Yahoo Geo Cities

YahooGeoCities was made possible by the acquisition of GeoCities by Yahoo! The apparent function of this service is the provision of FreeAsInBeer static webspace. The catch, of course, is that the user of such webspace wittingly becomes a party to the distribution of spam, which is to say, advertising. This is apparently to fulfill the requirements of the IronLawOfTanstaafl.


23 Feb 2006

Interesting interview on the radio today of Rebecca McKinnon [sp?] of the Berkman (as in Alexander????) Institute, on the Al Franken show. It seems that some see Yahoo! as the "greater of 3 evils" re. mainland China operations. This is among the "Big 3" portaloid entities, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. Apparently Yahoo! is more in bed with the authorities than the others due to the fact that its offerings include email resident on servers resident in mainland China. This gives the authorities subpoena power over people's email mensajes, and goes well beyond the mere censorship of google.cn.

In terms of the normative biases (self-imposed ethical constraints) of the present author, this means the OpportunityCost of keeping PubwanWiki true-to-norm has just gone up. It also means that I should be more in a hurry to expedite the migration of pubwan wiki content to WikiCities or elsewhere, as well as efforts to get a ReadWriteWiki devoted to PubWan.

Things are coming to a head.

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

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