton, either, suggesting she "is" a fake, a joke, even the devil. Slate compared her to General Electric, the "mega-cap blue-chip, a juggernaut of the 1990s," but I like the comparison to Microsoft better, especially if Obama is Google.
In fact, out of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, Clinton pulled in the most from Mr. Softy, the Beast of Redmond, and carried Silicon Valley, too. She also has visited the Googleplex, but unfortunately, it looks like Clinton specified "no math questions" before Schmidt was allowed to interview her.
The piece winds up with the following: "Rest assured, just like Microsoft with Google, wherever Obama is, there you'll find Clinton, too, especially online. In AdWords, on YouTube and MySpace."
And there you have it.
The handicapping of the candidates, according to Google.
While we think Google is an exceptional search engine, we're not so sure about its political advisory capabilities.
After all, in campaign season, it becomes just another interest group.
by Mondoreb
images:
* lockergnome;
* davidallgroup
Source: What Google Tells Us about the Candidates
Death by 1000 Papercuts Front Page.
Two statements about the 'Megan Had it Coming' blog were quoted by Fox News. We present both, as well as some questions at the end.
Lori Drew, who signed a police statement in 2006 that she was the instigator of the fictitious Internet boy named "Josh Evans", and was involved in the MySpace hoax in the minutes before Megan Meier's suicide: her attorney, Jim Briscoe's statement:
"I can categorically say that she did not write it," Briscoe told FOXNews.com. "She has not said anything on the Internet, on any blogs, on any Internet sites."
Briscoe said that Drew, a neighbor of the Meiers, has purposely remained silent in the media and online during the investigation and since.
"That's part of why she's remained silent, so there's no confusion about that," Briscoe said. "Anything that's on the Web is not true. She hasn't done anything. She doesn't know anybody who's done it — anybody who's doing it or has done it."
And now a statement from Google, parent company of Blogger.com, which hosts the 'Megan Had it Coming'.
Blogger.com, which houses the blog and lists "impersonation" as one of the things banned from the site, said it has no information that would call into question the authenticity of the "Megan Had It Coming" site.
"We take violations of Blogger's policy very seriously as such activities diminish the experience for our users," a spokesman for Google, Blogger's parent company, told FOXNews.com.
"Once we are notified about a blog that impersonates a person, we act quickly to remove it. We have not received an impersonation claim to date from the individual allegedly being impersonated."
Questions we'd like to ask:
* Why is the blog still up?
* If it is true, as Mr. Briscoe maintains, that Lori Drew is not the blog's author, why hasn't Ms. Drew shut it down?
* If Lori Drew is not the author of the 'Megan Had it Coming' blog, she can have it shut down in a heartbeat by contacting Blogger. This has not happened.
Blogger.com says, they have "no information that would call into question the authenticity of the "Megan Had It Coming" site."
* Blogger.com has information on who created the blog. What does that tell us?
These are the questions.
We're patient. We'll wait for the answers.
What do you think?
by Mondoreb
Source: MySpace Mom Linked to Missouri Teen Suicide Being Cyber Bullied Herself
Death by 1000 Papercuts Front Page.
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