The misspelling generator has been updated to now also generate misspellings for google news, images, blogsearch, and video. It already did the regular web search. It now also does full l33t speak For more information about the misspelling generator see my previous blog post and misspelling-generator.org.

The misspelling generator will be on display at the Dutch Institute for Media Art in the exhibition Speaking Out Loud from 15-11-2008 till 17-01-2009.

In general, a search engine is presented as an objective tool, although it is its underlying code which defines the possible outcomes.

An integral part of a search engine is the spelling control which suggests alternative words if it suspects that you have misspelled your search terms, prompting “Did you mean:�. However, since the early days of Usenet, misspellings have been used as a way to overcome censorship. By ignoring the suggested corrections, the misspellings can be a gateway to an alternative world.
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About a year ago Richard Rogers, Marieke van Dijk, and I made the Issue Dramaturg, a tool to display a site’s Google rank per query. Today, whilst preparing for the public form on Quaero I checked our query on 9/11 again. Every day we query Google for 9/11 and see which sites have what rank for that query. Normally 911truth.org has a very high rank in Google for this query. Since the 17th of September 2007 however, their rank has declined very fast. On the 20th of September 911truth.org completely disappeared from Google! 911truth.org is an important source for information about 9/11. According to Wikipedia,

[911truth.org,] The 9/11 Truth Movement is the name adopted by the loosely-connected organizations and individuals that question the mainstream account of the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States. [...] The common proposition among all of the movement supporters is that what they call “the official account” of the events of 9/11 is not true, and that the truth has been covered up by high-level officials and the official investigators.

Below you can find a screenshot of the Issue Dramaturg documenting the decline in Google rank for 911truth.org:

911truth.org itself says this about it:

It seems absolutely clear Google has purposefully removed 911truth.org from their search engine. Is this the same Google whose mission statement includes the goal “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Uhm, maybe only sort of universally accessible?

… Talking about a well documented case of Google censorship… I am constantly reminded why we started Open Search - a distributed peer to peer search engine which is set up to avoid search engine manipulation, censorship and profiling.

Cross posted on Masters of Media weblog

Global Internet Filtering Conference 2007

The OpenNet Initiative is holding its first public conference to discuss the current state of play of Internet filtering worldwide. The conference will be hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute and held at the University of Oxford on May 18, 2007. The conference is free of charge and open to the public.

Results from the first global study of Internet filtering carried out by the OpenNet Initiative (for which govcom.org and I made some analyses and visualisations) will be on the table for a day of discussion involving ICT development experts, speech and human rights advocates, journalists and bloggers, international laywers and scholars, and others interested in state responses to online information flows. We hope you will join us in exploring interpretations and implications of our data and helping to shape the OpenNet Initiative’s evolving research agenda.

The day will conclude with a debate hosted by the Oxford Union - Resolved: the Internet is the greatest force for democracy around the world.

Nart Villeneuve has a very interesting blogpost on why internet filtering is not the solution to e.g. child porn.

Yesterday Ron Deibert was interviewed by Amber Macintosh here at Citizenlab. In the video Ron explains very clearly why internet censorship is wrong. A must see! (If you look carefully you can even see a lot of govcommies).

We have made some beautiful illustrations of internet censorship, on display at the protect-the.net event. You can find the pdfs here:

Leaky Content: An Approach to Show Unblocked Content on Blocked Sites in Pakistan - The Baloch Case (November 2006) [method pdf]

Leaky Content: An Approach to Show Unblocked Content on Blocked Sites in Pakistan - The Baloch Case (November 2006) [story pdf]

Two Providers, Two Internets. - The Case of the United Arab Emirates (November 2006) [pdf]

The Internet Treats Censorship as a Malfunction and Routes around it? A Semi-manual Approach to Internet Censorship
Circumnavigation (June 2005) [updated pdf]

A Censor’s Network: Iranian Social, Political and Religious Sites. A Hyperlink Analysis Method for Censored Website Discovery (June 2006) [updated pdf]

For A0 versions of the maps please send a mail to Richard Rogers.

Here are some stories about the protect-the.net event and Psiphon:

- Webcast protect-the.net
- Documentary
- News: City news (short / long), macleans, Toronto Star, slashdot, cnn, bbc, NYT, cbc.

Next week we‘ll be presenting a couple of beautiful maps on internet censorship at the protect-the.net event in Toronto. I’ll make sure we put the maps online once the event has gone by, you can already see one here: Iran.

Announcement:

Once an unfettered forum for global communications, the Inernet is today under seige.

Upwards of forty countries now censor Internet traffic. Most of the censorship takes place in secret, without any public accountability or civilian oversight.

Protect the Net is a worldwide campaign to help restore the hope and promise that the original notion of the internet once held out as a frontier-less form of free expression, democratic communications, and access to information. It is about preserving and enlarging the global commons of information, shedding light on unlawful censorship and surveillance practices where they exist, and holding states and corporations accountable for the limitations they impose on free speech and access to information online.

Protect the Net Toronto is the first stop in the worldwide campaign. This event will be highlighted by presentations on Internet censorship, surveillance and infowar as well as the worldwide public release and demonstration of the psiphon censorship circumvention tool.

Psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor.

Protect the Net will educate and empower citizens worldwide about the perilous state of human rights online and what they can do to help rescue and restore those rights.