Google refuses to remove 'racist' Michelle Obama caricature

Google today refused to remove a racist caricature of Michelle Obama that was the first result presented to users of its search engine.



The US firm conceded that the picture – which depicts the US First Lady with the features of a monkey – was offensive but resisted calls to take it down.

The disturbing image was the top result suggested to anyone who typed “Michelle Obama” into Google Images, the firm’s picture search engine.

Complaints about the picture have reignited the debate about how far Google is responsible for the content it archives, and highlighted flaws in the complex calculations it uses to rank the “relevance” of results.

In a rare move, Google posted a message at the top of the results page for Michelle Obama distancing itself from the image.

The note, which appeared in space usually reserved for adverts, stated: “Sometimes our search results can be offensive. We agree” and directed users to a page explaining the technology giant’s laissez-faire approach to dealing with distasteful search results.

While apologising for any offence caused, the statement read: “Google views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority.”

“Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it.”

Google’s search result rankings are dictated by complex algorithms which take into account several hundred factors.

The most powerful element in the calculations is the “popularity” of web pages and images with other web users; the more people link to a web page, the higher it will be in search results.

This usually works as a de facto filtering system ensuring that prurient content does not rate highly for common search terms, but also mean that unexpected results can shoot up the rankings if they receive a flurry of links, as appears to have been the case with the Obama photo.

“They try to cook all this stuff up to come up with what they think is the best result, but in the end they’re just guessing,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Land website.

But despite Google’s stated opposition to self-censorship it does have the power to remove pages from its search results – something it frequently does to child pornography and websites that propagate viruses.

The Obama image had in fact been taken down once before because a previous website on which it was hosted was also infecting users’ computers with malicious software.

This afternoon the offensive picture finally disappeared from the top of Google's results after the latest website on which it appeared, a blog called Hot Girls, agreed to take it down.

A Google spokeswoman told the Telegraph: “We view our search results as a reflection of the content on the web. We do not remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as child porn and other illegal content.

“The Internet can include disturbing content, even from innocuous queries. We assure you that the views expressed by such sites in the results are not in any way endorsed by Google.” continues here

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Net pirates to be 'disconnected'

Should Net pirates be 'disconnected

People who persistently download illegal content will be cut off from the net, Business Secretary Peter Mandelson has announced.

Speaking at a government-sponsored forum he said the UK would introduce a similar policy to France.

It means persistent pirates will be sent two warning letters before facing disconnection from the network.

ISP TalkTalk said the plans were "ill-conceived" and said it was prepared to challenge measures "in the courts".

"What is being proposed is wrong in principle and won't work in practice," the firm said.

"In the event we are instructed to impose extra judicial technical measures we will challenge the instruction in the courts."

Lord Mandelson said that cutting off internet connections would be a "last resort".

"I have no expectation of mass suspensions. People will receive two notifications and if it reaches the point [of cutting them off] they will have the opportunity to appeal," he told the audience at the C&binet Forum, a talking shop set up by government to debate the issues facing the creative industries.

The pay-off for tough penalties against persistent file-sharers would be a more relaxed copyright regime, Lord Mandelson said.

The details of it would need to be hammered out at European level but it would take account of the use of copyright material "at home and between friends", he said.

It would mean that, for example, someone who has bought a CD would be able to copy it to their iPod or share it with family members without acting unlawfully.

Lord Mandelson praised the UK's creative industries, which are worth around £16bn and employs 2 million people.

But it has been eroded in recent years, he said, by new ways of accessing content.

"I was shocked to learn that only one in 20 music tracks in the UK is downloaded legally. We cannot sit back and do nothing," said Lord Mandelson.

The fact that young people now expect to download content for free was "morally as well as economically unsustainable," he added.

Mere conduits

But he emphasised that "legislation and enforcement can only ever be part of the solution".

The long-term answer was for the industry to educate users and to offer new and cheaper ways to download content, he said. In addition, new copyright laws were needed to lift restrictions on how people moved content on to the various different devices that they owned.

In France the government has just approved a so-called three strikes policy.

Under its system, those identified as illegally downloading content would initially be sent warning letters and, if they failed to comply, could be removed from the network for up to a year.

UK internet service providers have argued that it is not their job to police the network, claiming that there are "mere conduits" of content.

They also say that they should not have to bear the brunt of the costs.

In his speech, Lord Mandelson said that the costs of enforcing the policy would be "shared between ISPs and content providers".

However, ISP TalkTalk said that it would "continue to resist any attempts to make it impose technical measures on its customers".

It has set up a campaign called Don't Disconnect Us to lobby against the plans.

it said that it believed the "three-strikes" rule would lead to "wrongful accusations".

"The unintended consequence of Lord Mandelson's plan will be to encourage more wi-fi and PC hi-jacking and expose more innocent people to being penalised."

The firm recently demonstrated how someone could hi-jack unsecured wi-fi connections to download music illegally.

Dark net

The Open Rights Group, a digital rights lobby organisation, has long been opposed to a disconnection policy.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, is disappointed that the UK government is determined to introduce such legislation.

"Even MI5 disagree with Mr Mandelson - they are convinced we will see a rise of a 'Dark Net' of infringers. Nobody at C&binet from an online music service, as opposed to an old media company, thought that peer-to-peer [file-sharing] was a threat to their businesses.

"Yet Mandelson seems determined to push forward with his plans for 'three strikes' - threatening to punish people extremely harshly, threatening their education, businesses and livelihoods for a relatively minor financial misdemeanour," he said. continues here

Millions warned not to use Internet Explorer after Chinese fraudsters use security flaw to hijack computers

Millions of internet users are threatened by a flaw that can allow criminals access to personal and bank details.

A major security fault has been discovered in Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser, which is used by 70 per cent of all computers.

Around two million computer users are believed to have fallen victim after visiting apparently safe websites - and the problem threatens to sweep the worldwide web.

Due to the flaw, 'Trojan horse' viruses can be injected into the software of millions of computers, allowing criminals to remotely access and operate them.

Hackers in China are at the centre of the cyber attack, which is the most serious in the history of Microsoft's operating system. As many as 10,000 websites have already been compromised, according to anti-virus software producer Trend Micro.

So far the hackers have used the technology to steal computer game passwords which can be sold on the black market in the Far East. But there are fears cyber criminals will exploit the flaw to steal passwords-access internet bank accounts, or send out spam emails.

The problem is that Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser - used by 1billion people worldwide - has a basic flaw in a core component which allows it to read data from a web page.

Hackers have found a sequence of HTML codes - the computer language used to create websites - which exploits that flaw, causing Internet Explorer to crash.

This can trigger a malicious program installed by the hackers that can give them access to a computer without the owner realising.

Elia Florio, of internet security company Symantec, said: 'If your machine is unprotected then it is like an open door to a burglar.'

Trend Micro's senior security adviser in the UK, Rik Ferguson, said: 'The threat from it is only going to grow.'



Microsoft is racing to produce a software patch that will cover the gap in security. In the meantime, some industry experts are advising people to switch to alternative internet browsers such as Firefox and Opera. continues here

Read all about it! US newspapers fall prey to the internet and recession

The American journalist was once a notoriously hard-boiled character with sharp elbows and a press pass tucked into the band of his fedora.

In the era of the classic film The Front Page, set in the 1920s, reporters from rival city dailies used their most devious means to get the drop on the rest and claim a scoop.

Now those local stories may be “outsourced” to be written by a low-paid journalist in India and posted on the internet instead.

The US newspaper industry is in a full-blown crisis that has seen its business model dynamited by technology and its dwindling prospects threatened by the financial meltdown, which has, in effect, forced advertising revenue off a cliff.

In the past week the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, has sought bankruptcy protection from its creditors.

The sense of gloom emanating from staff at the two newspapers was heightened by prosecutors' allegations that the disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich had tried to force Sam Zell, the new owner of Tribune Company, to dismiss Chicago Tribune editorial writers who had called for his impeachment.

As the FBI issued subpoenas, Mr Zell said - to some scepticism - that it was news to him.

The atmosphere at the Los Angeles Times was already so sour that a group of current and former reporters had filed a suit challenging Mr Zell's acquisition of the company. An insider set up a blog for disgruntled staff entitled “Tell Zell”.

Post-bankruptcy, the columnist Joel Stein began his piece yesterday by writing: “This column may not meet the high levels of quality to which I have made you accustomed. That's because I haven't been getting paid.”

He went on in similarly acerbic tone: “I immediately e-mailed Zell's office and offered to let him work off the debt. My first choice, I explained, would be to have him do stuff around my house, because I'm two years into a six-month renovation and no one is showing up any more. But I also gave him the option of doing something that plays to his talents: accounting work.”

Also this week, The New York Times, the venerable “Old Gray Lady” of American journalism, announced that it would mortgage its prestigious new Renzo Piano-designed headquarters in Times Square in an effort to raise money.

“There is no quick, easy response to the sea changes already disrupting our industry before the financial meltdown of this fall,” Katharine Weymouth, the Washington Post publisher, said in a bleak memo to her staff. At least 30 daily newspapers are up for sale around the country, including famous names such as The Miami Herald. Some local institutions, such as the 149-year-old Rocky

Mountain News in Colorado, are in danger of folding altogether. The revived New York Sun has already closed its doors and the Christian Science Monitor has decided to print only once a week.

The Paper Cuts blog, which tracks redundancies, counts 15,153 newspaper lay-offs in America so far this year. The prognosis is so bad that some say the industry has reached a “General Motors moment” when it can no longer be profitable and needs a car industry-style bailout.

Writing in the New Republic magazine Mark Pinsky, a former Orlando Sentinel reporter, proposed that Barack Obama revive the Depression-era Federal Writers Project to put unemployed journalists to work.

“Today, there are many dislocated ‘old media' journalists from newspapers, radio and television on the street - here I declare my personal interest, as one of them - who could provide a skilled pool to staff a new FWP,” Mr Pinsky wrote.

It is all a far cry from the heyday of swashbuckling press barons a century ago, such as William Randolph Hearst, the model for Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, and New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who gave his name to the prestigious prizes.

The era gave birth to the pejorative term “yellow journalism” because of a Hearst-Pulitzer war to get control of a popular comic strip called Hogan's Alley, featuring an urchin named The Yellow Kid. Hearst enjoyed so much power that he is once, famously, said to have cabled an artist on assignment for his New York Journal in Cuba in 1898: “You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.”

The golden age lasted half a century, from 1880 to 1930. At its peak, America boasted 2,600 daily newspapers, with at least half a dozen in every large city. New York alone once had nearly 30 daily newspapers.

David Laventhol, the respected former publisher of The Los Angeles Times and president of Times-Mirror, said newspaper industry leaders had failed to confront the challenge of new technology. “It's never happened before at this level and they have not handled it well at all. They have put so much emphasis on the cost side they are losing their product,” he said. continues here