Following In Bing's Footsteps, Yahoo! and Flickr Censor Porn In India 167
bhagwad writes "Following recent news on how Bing decided sex was too sensitive for India, Yahoo! and its associated site Flickr have decided to do the same. While it's true that this is because of India passing laws that prohibit the publication of porn, no complaint was ever launched (and never will be), and glorious Google still continues to return accurate and unbiased results. So why is Yahoo! doing this? Is it because of its tie-up with Bing? I assume this is the case. Indian ISPs have already told the government and the courts that it's not their job to restrict porn and it's technologically infeasible too. In the absence of a complaint, I can only assume that Yahoo! has decided to do this of their own volition. Given that the 'sex' search term is searched more in India than in any other country, isn't it the duty of Yahoo! to provide accurate results to its customers? It can always plausibly deny control of its results and claim that filtering porn is infeasible. Since Yahoo! already has a low search market share in India, this will drive it even lower."
Here it comes... (Score:3, Funny)
Bing!
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Having said that, I only ever recall seeing one bit of bollywood porn, and it was a blooper (don't ask), so maybe it's just not around that much. Of course I might just not be that into that sort of thing and be missing out on a vast cultural experience. Better to use the simp
Re:Here it comes... (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole subcontinent is littered with statues of stylized large-breasted women and phallic lingam. It seems a little odd to ban online porn, when sexuality lies at the heart of Hinduism (as it does for all the Indo-European religions).
Re:Here it comes... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I'd say that, rather than "seem[ing] a little odd", the connection between sexuality and Hinduism could arguably be a strong incentive for banning online porn.
Consider, for example, the matter of medieval Catholicism and vernacular bibles. The whole continent is littered with churches full of stained glass depictions of biblical scenes, and the gospels lie at the heart of Catholicism, and yet, early vernacular translators got suppressed good and hard for their trouble. This was because the centrality of the bible to Catholic practice implied acceptance of it; but also implied an established order controlling its use, dissemination, and interpretation.
Similarly, it could well be(arguing from principles, not direct anthropological evidence) that the long connection of sexuality with Hinduism means a certain acceptance of it; but almost certainly also means an established set of rules and practices concerning its use, allocation, and proper role. Pornography from all over the world, in any style you like, available swiftly and anonymously over the internet, likely stomps on the toes of at least a few of those rules and practices.
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Dude, there's a temple with porn carved into statues on the outside [wikipedia.org].
(And there were many more before they were destroyed by the Mughals.)
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Not loud enough.
You're sacked!
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Ah. Good for you!
Wait a minute before the India-bashing begins (Score:2, Troll)
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No no, the summary contains paranoid Microsoft bashing, not India bashing. Not to mention the hilarious part about filtering being infeasible (I guess it would sort of suck for Indians if search engines started returning only white-listed results, but it isn't exactly hard to think of a way to filter output that you control (but the end result might suck for the searcher).
Re:Wait a minute before the India-bashing begins (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft, in their limitless greed and avarice, has an insatiable desire for cheap H1B and outsourced programming labour. India is a major source of this labour; but has rising incomes and standards of living, which threaten to make that labour more expensive. Pornography reduces birth rates by providing the sexually frustrated an alternative to procreation. If Microsoft(and its subservient minion Yahoo) can cut off India's porn supply, they can insure a bumper crop of future programmers. Supply and demand being what they are, the more programmers born, the less Microsoft has to pay, per programmer!
See? It's all very simple when you recognize the sinister conspiracy at work...
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Furthermore, by eliminating pornography in India, Microsoft will have assured that everyone will want to come to America to work^Wget porn. Brillant!
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That is a ridiculous theory. It is far too complicated. You got the first part right: "Microsoft, in their limitless greed and avarice, has an insatiable desire for cheap H1B and outsourced programming labour." From there you go horribly astray. My good friend Occam tells me that it is something more like this:
Microsoft Recruiter: We won't pay you much, but we don't block porn.
H1B Candidate: Where would I be finding the
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What i'm paranoid about is american multinational ignore the wishes of worldwide consumers and helping enforce local censorship policies at the expense of freedom. This has already happenned with china, where of course is political content rather than sexual content which is suppressed.
---
Censorsh [feeddistiller.com]
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His (her?) contention was that porn makes you not get pregnant by replacing actual sex.
Re:Wait a minute before the India-bashing begins (Score:5, Insightful)
There shouldn't be any bashing at all in this article.
.
India is a democratic country -- their laws are by definition reflective of their social values. If they want porn cencored, they are within their rights to want it. I don't agree with it -- but it's their call. If at some point in the future there is a change in social attitudes towards porn in India, they can vote for a government that will change their laws accordingly.
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If you want to bash anyone, bash Google for not respecting local laws -- but even that would be stretching it a bit.
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I don't bash google, or yahoo on this regard. My opinion is that India has a right to enact laws that coincide with the moral status quo of that country. I would recommend all companies to comply with the laws of the countries they have physical locations at, but I don't know if Google actually has a physical presence in India. If they don't, I can't see why they would care what India's laws are.
If Yahoo! wants to comply with India's laws, then good for them. But they need to be honest with the Indian users
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I don't know if Google actually has a physical presence in India
They do.. hence the bit about respecting local laws.
But they need to be honest with the Indian users of their service and make it publicly known that their results are filtered due to the laws of that country .... Censorship, when done in the dark is evil. Censorship done in the light of day is slightly less evil.
Completely agreed, and a great idea at that.
Re:Wait a minute before the India-bashing begins (Score:4, Insightful)
It's entirely reasonable to criticize governments when they enact stupid policies, whether they're democratically elected or not. As I recall one or two foreign entities on occasion said less than complimentary things about the Bush administration; were they wrong to do so?
A call for a White Paper (Score:2)
If only we had some kind of formal document that explicitly outlined these new and radical ideas in the United States. We could teach our children that all US citizens have a responsibility to understand the concepts held within it, and the flawless democratic system would allows us to make sure we elect officials who respect it, as well as the rights of all US citizens. Alas,
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...the flawless democratic system would allows us to make sure we elect officials who respect it...
I hope you were going for +5, Funny; I can't tell what you mean by that otherwise.
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Re:Wait a minute before the India-bashing begins (Score:4, Insightful)
India is a democratic country -- their laws are by definition reflective of their social values.
This is a fallacious correlation. Just because laws have been arrived at through a democratic process does not necessarily mean that they represent social values. There are much more important driving factors for legislation in a democracy than these social values. There are many ways (for example, lobbyists/bribery) that groups can influence democratic legislation, even in directions contrary to social values. The only possible government in which your ideals of democracy would be upheld would be one that's extremely limited socially so that no one's social values could be trampled upon.
If they want porn cencored, they are within their rights to want it.
I disagree with this. This is a case where your social values are at odds with personal liberties and just because such regulations would be arrived at through a democratic process doesn't mean that it's okay to take these liberties away. You could make the same case with racial segregation, where only a few really wanted to integrate, but the views of the majority democratically determined that segregation was legal and allowable. Another example could be gay marriage, where a majority is often against it, but since it is (arguably) within a gay couple's right to marry, these social values should not influence the democratic process to take their rights away.
Re:Wait a minute before the India-bashing begins (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a case where your social values are at odds with personal liberties and just because such regulations would be arrived at through a democratic process doesn't mean that it's okay to take these liberties away.
The thing here is, you are making a value judgement. You're also making a value judgement when you say that racial segregation is bad. I happen to agree with that judgement, but it is still a judgement. Who is there to say that your values are correct and some other person's values are incorrect? Unless we have absolute truth, we cannot know these things.
You are confused about the point of democracy: it doesn't exist to protect what you consider to be liberties, it actually exists to avoid some of the problems we have with kings (violent regime changes), and to have government that roughly represents the will of the majority. It is hard living in a single place with a bunch of people: if you think about it, even living in a family is hard, and how many more people are there in a country? Democracy solves the problem better than anything else so far, but still if the majority decides to take away your personal liberties, they can because there are more of them than you. You may think it is 'wrong,' but once again that is a value judgement.
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The idea that what the people want matters is a value judgement. The idea that violent regime changes are bad is a value judgement.
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I'm confused as to what you actually want. Is it rule of power? You need to have some kind of core values to go toward because otherwise there's no point to anything.
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If you are asking me what I personally want, it's a government that does not get in my way too much, because I can personally take care of myself. If the rest of the country decides it wants some massive, expensive, useless healthcare plan (as an aside, and as an observer, we are in an interesting situation here because the democratic party is trying to push a project that t
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I agree that getting people what they want is what we're trying to maximize, and democracy does that fairly well, but there are problems if the system is not reined in. The problem is that some people's wants are stronger than others. For example, consider a country with 10 people and a vote between two plans. Plan A gives everyone 10 apples. Plan B gives 6 people 11 apples and 4 people 1 apple. A pure democracy would pick B even though A is superior. This is how I see human rights issues. Their joy from se
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Ultimately all society depends on some level of trust and coo
We hold these truths to be self evident (Score:2, Insightful)
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." - The Declaration of Independence.
Upon that very clear value statement America's founding fathers overthrew Colonial rule and founded what is still in-arguably, despite recent lapses, THE model for Democracy. They did not assert political or religious authority, as clearly evidenced by the very care
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Furthermore, your argument is a logical fallacy; it says, "X argument is correct because these great people said it" which is of course wrong. It doesn't matter what certain people believed, it only matters what is right.
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There are plenty of examples of democracies getting it wrong. Just look at the California gay marriage bill that passed last year, or the various EU plans that were shot down by voters. Thank goodness there are ways around those.
Voting is pure gambling, there is no guarantee of a positive outcome. Any sort of referendum is just a roll of the dice and you hope the voters will get it right, but frequently they get it wrong. Simply saying "the voters have spoken" is childish and not at all fashionable amon
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Saying it a thousand times doesn't make it wrong.
I hate Limbaugh and Fox News as much as you do -- but democracy is essentially 'majority wins'.. nobody's been able to come up with a better system yet. And it isn't for lack of trying.
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I'm Indian so I can say this - Indians want porn, all classes and all backgrounds. Actually, it's only some of the uppermost class (class = money & background) that don't want or like it and it's social-suicide to 'rally' for porn or anti-censorship.
Notice how many 'Indian girl' porn vids have started coming up over the past 2-3 yrs? Yeah. And the summary already pointed out that Indian ppl (pun intended) search for sex more than any other country.
It's all very two-faced and about what you show rather t
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So 51% of the population has the right to deny 49% the right to engage in perfectly legitimate activities? I wouldn't approve of this even if 90% of the population voted for it.
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Right. Because laws always reflect the social values of society as a whole in a democratic society. That is why marijuana is now perfectly legal in the United States, and we stopped having one of the largest rates of incarceration in the "free" world when we stopped locking up people for committing victimless "crimes" long ago.
Thank Shiva and Shakti that democracies are flawless, and the all might dollar nev
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There is an interesting issue here. "it's their call" may be true. There may be a line though that you can speak out against or a precedence that may be dangerous to democracy in India. Here we are talking about prior constraint which is a very dangerous precedent. Now for images and ideas surrounding human procreation. Which I contend is necessary for our continued existance.
A democratic system that controls information is probably not a real democratic system. Democratic systems require a free flow and c
Heh (Score:3, Insightful)
Clearly, if you have to google "sex", you already know what it is.
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Re:Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
Hypothetical example: for every Indian who looks up "sex", there are four Americans who each look up "fisting", "creampies", "MILFs", and "jailbait"
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Hypothetical example: for every Indian who looks up "sex", there are four Americans who each look up "fisting", "creampies", "MILFs", and "jailbait" :)
What about the guy who's searching for "MILFs fisting jailbait creampies"? or "MILF"+"fisting"+"jailbait"+"creampies"? Or "jailbait fisting MILFs"? Or any of the previous with +"midget"?
I mean if you just search for "sex" you get stuff like wikipedia and psychology today...
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Interesting you chose the number 4, since their are almost exactly 4 times as many people living in India compared to America.
There are way more people both searching for sex on the internet and having sex IRL in India than in America, based on nothing more than population numbers.
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Clearly, if you have to google "sex", you already know what it is.
Or, more succinctly, sex != porn.
Re:Heh (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly, if you have to google "sex", you already know what it is.
"Sex" you say? Let's just give that a try.....open Google and.....OH MY GOD WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO ANOTHER PERSON???
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Awesome. The Illinois State Police's Sex Offender Registry is the *second* hit on the list (the first is "pornhub", which I assume is actually a porn site). The rest aren't porn sites (at least, not in the "creampie milf jailbait fisting" sense from comments earlier in the thread). And yes, I have safe search turned off - I'll censor my own web, thanks.
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Clearly if you are on /., you don't know what it is.
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I think the reverse would be true. Sex and porn would be well known subjects. As we all know (sorry), Knowledge != Experience.
[John]
Gone downhill... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't the Kama Sutra come out of India?
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Didn't the Kama Sutra come out of India?
Have you ever tried reading it? It's about as exciting as the Bible (or any other ancient text), though at least it's more relevant.
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Dude, you're doing it wrong: it's a hands-on tutorial, not a reference manual... you're supposed to work through the exercises, not just read them.
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I beg to differ. http://www.xkcd.com/414/ [xkcd.com]
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It is difficult to understand India, unless you have visited and lived for some time. There is a great level of hypocrisy in India about everything including sex.
Sex is not new to India, and also it is not kept as hidden as we think. Kama Sutra is one example, Khajuraho temples in India showing different positions of intercourse is another example...and according to many experts, Shivalinga [wikipedia.org] worshipped almost everywhere in India is a symbol of sex. Of course, the worshipping represents respectful recognit
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Sex is not new to India
You don't say. I was wondering how all those people ended up getting born there. Next thing you're going to point out that sex isn't new to Iran either.
maybe makes bussiness sense (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case, I don't see this as a 'Bing and Yahoo are bad' issue. If Google does not comply, that is business decision, just like Bing and Yahoo.
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They did. Search for Tienanmen Square on images.google.cn. Then search on any other flavor of google. Quite the difference!
They do give the wikipedia pages, but it seems to be picking up on my locale, but I do distinctly remember searching google on a tor exit node from china and being surprised at how censored the great wall really is.
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Try over a billion people :) -- almost three billion if you combine India and China.
I don't have first-hand knowledge, but it seems to me that in China it doesn't matter if people get pissed. Events damaging to the govt. seem to literally disappear from their history, like Tiananmen sq., events in Tibet, and much more. I guess it's a chicken-and-egg thing when it comes to censorship -- you can't get mad about stuff you don't know about. Perhaps people in China just think the 'net has a lot less porn than
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Possibly, if Google was blocked, it would piss enough people off to lower the people's opinion of the government and possibly effect change.
OK, let me get this straight, just so I understand. You're saying that if the Chinese government blocked Google, the Chinese people would be enraged? Sufficiently enraged to rise up and overthrow the government? Are you deranged, man? Or are you just totally unaware there's a world outside of Google, Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter? Honestly, where did this attitu
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Possibly, if Google was blocked, it would piss enough people off to lower the people's opinion of the government and possibly effect change.
Actually what happens is that half of the government points to t3h ebil corporashuns and screams "See? They're trying to strong-arm us! They threaten us! Down with corporashuns! And multinationals while we're at it." and half of the population supports them when they enact idiotic laws (statalization, regulation, etc)
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Exactly; businesses make business decisions. This may be a poor business decision (although I agree with you that it also may be a very shrewd one) but nobody should be heaping blame on Bing and Yahoo for censorship. That blame should be directed squarely at the Indian government. Bing and Yahoo (and yes, Google too) are concerned only with revenue streams. You will disappointed if you feel otherwise.
Governments should be accountable for upholding human rights, like free speech, by creating sensible, correc
So are you redirected to wholesome Bollywood? (Score:4, Funny)
We all know that there is no sex in Bollywood. It is a chaste and pure place where the pixies and fairies cavort in peace, love and mung beans.
Wait a minute (Score:2, Interesting)
It can always plausibly deny control of its results and claim that filtering porn is infeasible.
Well it's obviously feasible if they're actually doing it.
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Re:Wait a minute (Score:5, Funny)
You're implying that they somehow block every single search term related to porn. Guess what? Not only are there tons of slang terms for various things they haven't heard of, but even whole genres of porn that they can't block because they've never heard of. Sure, they can block most mainstream porn, but a lot of genre-specific porn would also apply to mainstream.
2 snakes 1 charmer?
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Not to mention innocent food references like "1 guy 1 jar".
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Just wait till they try to ban slashfic ...
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Says who? (Score:2, Interesting)
Since Yahoo! already has a low search market share in India, this will drive it even lower.
I suspect the executives at Yahoo! don't share your opinion. It's not like they did this because of their personal moral codes; this is probably a calculated risk, based upon the societies public values, intended to increase market share by appearing to be more family-oriented and appropriate. The goal is to spawn conversations such as: "Oh, you're using Google? Haven't you heard about the immoral content it tries to force upon users?"
I don't know if it will work, but it's not like it's downright stupi
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it tries to force upon users?"
Force on users?
The Geek As Psychic (Score:2)
no complaint was ever launched (and never will be), and glorious Google still continues to return accurate and unbiased results
Never say never.
Money, politics, law and religion make a volitile mix in any culture. You cannot predict the outcome.
Apple Censors Dalai Lama IPhone Apps in China [pcworld.com] [Dec 29]
Google's China Blues [forbes.com] [Dec 21]
hold the phone (Score:2)
Wait, wait... there's porn on flickr?
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Yeah, there's some. It's more "artsy nakedness" than simply "porn" though there was that octopus on women gallery....
I think it was Flickr anyway.
(It was on BoingBoing.net and only Tubgirl and the like are the bounds of my curiosity. The Daily Cervix was pushing it though.)
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Wait, it's called Beautiful Cervix, not Daily.
And here, the octopus thing so you don't need that on your google record: http://boingboing.net/2009/01/02/cephalerotica.html [boingboing.net] :P
Uh, no... (Score:2)
It can always plausibly deny control of its results and claim that filtering porn is infeasible.
Well, clearly since Bing is doing it, yahoo can't claim that they can't. They've just shown that they can make at least a minimally successful attempt. Your "plausible deniability" isn't looking so plausible.
LK
Who is bhagwad? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is bhagwad someone famous, or someone with particular insight into the Indian ISP situation, or someone who has some other qualification that would make it worth having most of the submission be his blithering speculation on the subject?
It would be really nice of Slashdot were to hire some editors to actually edit the submissions.
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You don't read very well, do you? Just because "or" is a small word doesn't mean you can just ignore it. I didn't put it in just to improve the feng shui of my sentence structure.
Just like with TV networks... (Score:4, Insightful)
isn't it the duty of Yahoo! to provide accurate results to its customers?
You make the mistake of assuming that the users are the customers, rather than the product being sold.
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You make the mistake of assuming that the users are the customers, rather than the product being sold.
Oh no! How creepy and dystopian. It's like I'm in the Matrix, and I'm being used as a human battery! Thank you, Phroggy, for opening my eyes to that which I have been so ignorant of all my life! It's like you have amazing powers to see the real truth.
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Sorry, but this is a truth well established within web portal corporations.
Customer = advertiser
Product = ad impressions
Essential components of the Product are:
- ad itself (usually outsourced to advert/gfx agency)
- content within which the ad is displayed (whatever is used to attract the user)
- medium (platform to run it on, servers, network infrastructure to serve the ad and so on)
- users - audience to view the ads.
The customer is only interested in user receiving the message of the ad. This is what the wh
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It's true that the role of advertising is to get people to visit the advertiser'
The obvious reason (Score:2)
Well, after reading this article, I can see why porn films might be a sensitive issue in India... ;-)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6161691.stm [bbc.co.uk]
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Especially if they have South African stars. [bbc.co.uk]
It will never work (Score:3, Insightful)
If one has a cultural framework in which on values males over females (in spite of the fact that India, at least from my reading of PBS programs, has a high respect for females). If you check the CIA World Factbook, regarding the "People" ratios it becomes fairly obvious. Sex selection is occurring in India taking place either by implicit or explicit actions (the most explicit actions being the clandestine abortion of female fetuses). If one has a sex selection process going on (and one could argue the same thing is taking place in China) then there is obviously going to be a demand for online "sex" information, esp. if one has rations involving 10's of millions of males with respect to females. And if you happen to think that constraining search engine results (presumably what the governments or the puritanical U.S. search engine providers might think) is going to constrain access then you fail to understand what outside of the box thinking of millions of individuals can accomplish. You cannot correct the problem by constraining internet access, you can can only correct it by changing the culture (a slow and difficult process, but one which the "west" has been through) or by changing the fundamental nature of human beings (clamping down on the natural desires to mate, etc.) which probably requires genetic engineering beyond our current capabilities.
Thus complaining about this (at least from a "West"ern perspective) is pretty much of a no-op / noise). Complaining about this from an "East"ern perspective (India/China) (combined population 2+ billion people or 30+% of the world's population) simply gives the creative individuals information required to do what they do best (i.e. work around the "system"). I could within a few hours easily work up a Perl script which figures out which keywords are blocked and which are not and the best way around such systems. Until government officials learn that attempting to "censor" the thought paths of their populations is relatively pointless exercise in an internet world, then conversations like this one (at least in the "West"ern world are relatively pointless). The paths to change (where females and males are valued as equal) have to come from within the individual cultures.
Kamasutra (Score:2)
didn't India write the book on porn !
Huge in India (Score:2)
India has what are probably the largest red light districts in the entire world. One district in Calcutta has an estimated 500,000 working whores all the way from three years old up into their nineties.
That being a given just what the heck is porn supposed to do in that nation? It would be far better to get the men to wear condoms as the prostitutes often don't even know what a condom is and AIDS is a huge problem in that nation.
Duty? (Score:2)
isn't it the duty of Yahoo! to provide accurate results to its customers?
No. It's just a search engine, for pity's sake. It's not like they took an oath to serve up truth, justice, and Western decay.
Douglas Adams was first (Score:2)
Sex: none
Well, in fact there is an awful lot of this, largely because of the total lack of money, trade, banks, art, rainfall, or anything else that might keep all the non-existent people of the Universe occupied. However, it's not worth embarking on a long discussion of it now, because it really is terribly complicated. For further information see Chapters Seven, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Fourteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Nineteen, Twenty-One to Eighty-Four inclusive, and... most of the rest of the book.
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Well said. Now may I introduce you to Rajish. He will be sharing your office with you for the next 30 days on a training basis. Don't look so worried, I'm sure the unemployment line isn't too long. And remember, you do have your company shares to tide you over, or at least give you a few days s
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person I've completely had it with India and Indians dictating how to implement technology. F@#k'em!!!!
A large percentage of the Indian population are poor illiterate farmers/village-folk. A very tiny percentage of their population (my guess is single digits) is online and most Indians I know would never support such policies. Most likely this is just their internal politics (similar to the abortion and LGBT posturing we have here) to appeal to the conservative populace. Heck they tell me some morons even tried to ban Valentines day as it imposes liberal "western" values ! (It didn't work)
Mod abuse.. (Score:2)
Troll? Seriously?
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In other news, US vegetable pickers with delusions of grandeur complained about their replacement by Mexicans.
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A press conference in a dystopian future.
Darth Conroy: With the failure of the National Broadband Filter to protect the children we've decided to block VPN.
Emporor BHP: No, you wont be doing that now will we.
Darth Rudd: yes, my master.
If nothing else, you can count on the government bending over to the corporations that the Australian economy depends on (the resources sector). After all a few offended puritans are noting compare