Google Wipes 786 Pirate Sites From Search Results (torrentfreak.com) 83
Google and several leading Russian search engines have completely wiped 786 "pirate" sites from their search results. That's according to telecoms watch Rozcomnadzor, which reports that the search providers delisted the sites after ISPs were ordered by a Moscow court to permanently block them. TorrentFreak reports: Late July, President Vladimir Putin signed a new law which requires local telecoms watchdog Rozcomnadzor to maintain a list of banned domains while identifying sites, services, and software that provide access to them. [...] Nevertheless, on October 1 the new law ("On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection") came into effect and it appears that Russia's major search engines have been very busy in its wake. According to a report from Rozcomnadzor, search providers Google, Yandex, Mail.ru, Rambler, and Sputnik have stopped presenting information in results for sites that have been permanently blocked by ISPs following a decision by the Moscow City Court. "To date, search engines have stopped access to 786 pirate sites listed in the register of Internet resources which contain content distributed in violation of intellectual property rights," the watchdog reports. The domains aren't being named by Rozcomnadzor or the search engines but are almost definitely those sites that have had complaints filed against them at the City Court on multiple occasions but have failed to take remedial action. Also included will be mirror and proxy sites which either replicate or facilitate access to these blocked and apparently defiant domains.
I should remove these from my index too (Score:4, Funny)
I should remove these from my index too. I need a list of the sites I have to remove.
Re:I should remove these from my index too (Score:5, Informative)
If I do a naughty search on google, I get:
we have removed 6 results from this page.
If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaints that caused the removals at LumenDatabase.org
followed by a bunch of links to pages at Lumen, full of pirate URLs . What a resource! They should call it PirateDatabase.org.
Thanks Warner Bros etc for doing the hard work of finding the good pirate sites for me. [lumendatabase.org]
Somebody should write a simple search engine that just returns links from DMCA complaints within LumenDatabase.org
Re: I should remove these from my index too (Score:1)
I wasn't sure what to search for. Then I thought "how stupid could they be?"
Search on '.com' :-) page after page of pirate goodness.
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You have to be registered Russian ISP or something alike (Google seems to qualify), and have electronic signature certificate, issued by Russian Goverment CA (of course it would be GOST R 34.10 algorithm, so you'll need appropriate software to sign request) to be able to download RosKomNadzor blacklist database legally. Ordinary people only have access to interface, which allows to check whether URL is blocked one URL at time.
Fortunately there are some guerilliers, who maintain site https://rublacklist.net [rublacklist.net]
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While we're busy making rap music illegal, can we also add western music and country music to that list?
Thanks.
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I'm white, I hate rap music but I also hate country and western music. I figured that while we were banning some kinds of music, we might as well get rid of all the crappy music.
Helpless Without Google (Score:4, Interesting)
I was amused to learn a while back that some people simply are incapable of typing a domain name into a browser's URL field. They only know how to search for everything via Google.
I was at a friend's house one day talking about going to a baseball game. I told him to go to nationals.com to see where good seats remained. He dutifully opened up google.com and typed "nationals.com" into the search bar. No, I am not kidding.
So this kind of restriction actually has much greater impact than it first might seem.
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I laugh at people for that, but occasionally do it myself.
Mostly because it can actually be faster when your homepage is Google, and you don't need to click in the address bar to move the cursor because the cursor's already in the Google search textbox. And Google can handle spelling mistakes.
Of course, then I have to click on a search result...
Re:Helpless Without Google (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup. Also, it saves you from going to the wrong site if your typing is less than perfect. Google is usually smart enough to find the site you wanted despite most common typos instead of taking you to some typo squatter site.
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...or the other way around, if the site you are trying to get to isn't THAT big a site (or, for good reason, a bit obscure and lesser well known...) and the typosquatter managed to have more (landing) pages link to his typosquatted domain.
Now try to get your browser (and the inevitably attached search engine) to believe you that you did NOT want the typosquatted domain and that you're an adult fully capable of using a keyboard sensibly enough to type the URL correctly.
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when your homepage is Google, and you don't need to click in the address bar to move the cursor because the cursor's already in the Google search textbox.
CTRL+T, then CTRL+L. I don't know what this homepage thing is you speak of. But I think I saw one when I first installed my browser. Now it's just my current tabs.
And I already have my address bar set up to query Google, so I usually don't have to type the whole thing or worry about spelling.
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Actually, CTRL+T already puts the cursor in the right place. CTRL+L is only when you're wanting to use an existing tab.
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. . . . and you don't need to click in the address bar to move the cursor because the cursor's already in the Google search textbox.
People still do that? I just use the Command + L (Mac) or Alt + D (Windows) keyboard shortcut to highlight/move cursor to address bar.
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Mostly because it can actually be faster when your homepage is Google, and you don't need to click in the address bar to move the cursor because the cursor's already in the Google search textbox.
My home page is quick dial, and the cursor is already in the address bar. If I want to search, it's just a single tab away.
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Next time don't look so hideous. No wonder you need people with poor eyesight.
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Really? Poor you, can't find any living chicks that hold still for the couple seconds you need?
Now, pull that femur out of your ass and close the grave, will ya? And for fuck's sake, stop screaming, you're in a graveyard!
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Hmm, I've seen a guy google bing so that he could bing his search.
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I LOVE to do that, because you know somewhere they're tracking that - "Hey, people using us to find Bing instead are up 5% today!" OK, they're probably just laughing instead of seeing it as an indication of a problem with their service, but whatever.
I do have to be in the right mood so that the amusement is worth the delay.
Re:Helpless Without Google (Score:4, Informative)
Same reason women have fat friends, so they're the skinny one.
Re: Helpless Without Google (Score:2)
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Honestly I think you can blame Google themselves for that, since browsers started blurring the line between the search bar and the URL bar making them basically the exact same thing people have been forced into this paradigm.
It's one thing I hate about most modern browsers, I liked explicit separation of the two, but you don't really get that now. If you mis-type a URL in what used to be the URL bar it often ends up in a Google search anyway.
So I really don't blame end users for that at all, it's not really
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It gets worse. Current browsers support this bad habit by blurring the difference between URL and search field.
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I'm guessing / hoping that (Score:3)
Google's only removing this for results served up via Google.ru, right?
Anyway, the better way to do this (for the evil government) would not be to depend on the foreign search engine, but to mandate ISPs have transparent proxies that will filter pages on the fly. And also (not coincidentally) MitM your SSL for the police and intelligence agencies to be able to access all your traffic.
Remove the links not just from Google, but from anything served up to a Russian-connected computer from any source.
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Really? Taken or single?
Hey, I'd finally have a boyfriend who has all the latest games and videos!
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Nothing wrong with being gay, so I assume you think there is nothing wrong with piracy.
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Sounds a lot like the headline "McDonald's removes beef from its menu", leaving us to guess that they're probably talking about the menu in a small town in India. You can recognize shady news sources as the ones that try to maximize outrage. As long as their headline is technically correct from some particular point of view, they're safe from libel lawsuits.
Duckduckgo (Score:2)
BFD (Score:1)
Pirates can register and provision dozens or hundreds of sites in an evening. It takes too long to get a court order that lists specific ones.
For example, google "Led Zeppelin free mp3". The very first three hits I get are from mp3goo.io, freedownloadmp3.net, and mp3guild.com. There's also mp3pn.info on the first results page. Are these legit sites or pirates? So Google has self-driving cars, but no technology that's capable of distinguishing a pirate site (or at least suspicious enough to banish from
It's Parasites All The Way Down (Score:1)
Based on my experience of humanity, this view is most likely correct. The problem is insoluble, barring some kind of absurd digital panopticon, so executives are making a public show of taking action for their shareholders, consultants are maki
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Google "Pirate Bay" or one of the other websites, and if you aren't in Russia, you'll get results.
Fucking moron.
Well that's it they no longer exist (Score:2)
piracy is over lol.
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Yes. That's it. No more free movies or songs, and we all have to buy them now. Nobody can evade the MAFIAA anymore.
(please let them believe it, please let them believe it, please let them believe it, ...)
It also sets a dngerous precedent (Score:5, Insightful)
Google removing domains from search results can and will be a tool of other kinds of legal censorship, including political censorship. "Pirate sites" is not necessarily a well defined term. Is some of the material on those sites content that engages in satire, or other forms of fair use? Or has there been a rubber stamp of "piracy" for hosting content that is, even on casual review legal? Will a government or private "anti-piracy" agency review sites, hunt for a captured or quoted article, and get it pulled from Google search results under the guise of "anti-piracy"
Such censorship has certainly occurred on Youtube, which Google owns, and for Google mentioned search results. I'm concerned that Google is losing, if it ever had, the ability to refuse censorship requests.
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Legal orders by a countries authorities are not "requests" and google has been censoring and obeying such demands for years now all across the world.
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A precedent would imply that this was anything new.
For example if you search for porn sites like Pornhub or xhamster in Germany you won't find them. To make matters worse, top results are often impersonators that try to push ad-ware or some other shady crap.
Google has also ventured into the area of political censorship by pushing sites it agrees with over news sites it disagrees with.
It's just business as usual over at Google.
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That is why I have started to use duckduckgo a bit less advertising, a bit less filtering. The google search engine is only useful to me as long as it returns the sights I am after. If it does not I use another search engine.
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No. you are extremist site, if they don't like your politics. It is much worse to be extremist, than to be just pirate.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Where did all the Russian trolls go? (Score:1)
Only yesterday we had hundreds of posts saying how bad Google were for lowering the search ranking of RT. Now we have Putin ordering websites removed, genuine censorship, not a peep out of them. I guess censorship is fine if its in Russia's interests, otherwise its bad.
not free (Score:2)
In other words (Score:2)
if you want to operate a pirate site in Russia, Vlad must get paid.
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Google barely works anymore (Score:3)
It tries to guess what you want instead of searching for what you want. I try and exclude pinterest from image search results and I get nothing but pinterest links. Instead of one or two sponsored links per page I get 5 or more (at LEAST they still identify them as sponsored links) beyond the obvious ones there are certainly companies that game the result system clogging up legit things I'm looking for with snake oil sales (for example "calm clinic" which is a book selling scheme that preys on people who have questions about anxiety symptoms)
If Google can't deliver good search results then I have no use for it, DuckDuckGo ain't perfect but its becoming more and more useful...
786 down (Score:2)
786 down, only 3357629438144072 to go.
Net neutrality for me, but not for thee (Score:2)