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Google are evil. There, I've said it. We all think it and it's time we spoke up about it, and tried to do something about it. Why is Google evil? Because they control what you think, how you live your life, and the decisions you make whilst living it. Surely not! I hear you cry. Well, let me explain...

It's all down to one simple thing: Information. As the old adage goes, Knowledge is Power. Google control the Knowledge, and therefore have all the Power.

Let's start at the beginning...

When the Internet was young, it became quickly apparent that some sort of index would need to be created, so that people could find things more easily. The First Era of Search provided only static lists of links to pages, which became quickly out of date for obvious reasons. Paradoxically, these lists were also published in dead-tree format and made available in all good bookshops. For a brief period in the mid 1990s, being given a 'Big Book of Internet Links' as a Birthday or Christmas gift was a great thing, and had us rushing to our monolithic Windows 95 machines to try out some of the more obscure links listed within. These static lists were basically the only way early Internet users could find information that wasn't stored on the major news or brand websites. In the mid 1990s, big information sites like such as Wikipedia had yet to exist, and even the venerable IMDB had not yet left Cardiff University for its permanent home at imdb.com.

The problem with these static lists was that a select few controlled what was listed, and in what order or prominence. If the elite few didn't agree with or didn't like a site then it never got listed. To not be listed in the early days, was the death knell for websites. No matter how you look at it, free service or not, this was censorship. Think of it akin to a Librarian hiding books in a Public Library because they personally didn't agree with the content or subject matter.

The Second Era of Search is where this all changed. It ushered in a new concept; The search index. What made these systems different is that they wandered around the web recording what they saw, and made that information available to anyone who asked via a few choice keywords. Type in 'Dancing Hamsters' and you would be rewarded with a page of links to other pages containing dancing hamsters. Exactly what you wanted. No filtering, no censorship, and no promotion of your local government's or a global corporation's elite dancing hamsters.

It is important to note that Google was not a pioneer during the Second Era - they came late to that party, long after Yahoo!, AltaVista, WebCrawler and Lycos had already pitched their successful search engine tents.

The great thing about the Second Era was competition. With so many usable search indexes to choose from, the search providers had to stay honest, or wither on the vine. If you felt that Yahoo! wasn't serving up the page that you were pretty sure was out there, you could hop on over to Lycos or AltaVista and try the same query there and check for different results. Keeping users loyal to a single search provider was very important, and this was achieved (in the most part) by providing accurate, unbiased results. When a provider broke this cardinal rule (usually due to having been purchased by a parent company that over-exerted its new influence) that provider very quickly found itself out of favour with the Internet user base at large and thus found its very existence threatened.

Enter The Third Era of Search, where Google finally joins the fray and commercialisation of the Internet and the ever growing cost of bandwidth has eaten up most of the other search providers. The Third Era saw an effort to head off the young upstart of Google, where the few remaining established search providers started bolting on ever esoteric features that distracted from the core search service, which just left users lost in a sea of irrelevant options and pseudo walled gardens. During this phase Google stuck to its design guns and kept its site simple and clean (although there was iGoogle, but that was never the default experience).

At the end of the Third Era, there were only two relevant search providers still standing; Google and Microsoft, and Microsoft only survived by setting MSN, and later Bing, as the default home page on every new Internet Explorer install. Despite this, Google now had most of the search provider market, and that's when it turned evil.

We're now in the Fourth Era of Search, Google has the market sewn up, and have leveraged what they know about the information on the Internet and more importantly, what they know about the users of the Internet into a whole raft of services; News, Maps, Images, YouTube, Mail, and the newest poster child, Google+.

All of these services are free, and there is a saying that goes something like this: If you are not paying for the product, then you ARE the product. When using Google services, this could not be more true. Every query you enter, every result you click on, every page you visit, Google is tracking you. A profile is being built reflecting your habits, your interests, your secret vices. All this information is then used to tailor what type of Internet you see.

For example, at its most base level and an actual recent search experience of mine, if you are in the UK and you search for linux from scratch, you'll see as the first result a .co.uk, and as the second result a .org. The .org is actually the site you'll be wanting, as it's been around for years, and is linked to by many other sites. However, the .co.uk result is listed above it, because Google knows you are in the UK, and feels that prioritising UK websites above all others makes the results more relevant to you. Whether or not you think this is a good thing is down to personal preference, but in this instance, the co.uk result is a dummy blog site with placeholder text that has been around (at time of writing) for less than a year, and clearly is not in use yet.

Google believe in Personal Search. This is where they tailor each result set to the user posing the query. They have extensively expanded and improved their algorithms to enable them to do this. It also means that they have the ability to hide or promote any site they choose to. If Google wanted to hide any reference to the Arab Spring or champion Julian Assange they could do so quite easily (and they do for some things), and you would be none the wiser.

Therefore, in short, Google control the Internet to such an extent that it should be called the Googlenet. They are the gatekeepers of the web, and can manipulate who sees what information. If they decide a site or page should be buried, it becomes a trivial task for them to exclude it from all results, or just your results, or even just the results displayed in your country. This gives them an unthinkable amount of power. If there was a country trying to exert the same sort of control over people in the real world, the United Nations (and in particular, the US who've always fancied themselves as the World Police) would be up in arms against that nation. Back in cyberspace however, it's just accepted because Google makes the Web oh-so-convenient. All it takes is a small tweak to Google's algorithms and suddenly everyone is seeing pages claming that Iran is secretly pointing nukes at the USA, or the USA is murdering suspected terrorists all over the world in secret torture camps. If enough people read the same 'facts' it becomes assumed that those 'facts' are true - this is classic group-think.

Google are a commercial entity. They exist to make money, and to use that money to make even more money, and they are using you to make that happen. It is not in their interests to provide an un-biased service. At some point they need to be held accountable for the way they manipulate the presentation of information on the web - until then we all need to remove our Google tinted glasses once in a while, and find our information another way.

[Cross-Posted from: http://www.jaruzel.com/]

NOTE: This is just a draft copy of my post, likely still incomplete. Once edited and reviewed, I'll post to the main index.

Ok, so first, I want to apologize that this is a few days late. Due to real life insanity (involving, but not limited to, 30 hours of flying, horrible jetlag, and seasickness), I wasn't able to get this discussion started when I promised, so please accept my deepest apologizes. Anyway, here's the moderation discussion, as promised. I've made it clear multiple times that the current algo is something of a temporary hack. I've been reading comments on my journal, and on the articles we've had discussing in-depth.

Before we begin, there are a couple of things I'd like to go into first before we go into rewriting the algorithm. A lot of people have suggested alternative moderation systems (i.e., something Reddit like, or a tag-based system) instead of trying to "fix" slash's system. While I'm not inherently object to replacing moderation wholesale, it would require someone to actually implement a new system, get it setup somewhere, let people review it, and then perhaps roll it out to the site. As the saying goes, talk is cheap. I'm personally not going to replace what I see as a "good enough" system without the community deciding that they want it, and that requires that said system exists to be evaluated. If someone is seriously interested in still perusing this, I invite them to drop by #dev, and discuss it 1:1.

*big exhale*

Right, now that we got that out of the way, I'd like to address what I've seen the biggest concerns towards moderation. I recommend that people read my writeup about the current system before diving in, as I will be referring that post considerably.

I've got some pretty graphs here that show how points are being spread through the system, and that, for the most part moderation is mostly working as adversed.

*FIXME, put graphs here*

Point expiration: Oh boy, people really have let me know about this one. I've written a fair bit about this, but to sum-up, modpoints with a short half-life *are* a good thing. On Soylent, we post upwards of 10-20 articles a day, and once an article is no longer in the "top 10" so to speak, the number of new comments essentially drops into single digits. With a smaller userbase, we need lots of mod points in circulation to make the system work, and even then, generally half to 3/4th of all modpoints expire out without being used.

*graph to points expiration table*

That's not to say that the current four hour period isn't short. My largest concern at the moment is that any large increases of mod point expiration has something of a cascading effect. At any given moment, we have a specific number of slots of people who can be moderators, and if someone doesn't bother to moderate at all, that slot is effectively taken until the points go "POOF". I'm tentatively willing to increase the duration to six hours, to relief some of this pressure, and then see how moderation spreads are affected. Any large scale increases in the expiration however means making more of the userbase eligible to moderate at a given time. I'm open to thoughts on this one.

Hi,

As promised, here is my update about the IRC cloaks and how we're going to enhance them.

It's important to note, by default your hostname/IP's first (few) segments get masqueraded by the IRC daemon (IRCd), but you can also get an entirely different cloak by messaging HostServ and requesting one[1]. However, some people have made a good argument that the default cloaking mechanism isn't enough, and thus I began my journey finding a better way.

I went to look at the current cloak module[2] that we're using and found an easy way to improve it. However, I'm not a star in C and I've asked stderr for some advice. He then offered to write a cloaking module for us, that works independently from the original one that was linked.

He has made significant progress and we're aiming to deploy the module on our TestNet later today (you can get on the test net by connect to irc.sylnt.us on port 7779 or port 8889 [ssl]) and, naturally, test it.

Once the module gets marked as "Safe to use" we'll deploy it on irc.web-refinery.com (SN's second IRC server, that's currently linked to irc.sylnt.us, I set it up because some people were getting packet loss due to some issue along the route from them to my server in Germany). Once that's done and confirmed to be working properly - which it should, if it passes on the testnet - it'll be deployed on irc.sylnt.us.

The reason for first deploying it on irc.web-refinery.com is simple: even though irc.soylentnews.org is a round robin, it only gets low traffic, so it's safer to deploy it there first.

More information about the cloaking module will be released in time.

I hope I have provided enough information, be sure to keep an eye on my journal as more information will be released in time.

Thank you for the feedback Soylenteers and special thanks to stderr!

Another thanks to everyone on IRC who commented on my entry here to improve it, amongst others: Kobach, Konomi, Mattie_p, Soyforlent and everyone else I might have missed, English isn't my native language and that's probably a good thing.

[1] /hs request a.cloak or, if your IRC client doesn't respect the IRCd's aliases replace /hs with /msg hostserv
[2] Source here

So, I'm watching my SoylentNews Karma value slowly creep up...

How does this compare to the Karma values on /.? (My /. karma has been at Excellent for so long, I have no idea what the other value keywords are...)

Any ideas?

This was me over at /.:

UID #804522 - http://slashdot.org/~Jaruzel

As the SoylentNews site has gone live, I've seen several URLs posted for access to different "areas" of the site as well as to other supporting resources. I'm using this space to collect the SoylentNews links I've found, in no particular order. Some are for historical reference, others for current access/reference.

The following links may be somewhat dated or obsolete:

• Development Forums
• Development Activity
• Bugs - List
• Bugs - Submit
• Wiki
• GitHub
• Web Chat - ##altslashdot

Alternative URLs listed here were found at the top of http://irc.sylnt.us/

• sylnt.us - wiki
• sylnt.us - forum
• sylnt.us - code
• sylnt.us - IRC Logs
• sylnt.us - Got Bugs?
• sylnt.us - Who's Who?
• sylnt.us - Leave your IRC comments here

If you are new to IRC, a good place to start is the www.irchelp.org web site!

More #Soylent IRC-related links: NOTE: issue "/msg NickServ help" to get started.

• IRC (toplevel)
• #soylent - General main channel
• #editorial - Home of the editors
• #dev - Home of the developers
• #sysops - Home of the system administrators
• #help - For IRC related questions
• #trivia - For some trivia
• #idlerpg - Idle away!

Hi everyone,

I don't think that anyone will bother reading this journal. But it's a journal after all, and I have a spare minute (which doesn't happen often), because I'm commuting back home right now.

So I think that our new news site is great and I look forward into the bright future. No need to compulsively check /. again, because I know that better news will be here. And also if I stumble on something worthy, I will submit it too.

The "/." brings me to the question of how do we abbreviate our new site? SN? Barrabas was talking about how he wanted to setup a name submission form, with automatic checking if domain is available. Heck I even bought three domains that I wanted to suggest as possible names for voting, to prevent namesquatting. Also Barrabas elaborated about how he sees this as a two stage voting process, to make sure that the best name is selected. Understand me well - I'm not trolling that SN is a bad name, I just wonder if this planned voting on name was cancelled or there simply wasn't enough time, because bringing up slash is a plenty of work already.

But also, it is a relief to have this our great new site here. The old one became unbearable in recent years.

Also this place could become a real journal for me, when we will have MathJax support. Then I could write down my thoughts using language superior to english, and then I will even enjoy writing this journal. I wish that I had time to help implementing that myself. Heck here I am proposing a bounty: I will give 0.5 BTC to the person that will make MathJax a reality on this site. To claim the bounty just post a reply here with link to git commit, and a BTC address. Of course after it works here on this site :)

You can also find me on IRC as cosurgi, but sometimes I am away longer than a day or two. However I always stay logged in. If you want to say hi, you are welcome. If you start with "cosurgi:" then irssi client will highlight you in yellow, and I will notice you even after few days.

well, happy Soylenting!

1. Integrate with the site (host cloaks for registered users, maybe voice privileges for good karma users during the previously mentioned discussions)
2. Have control over the services, so you guys can create any channels necessary. One of the freenode policies is that #-channels must relate to open source projects, but ##-channels are less restricted. This can be confusing for new users. One of the things I noticed in ##AltSlashdot was the high number of people who don't have a regular IRC network.

Lastly, I'm sure I've forgotten to cover something, so help me out, I want to hear your questions and comments about the network. Should we keep moving forward with this or cancel and head back to Freenode? Is there anything in particular you want to see?


Come join us at irc.soylentnews.org #Soylent (or on webchat at http://chat.soylentnews.org)
You all are also welcome to send private concerns to chat@SoylentNews.org

Day 5, the sky has broken open and begun to rain upon the vessel. So far we have sent the cabin boy down to pump the bilge.