Google agrees to censor search results in China
Google bows to China pressure by Verne Kopytoff, Chronicle Staff Writer Jan. 25, 2005 This is an interesting piece of information. On the one hand, Google is fighting the Dept of Justice subpoena on providing user information, but on the other hand the company has agreed (just as the other search engine companies have done) to censor search results in China. How does this get subclassified in the "do no evil" category?
"The popular search engine will block results that include such terms as "free Tibet," "democracy" and "Falun Gong" as part of a Chinese Web site the company is introducing today."Continue reading
Bush adminstration has been slowly dismantling environmental information tool
New OMB Watch Report on TRI: Dismantling the Public's Right to Know OMB watch released a new report in December, 2005, Dismantling the Public's Right to Know: EPA's systematic Weakening of the Toxic Release Inventory, stating that the "Bush administration and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are slowly dismantling its flagship environmental information tool: the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI)." The TRI database has been providing the public information about environmental risks in workplace and communities.
"The easy access to pollution information provided by TRI has empowered citizens to push for improvements, and facilities have acted to reduce releases. Since facilities began reporting in 1988, there has been a nearly 60 percent reduction in total releases of the 299 core chemicals that the program began tracking. This is a significant drop, one that was fueled by merely making information publicly available. As new chemicals have been added to the TRI program, those releases have also dropped. This year, EPA reported a 42 percent reduction in releases and disposal of the more than 650 chemicals now tracked under TRI over the 6 years between 1998 and 2003. TRI is EPA's premier database of environmental information, and it demonstrates the power that information holds to promote change that benefits everyone's environment, health and safety."Continue reading
Chinese government uses various tactics to control news
Beijing censors news of fatal protest by Howard W. French, San Francisco Chronicle via New York Times, Dec. 14, 2005. This recent story about chinese government restricting keywords in google search results should alarm the library community and give yet another reason for libraries to locally collect, preserve and distribute government information.
In the wake of the biggest use of armed force against civilians since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989,Chinese officials have used different techniques to prevent news of the deaths from spreading. The tactics include barring reports in most newspapers outside the immediate region and banning place names and other keywords associated with the event from major Internet search engines, like Google.Continue reading
Los Alamos Technical Reports and Publications
"In 2002, the Los Alamos National Laboratory terminated public access to thousands of unclassified reports on nuclear science and technology as well as other historical and policy-related publications that had formerly been available on the Lab's web site as part of its Library Without Walls initiative." Continue reading
Hurricanes Katrina & Rita web archive
Internet Archive in conjunction with individual contributions created a web archive for Katrina and Rita. The site contains 25 million documents which were crawled between the dates of September 4 - October 17th. The site is available for the public. Continue reading
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