english blog

Google and Censorship

2009-03-01T18:20:00.001+02:00

A fascinating article from NYTimes, I will put it here for further reference:
Google’s Gatekeepers
By JEFFREY ROSEN

In 2006, Thailand announced it was blocking access to YouTube for anyone with a Thai I.P address, and then identified 20 offensive videos for Google to remove as a condition of unblocking the site.

‘If your whole game is to increase market share,’ says Lawrence Lessig, speaking of Google, ‘it’s hard to . . . gather data in ways that don’t raise privacy concerns or in ways that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.’

In March of last year, Nicole Wong, the deputy general counsel of Google, was notified that there had been a precipitous drop in activity on YouTube in Turkey, and that the press was reporting that the Turkish government was blocking access to YouTube for virtually all Turkish Internet users. Apparently unaware that Google owns YouTube, Turkish officials didn’t tell Google about the situation: a Turkish judge had ordered the nation’s telecom providers to block access to the site in response to videos that insulted the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, which is a crime under Turkish law. Wong scrambled to figure out which videos provoked the court order and made the first in a series of tense telephone calls to Google’s counsel in London and Turkey, as angry protesters gathered in Istanbul. Eventually, Wong and several colleagues concluded that the video that sparked the controversy was a parody news broadcast that declared, “Today’s news: Kamal Ataturk was gay!” The clip was posted by Greek football fans looking to taunt their Turkish rivals.

Wong and her colleagues asked the Turkish authorities to reconsider their decision, pointing out that the original offending video had already been voluntarily removed by YouTube users. But after the video was taken down, Turkish prosecutors objected to dozens of other YouTube videos that they claimed insulted either Ataturk or “Turkishness.” These clips ranged from Kurdish-militia recruitment videos and Kurdish morality plays to additional videos speculating about the sexual orientation of Ataturk, including one superimposing his image on characters from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” “I remember one night, I was looking at 67 different Turkish videos at home,” Wong told me recently.

After having many of the videos translated into English, Wong and her colleagues set out to determine which ones were, in fact, illegal in Turkey; which violated YouTube’s terms of service prohibiting hate speech but allowing political speech; and which constituted expression that Google and YouTube would try to protect. There was a vigorous internal debate among Wong and her colleagues at the top of Google’s legal pyramid. Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s director of global public policy, took an aggressive civil-libertarian position, arguing that the company should protect as much speech as possible. Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, took a more pragmatic approach, expressing concern for the safety of the dozen or so employees at Google’s Turkish office. The responsibility for balancing these and other competing concerns about the controversial content fell to Wong, whose colleagues jokingly call her “the Decider,” after George W. Bush’s folksy self-description.

Wong decided that Google, by using a technique called I.P. blocking, would prevent access to videos that clearly violated Turkish law, but only in Turkey. For a time, her solution seemed to satisfy the Turkish judges, who restored YouTube access. But last June, as part of a campaign against threats to symbols of Turkish secularism, a Turkish prosecutor made a sweeping demand: that Google block access to the offending videos throughout the world, to protect the rights and sensitivities of Turks living outside the country. Google refused, arguing that one nation’s government shouldn’t be able to set the limits of speech for Internet users worldwide. Unmoved, the Turkish government today continues to block access to YouTube in Turkey.

THE ONGOING DISPUTE between Google and Turkey reminds us that, throughout history, the development of new media technologies has always altered the way we think about threats to free speech. At the beginning of the 20th century, civil libertarians in America worried most about the danger of the government silencing political speech: think of Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate for President, who was imprisoned in 1919 for publicly protesting American involvement during World War I. But by the late 1960s, after the Supreme Court started to protect unpopular speakers more consistently, some critics worried that free speech in America was threatened less by government suppression than by editorial decisions made by the handful of private mass-media corporations like NBC and CBS that disproportionately controlled public discourse. One legal scholar, Jerome Barron, even argued at the time that the courts should give unorthodox speakers a mandatory right of access to media outlets controlled by giant corporations.

Today the Web might seem like a free-speech panacea: it has given anyone with Internet access the potential to reach a global audience. But though technology enthusiasts often celebrate the raucous explosion of Web speech, there is less focus on how the Internet is actually regulated, and by whom. As more and more speech migrates online, to blogs and social-networking sites and the like, the ultimate power to decide who has an opportunity to be heard, and what we may say, lies increasingly with Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and even eBay.

The most powerful and protean of these Internet gatekeepers is, of course, Google. With control of 63 percent of the world’s Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, Google has enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world. As an acknowledgment of its power, Google has given Nicole Wong a central role in the company’s decision-making process about what controversial user-generated content goes down or stays up on YouTube and other applications owned by Google, including Blogger, the blog site; Picasa, the photo-sharing site; and Orkut, the social networking site. Wong and her colleagues also oversee Google’s search engine: they decide what controversial material does and doesn’t appear on the local search engines that Google maintains in many countries in the world, as well as on Google.com. As a result, Wong and her colleagues arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.

In response to the rise of online gatekeepers like Wong, some House Democrats and Republicans have introduced a bipartisan bill called the Global Online Freedom Act, which would require that Internet companies disclose to a newly created office in the State Department all material filtered in response to demands by foreign governments. Google and other leading Internet companies have sought modifications to the bill, arguing that, without the flexibility to negotiate (as Wong did with Turkey), they can’t protect the safety of local employees and that they may get kicked out of repressive countries, where they believe even a restricted version of their services does more good than harm. For the past two years, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, along with other international Internet companies, have been meeting regularly with human rights and civil-liberties advocacy groups to agree on voluntary standards for resisting worldwide censorship requests. At the end of last month, the Internet companies and the advocacy groups announced the Global Network Initiative, a series of principles for protecting global free expression and privacy.

Voluntary self-regulation means that, for the foreseeable future, Wong and her colleagues will continue to exercise extraordinary power over global speech online. Which raises a perennial but increasingly urgent question: Can we trust a corporation to be good — even a corporation whose informal motto is “Don’t be evil”?

“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and a former scholar in residence at Google, told me recently. “One reason they’re good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it’s over for them.” Google’s claim on our trust is a fragile thing. After all, it’s hard to be a company whose mission is to give people all the information they want and to insist at the same time on deciding what information they get.

THE HEADQUARTERS OF YOUTUBE are in a former Gap building in San Bruno, Calif., just a few miles from the San Francisco International Airport. In the lobby, looming over massage chairs, giant plasma-screen TVs show popular videos and scroll news stories related to YouTube. The day I arrived to interview the YouTube management about how the site regulates controversial speech, most of the headlines, as it happens, had to do with precisely that topic. Two teenagers who posted a video of themselves throwing a soft drink at a Taco Bell employee were ordered by a Florida judge to post an apology on YouTube. The British culture secretary had just called on YouTube to carry warnings on clips that contain foul language.

The volume of videos posted on YouTube is formidable — Google estimates that something like 13 hours of content are uploaded every minute. YouTube users can flag a video if they think it violates YouTube’s community guidelines, which prohibit sexually explicit videos, graphic violence and hate speech. Once flagged, a video is vetted by YouTube’s internal reviewers at facilities around the world who decide whether to take it down, leave it up or send it up the YouTube hierarchy for more specialized review. When I spoke with Micah Schaffer, a YouTube policy analyst, he refused to say how many reviewers the company employs. But I was allowed to walk around the office to see if I could spot any of them. I passed one 20-something YouTube employee after another — all sitting in cubicles and wearing the same unofficial uniform of T-shirt and jeans. The internal reviewers were identifiable, I was told, only by the snippets of porn flickering on their laptops.

The idea of a 20-something with a laptop in San Bruno (or anywhere else, for that matter) interpreting community guidelines for tens of millions of users might not instill faith in YouTube’s vetting process. But the most controversial user flags or requests from foreign governments make their way up the chain of command to the headquarters of Google, in Mountain View, Calif., where they may ultimately be reviewed by Wong, McLaughlin and Walker.

Recently, I spent several days talking to Wong and her colleagues at the so-called Googleplex, which has the feeling of a bucolic and extraordinarily well-financed theme camp. As we sat around a conference table, they told me about their debates as they wrestled with hard cases like the dispute in Turkey, as well as the experiences that have informed their thinking about free speech. Walker, the general counsel, wrote for The Harvard Crimson as an undergraduate and considered becoming a journalist before going into law; McLaughlin, the head of global public policy, became a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society after working on the successful Supreme Court challenge to part of the federal Communications Decency Act. And Wong, a soft-spoken and extremely well organized woman, has a joint degree in law and journalism from Berkeley and told me she aspired to be a journalist as a child because of her aunt, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times.

I asked Wong what was the best analogy for her role at Google. Was she acting like a judge? An editor? “I don’t think it’s either of those,” she said. “I definitely am not trying to pass judgment on anything. I’m taking my best guess at what will allow our products to move forward in a country, and that’s not a judge role, more an enabling role.” She stressed the importance for Google of bringing its own open culture to foreign countries while still taking into account local laws, customs and attitudes. “What is the mandate? It’s ‘Be everywhere, get arrested nowhere and thrive in as many places as possible.’ ” So far, no Google employees have been arrested on Wong’s watch, though some have been detained.

When Google was founded, 10 years ago, it wasn’t at all obvious whether the proprietors of search engines would obey the local laws of the countries in which they did business — and whether they would remove links from search results in response to requests from foreign governments. This began to change in 2000, when a French Jew surfed a Yahoo auction site to look for collections of Nazi memorabilia, which violated a French law banning the sale and display of anything that incites racism. After a French judge determined that it was feasible for Yahoo to identify 90 percent of its French users by analyzing their I.P. addresses and to screen the material from the users, he ordered Yahoo to make reasonable efforts to block French users from accessing the prohibited content or else to face fines and the seizure of income from Yahoo’s French subsidiary. In January 2001, Yahoo banned the sale of Nazi memorabilia on its Web sites.

The Yahoo case was a landmark. It made clear that search engines like Google and Yahoo could be held liable outside the United States for indexing or directing users to content after having been notified that it was illegal in a foreign country. In the United States, by contrast, Internet service providers are protected from most lawsuits involving having hosted or linked to illegal user-generated content. As a consequence of these differing standards, Google has considerably less flexibility overseas than it does in the United States about content on its sites, and its “information must be free” ethos is being tested abroad.

For example, on the German and French default Google search engines, Google.de and Google.fr, you can’t find Holocaust-denial sites that can be found on Google.com, because Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany and France. In the wake of the Yahoo decision, Google decided to comply with governmental requests to take down links on its national search engines to material that clearly violates national laws. (In the interest of disclosure, however, Google has agreed to report all the links it takes down in response to government demands to chillingeffects.com, a Web site run by Harvard’s Berkman Center that keeps a record of censored online materials.)

Of course, not every overseas case presents a clear violation of national law. In 2006, for example, protesters at a Google office in India demanded the removal of content on Orkut, the social networking site, that criticized Shiv Sena, a hard-line Hindu political party popular in Mumbai. Wong eventually decided to take down an Orkut group dedicated to attacking Shivaji, revered as a deity by the Shiv Sena Party, because it violated Orkut terms of service by criticizing a religion, but she decided not to take down another group because it merely criticized a political party. “If stuff is clearly illegal, we take that down, but if it’s on the edge, you might push a country a little bit,” Wong told me. “Free-speech law is always built on the edge, and in each country, the question is: Can you define what the edge is?”

INITIALLY, GOOGLE’S POLICY of removing links to clearly illegal material on its foreign search engines seemed to work. But things changed significantly after Google bought and expanded YouTube in 2006. Once YouTube was available in more than 20 countries and in 14 languages, users began flagging hundreds of videos that they saw as violations of local community standards, and governments around the globe demanded that certain videos be blocked for violating their laws. Google’s solution was similar to the one the French judge urged on Yahoo: it agreed to block users in a particular country from accessing videos that were clearly illegal under local law. But that policy still left complicated judgment calls in murkier cases.

In late 2006, for example, Wong and her colleagues debated what to do about a series of videos that insulted the king of Thailand, where a lêse-majesté law makes criticisms of the king a criminal offense. Wong recalls hearing from an employee in Asia that the Thai government had announced that it was blocking access to YouTube for anyone with a Thai I.P. address. Soon after, a Thai government official sent Wong a list of the U.R.L.’s of 20 offensive videos that he demanded Google remove as a condition of unblocking the site. Some of the videos were sexually explicit or involved hate speech and thus clearly violated the YouTube terms of service. Some ridiculed the king — by depicting him with his feet on his head, for example — and were clearly illegal under Thai law but not U.S. law. And others — criticizing the Thai lêse-majesté law itself — weren’t illegal in Thailand but offended the government.

After an extensive debate with McLaughlin and Walker, Wong concluded that since the lêse-majesté law had broad democratic support in Thailand, it would be better to remove the videos that obviously violated Thai law while refusing to remove the videos that offended the government but didn’t seem to be illegal. All three told me they were reassured by the fact that Google could accommodate the Thai government by blocking just the videos that were clearly illegal in Thailand (and blocking those for Thai users only), leaving them free to exercise their independent judgment about videos closer to the line. The Thai government was apparently able to live with this solution.

Over the past couple of years, Google and its various applications have been blocked, to different degrees, by 24 countries. Blogger is blocked in Pakistan, for example, and Orkut in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, governments are increasingly pressuring telecom companies like Comcast and Verizon to block controversial speech at the network level. Europe and the U.S. recently agreed to require Internet service providers to identify and block child pornography, and in Europe there are growing demands for network-wide blocking of terrorist-incitement videos. As a result, Wong and her colleagues said they worried that Google’s ability to make case-by-case decisions about what links and videos are accessible through Google’s sites may be slowly circumvented, as countries are requiring the companies that give us access to the Internet to build top-down censorship into the network pipes.

IT’S NOT ONLY FOREIGN COUNTRIES that are eager to restrict speech on Google and YouTube. Last May, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s staff contacted Google and demanded that the company remove from YouTube dozens of what he described as jihadist videos. (Around the same time, Google was under pressure from “Operation YouTube Smackdown,” a grass-roots Web campaign by conservative bloggers and advocates to flag videos and ask YouTube to remove them.) After viewing the videos one by one, Wong and her colleagues removed some of the videos but refused to remove those that they decided didn’t violate YouTube guidelines. Lieberman wasn’t satisfied. In an angry follow-up letter to Eric Schmidt, the C.E.O. of Google, Lieberman demanded that all content he characterized as being “produced by Islamist terrorist organizations” be immediately removed from YouTube as a matter of corporate judgment — even videos that didn’t feature hate speech or violent content or violate U.S. law. Wong and her colleagues responded by saying, “YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view.” In September, Google and YouTube announced new guidelines prohibiting videos “intended to incite violence.”

In addition to Lieberman, another outspoken critic of supposed liberal bias at YouTube and Google is Michelle Malkin, the conservative columnist and blogger. Malkin became something of a cause célèbre among YouTube critics in 2006, when she created a two-minute movie called “First, They Came” in the wake of the violent response to the Danish anti-Muhammad cartoons. After showing pictures of the victims of jihadist violence (like the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh) and signs declaring “Behead Those Who Insult Islam,” the video asks, “Who’s next?” and displays the dates of terrorist attacks in America, London, Madrid and Bali.

Nearly seven months after she posted the video, Malkin told me she was “flabbergasted” to receive an e-mail message from YouTube saying the video had been removed for its “inappropriate content.” When Malkin asked why the video was removed, she received no response, and when she posted a video appealing to YouTube to reinstate it, that video, too, was deleted with what she calls the “false claim” that it had been removed at her request. Malkin remains dissatisfied with YouTube’s response. “I’m completely flummoxed about what their standards are,” she said. “The standards need to be clear, they need to be consistent and they need to be more responsive.”

I watched the “First, They Came” video, which struck me as powerful political commentary that contains neither hate speech nor graphic violence, and I asked why it was taken down. According to a YouTube spokesman, the takedown was a routine one that hadn’t been reviewed by higher-ups. The spokesman said he couldn’t comment on particular cases, but he forwarded a link to Malkin’s current YouTube channel, noting that it contains 55 anti-jihadist videos similar to “First, They Came,” none of which have been taken down. (“First, They Came” can now be found on Malkin’s YouTube channel, too.)

The removal of Malkin’s video may have been an innocent mistake. But it serves as a reminder that one person’s principled political protest is another person’s hate speech, and distinguishing between the two in hard cases is a lot to ask of a low-level YouTube reviewer. In addition, the publicity that attended the removal of Malkin’s video only underscores the fact that in the vast majority of cases in which material is taken down, the decision to do so is never explained or contested. The video goes down, and that’s the end of it.

Yet even in everyday cases, it’s often no easier to determine whether the content of a video is actually objectionable. When I visited YouTube, the management showed me a flagged French video of a man doubled over. Was he coughing? Or in pain? Or playacting? It was hard to say. The YouTube managers said they might send the item to a team of French-language reviewers for further inspection, but if the team decided to take down the video, its reasons would most likely never become public.

AS THE LAW PROFESSOR TIM WU TOLD ME, to trust Google, you have to be something of a monarchist, willing to trust the near-sovereign discretion of Wong and her colleagues. That’s especially true in light of the Global Network Initiative, the set of voluntary principles for protecting free expression and privacy endorsed last month by leading Internet companies like Google and leading human rights and online-advocacy groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology. Google and other companies say they hope that by acting collectively, they can be more effective in resisting censorship requests from repressive governments and, when that isn’t possible, create a trail of accountability.

Google is indeed more friendly to free speech than the governments of most of the countries in which it operates. But even many of those who are impressed by Wong and her colleagues say the Google “Decider” model is impractical in the long run, because, as broadband use expands rapidly, it will be unrealistic to expect such a small group of people to make ad hoc decisions about permissible speech for the entire world. “It’s a 24-hour potential problem, every moment of the day, and because of what the foreign governments can do, like put people in jail, it creates a series of issues that are very, very difficult to deal with,” Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy at the State Department, told me. I asked Wong whether she thought the Decider model was feasible in the long term, and to my surprise, she said no. “I think the Decider model is an inconsistent model because the Internet is big and Google isn’t the only one making the decisions,” she told me.

When I pressed Wong and her colleagues about who they thought should make these decisions, they said they would be happiest, of course, if more countries would adopt U.S.-style free-speech protections. Knowing that that is unlikely, they said they would prefer that countries around the world set up accountable bodies that provide direct guidance about what controversial content to restrict. As an example of his preferred alternative, Andrew McLaughlin pointed to Germany, which has established a state agency that gathers the U.R.L.’s of sites hosting Nazi and violent content illegal under German law and gives the list to an industry body, which then passes it on to Google so that it can block the material on its German site. (Whenever Google blocks material there or on its other foreign sites, it indicates in the search results that it has done so.)

It is striking — and revealing — that Wong and her colleagues would prefer to put themselves out of business. But it is worth noting that even if Google’s suggestion were adopted, and governments around the world began to set up national review boards that told Google what content to remove, then those review boards might protect far less free speech than Google’s lawyers have. When I raised this concern, McLaughlin said he hoped that the growing trends to censor speech, at the network level and elsewhere, would be resisted by millions of individual users who would agitate against censorship as they experienced the benefits of free speech.

There’s much to be said for McLaughlin’s optimism about online free-speech activism. Consider recent experiences in Turkey, where a grass-roots “censuring the censors” movement led more than 400 Turkish bloggers to shutter their Web sites in solidarity with mainstream sites that were banned for carrying content that, among other things, insulted Turkey’s founding father. In America, and around the world, the boundaries of free speech have always been shaped more by political activism than by judicial decisions or laws. But what is left out of McLaughlin’s vision is uncertainty about one question: the future ethics and behavior of gatekeepers like Google itself.

“Right now, we’re trusting Google because it’s good, but of course, we run the risk that the day will come when Google goes bad,” Wu told me. In his view, that day might come when Google allowed its automated Web crawlers, or search bots, to be used for law-enforcement and national-security purposes. “Under pressure to fight terrorism or to pacify repressive governments, Google could track everything we’ve searched for, everything we’re writing on gmail, everything we’re writing on Google docs, to figure out who we are and what we do,” he said. “It would make the Internet a much scarier place for free expression.” The question of free speech online isn’t just about what a company like Google lets us read or see; it’s also about what it does with what we write, search and view.

WU’S FEARS THAT violations of privacy could chill free speech are grounded in recent history: in China in 2004, Yahoo turned over to the Chinese government important account information connected to the e-mail address of Shi Tao, a Chinese dissident who was imprisoned as a result. Yahoo has since come to realize that the best way of resisting subpoenas from repressive governments is to ensure that private data can’t be turned over, even if a government demands it. In some countries, I was told by Michael Samway, who heads Yahoo’s human rights efforts, Yahoo is now able to store communications data and search queries offshore and limits access of local employees, so Yahoo can’t be forced to turn over this information even if it is ordered to do so.

Isolating, or better still, purging data is the best way of protecting privacy and free expression in the Internet age: it’s the only way of guaranteeing that government officials can’t force companies like Google and Yahoo to turn over information that allows individuals to be identified. Google, which refused to discuss its data-purging policies on the record, has raised the suspicion of advocacy groups like Privacy International. Google announced in September that it would anonymize all the I.P. addresses on its server logs after nine months. Until that time, however, it will continue to store a wealth of personal information about our search results and viewing habits — in part to improve its targeted advertising and therefore its profits. As Wu suggests, it would be a catastrophe for privacy and free speech if this information fell into the wrong hands.

“The idea that the user is sovereign has transformed the meaning of free speech,” Wu said enthusiastically about the Internet age. But Google is not just a neutral platform for sovereign users; it is also a company in the advertising and media business. In the future, Wu said, it might slant its search results to favor its own media applications or to bury its competitors. If Google allowed its search results to be biased for economic reasons, it would transform the way we think about Google as a neutral free-speech tool. The only editor is supposed to be a neutral algorithm. But that would make it all the more insidious if the search algorithm were to become biased.

“During the heyday of Microsoft, people feared that the owners of the operating systems could leverage their monopolies to protect their own products against competitors,” says the Internet scholar Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School. “That dynamic is tiny compared to what people fear about Google. They have enormous control over a platform of all the world’s data, and everything they do is designed to improve their control of the underlying data. If your whole game is to increase market share, it’s hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don’t raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.”

Given their clashing and sometimes self-contradictory missions — to obey local laws, repressive or not, and to ensure that information knows no bounds; to do no evil and to be everywhere in a sometimes evil world — Wong and her colleagues at Google seem to be working impressively to put the company’s long-term commitment to free expression above its short-term financial interests. But they won’t be at Google forever, and if history is any guide, they may eventually be replaced with lawyers who are more concerned about corporate profits than about free expression. “We’re at the dawn of a new technology,” Walker told me, referring not simply to Google but also to the many different ways we now interact online. “And when people try to come up with the best metaphors to describe it, all the metaphors run out. We’ve built this spaceship, but we really don’t know where it will take us.”

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, is a frequent contributor to the magazine. He is the author, most recently, of “The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America.”

The love

2009-02-04T17:26:00.002+02:00

A wise person once said "Love is a irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired".

Who can say more about it?

Well, even if this is the case at most of the time, the person you desire irresistibly may not have the same feeling for you. Surely, that person is not in love.

But does it make you not being in love?

That is the question that I am asking myself lately.

From an outside point of view, it might seem a little bit complicated and a little bit twist of words, like a poetic stuff.

Nevertheless, that is the case for me.

So far, my love life has been complicated. Sometimes I feel like I am dissatisfied with it, but I came to realize that I might have enjoy it.

Ok. Some of you may get the idea that I am kind of masochist, but this is not related to punishment or pain...

For some people, love is often associated with patronage… Kind of binding between two persons… Each person owns the other one and does not want to share with others.

But that is not the case for all types of loves. I know most of you does not agree with this.

Maybe, the answer is that love is being irrational when you know that reasoning ends at some point. From this perspective, all of the conflicts I have so far make sense.

See, I answered one of the most difficult questions of mankind just less than 250 words.

General elections

2007-07-20T18:11:00.000+03:00

This week’s general election once draws the attention of the world after the failed attempt of electing the president of the republic. This time the Economist chooses “A battle for the future” for the headlines, and favors AK Party in editorial article in Leaders Section.

Gather information together using Yahoo Pipes

2007-05-13T03:24:00.000+03:00

Recently, -indeed, almost one month ago- I have been looking for a service that can mix all of my blogs' feeds together so that readers can only subscribe to it and no need to worry about missing a post on one of them.

After, trying several disappointed services, I came across the Yahoo Pipes. Indeed, it is such a good service that it can be very useful for you. By using this tool, you can gather, filter and sort any information on the web.

Well, here in my IT blog I discuss how i used it to combine the blog posts that I write in several blog sites. I think you should give it a try.

A simple application of Yahoo Pipes

2007-05-13T03:21:00.000+03:00

Today, I am gonna talk about a very useful service offered by Yahoo that makes your internet experience better than before.

The service is called as Yahoo Pipes. The service is a very good tool for users who want to get information within different resources on the web. You can gather, filter and sort –and possible more- the information from different sources and publish this information with different ways.

I suggest you to go to the site and play a little bit and you will grasp the details of the service and learn how it can be used for your convenience.

Here, I want to discuss how Yahoo pipes saves a lot of time for me and my readers. As you all know, I have been writing different blogs. And if any one of my reader wants to check whether I post a new message, it should revisit the site or subscribe for each blog's feeds. However, by using Yahoo Pipes, I combined the feeds of my blogs together, so from now on, everyone can get updates of my blog post just subscribing this newly created feed.

Let's see how I managed to do that.

When you visit pipes.yahoo.com and log on using your Yahoo ID, you see a link of "create a new pipe". Here from there, you can begin constructing your pipe.

Below, you see the graphical representation of my pipe.

As you can see there are four components of it:

Fetch Feed: This object can be added from Sources from left pane. After adding this object, I start adding my URLs of my blogs' feeds. That is just all.

Filter: This object is used for filtering the information. It can be reached from Operators category from left pane. Here, there is a very simple rule which tells that only the author of the item.author.name attribute containing Sinan can be permitted to go through this filter.

Sort: This is another object form Operators that is used for sorting. Here in my case, all of the items are sorted by item.pubDate in Descending Order. This means that all of my blog posts will be resorted by the newest at the top.

Pipe output: This is the final object that is to sell that pipe should give some output. When you click on it, you see the output of your pipe in the pane at the bottom.

Finally, I saved the pipe and published it using the buttons on the top right. Now, everyone can see the output of my pipe by going to the URL provided by Yahoo Pipes.

Notice that I also used FeedBurner to fetch this newly created feed in order to see the statistics of user activity. But it is totally different story and the service is not related to Yahoo Pipes. You can get information about how to integrate FeedBurner to your Blogger blogs from my another blog post.

That's all.

How much would you pay before marrying an investment banker?

2007-05-10T20:04:00.000+03:00

Recently, I read an interesting article in which a divorce lawyer named Jeremy Levison warns the bankers that "Don't get married. If you must, make sure your other half is as rich as you."

As provocative as it sounds, the articles then looks at the underlying claims that make this warning a legitimite one. One of the cleverest guys in pricing complex securities makes an analysis of the situation and he concludes that "you might expect to see $187,500 to $375,000 being invested toward getting a junior banker to the altar".

Of course, this is for those of people who works in Wall Street or London. Maybe the situation in Turkey might be more different but here I want to address Turkish girls that it might be a good investments for you to find a guy who wants to work as a investment bankers or traders.

The Economist’s perspectives on Turkish presidency

2007-05-04T07:46:00.000+03:00

The political climate in Turkey matters a lot for us. Moreover, the outsiders are also watching carefully what is happening in Turkey. Here, I want to highlight a few important points that I found in this article of the Economist.

Firstly, the magazine believes that what has been done in recent four and a half year was a quite success for the country and no other administration has achieved to the same over half a century:

Mr Erdogan's government has been Turkey's most successful in half a century. After years of macroeconomic instability, growth has been steady and strong, inflation has been controlled and foreign investment has shot up. Even more impressive are the judicial and constitutional reforms that the AK government has pushed through. Corruption remains a blemish, but there is no sign of the government trying to overturn Turkey's secular order. The record amply justifies Mr Erdogan's biggest achievement: to persuade the EU to open membership talks, over 40 years after a much less impressive Turkey first expressed its wish to join.

Then, the article gives an interesting perspective about what might me helpful to the army's recent sortie. It declares that recent rise of the opposition of Turkey's entry to the EU may have led to the army to be more confident of hampering the government's deeds:

But the perception in the country that so many current members are against it matters, for it reduces the EU's influence. Were the prospects of EU membership obviously brighter, the army would not have intervened as brutally. As it is, the EU's mild condemnation was shrugged off in Ankara, especially when the Americans said nothing at all. Their influence in Turkey is also much diminished, mainly because the war in Iraq has inflamed anti-American feeling.

As interesting as it sounds, the magazine also recommends that "for the sake of the state they are trying to protect, Turkey's soldiers should stay out of politics". I think that most of you are not unfamiliar with this recommendation. Well, who was the first person to put such a bold measure in the army's internal standing orders?

Recruiters' Top 10 Complaints

2007-04-26T06:38:00.000+03:00

Recently, I came across this article in BusinessWeek in which several interviewers from different companies discuss the mistakes applicants do when they interview. The editor comes up with 10 of those mistakes. Here are a few highlights from that article:

Follow Interview Etiquette
Some of the most embarrassing moments are caused by blunders a student didn't anticipate. A cell phone ringing in the middle of an interview can be an unwelcome interruption. Whatever you do, don't stop to answer it or check the number, says Connie Thanasoulis, director of campus recruiting at Merrill Lynch. Her advice: "Apologize, and immediately move on."
Keep Your Answers Short and to the Point

Try to keep your answers under a minute if possible. This gives the interviewer a chance to consider whether they want to ask the candidate to elaborate on the answer. "If the interviewer wants more details, they will ask for it," Sullivan says.
It's Okay to Be Clueless

The question can be an interesting test for Canale, who evaluates candidates by the manner in which they answer the question. He says that being honest about not knowing the answer is sometimes the best tactic. "Don't be afraid to say I don't know," says Canale. "I think that would be an area where everybody could improve."
Avoid Clichés
It can irk a recruiter when students spend their allotted time talking about themselves in broad generalizations or clichés. Avoid common phrases such as "I'm a people person" or "I'm a creative person." Instead, Booz Allen's Sullivan recommends that you come up with pertinent examples or stories that clearly illustrate your point.
Keep Negativity Out of the Conversation

"The problem is you don't know if the person sitting across from you may be a consultant," McLaughlin said. "You could be rubbing the person the wrong way. I always tell students stay away from anything that could be perceived as a negative comment."
Always Have Questions Prepared
Students should walk into the interview with a list of thoughtful questions that take advantage of the recruiter's knowledge of the company, Sullivan says. He recommends avoiding questions that can easily be answered by looking at the company's Web site, such as whether the company has a Boston office. "You should have three or four really good and insightful questions that show self-awareness that you are in front of someone who is pretty senior," Sullivan says.
Keep Your Ego in Check

If quantitative math is not your strong suit, don't pretend that it's your best subject. You could be sitting across from a derivatives trader who might want to put you on the spot, says Citigroup's McLaughlin. "Instead of making broad characterizations about your skill set, be more humble about your abilities," she says.
Don't Walk in Unprepared
Learn as much as you can about the person who is interviewing you and the company before the interview. Recruiters say they are sometimes surprised when they see a student has done little to no research on the company before the interview. "We've seen students that may not know the company or firm. Some may not have visited the Web site or attended a briefing on campus," said Angela Marchesi, MBA recruiting program manager at Deloitte.
Don't Talk in Absolutes

Students should avoid the temptation to tell a recruiter that their firm is the candidate's No.1 choice.
Never Bring Up Salary
"Sometimes there is a tendency for candidates to overemphasize the compensation piece," he says. "They talk less about 'how can I contribute to the company?' and more about "what can I make here?'" Students should equate an initial meeting with a recruiter with a first date, Vijungco says: "On a first date, you don't want to talk about marriage."

The most important event of coming days...

2007-04-22T20:17:00.000+03:00

70 millions Turkish citizens wait for the announcement of the candidate of AK party. According to some news, only Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Bülent Arınç and Abdullah Gül know the candidate. Well, we will get our answers to question through the middle of this week unless they miss the registration deadline. The issue is also brought forward by The Economist in the section of "The coming days":

THE registration deadline for candidates hoping to become Turkey’s next president expires in the middle of the week. The seven-year term of the fiercely secular incumbent, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, ends in May. Turkey’s mildly Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, may fancy the job. But recent massive demonstrations show that opponents, perhaps unfairly, fear that his ascent to the presidency would constitute a grave threat to Turkey’s secular republic. And his AK Party members want him to lead them into November’s parliamentary elections to boost their chances of maintaining their huge majority. Mr Erdogan may conclude that he is better off in his current role.

Lovefool...

2007-04-15T23:17:00.000+03:00

Nowadays, I mostly listen Lovefool from The Cardigans, which is one of the most joyful song about the suffer of the love. Perhaps, you heard it for almost every romantic movies. Right after I watched the documentary of Enron, I said I gotta find it somewhere and listen to it again anda again. Well, enjoy the lyrics:

Dear, I fear we're facing a problem
you love me no longer, I know
and maybe there is nothing
that I can do to make you do
Mama tells me I shouldn't bother
that I ought just stick to another man
a man that surely deserves me
but I think you do!

So I cry, and I pray and I beg

Love me love me
say that you love me
fool me fool me
go on and fool me
love me love me
pretend that you love me
leave me leave me
just say that you need me

So I cried, and I begged for you to
Love me love me
say that you love me
leave me leave me
just say that you need me
I can't care about anything but you

Lately I have desperately pondered,
spent my nights awake and I wonder
what I could have done in another way
to make you stay
Reason will not pledge a solution
I will end up lost in confusion
I don't care if you really care
as long as you don't go

So I cry, I pray and I beg

Love me love me
say that you love me
fool me fool me
go on and fool me
love me love me
pretend that you love me
leave me leave me
just say that you need me

So I cried, and I begged for you to
Love me love me
say that you love me
leave me leave me
just say that you need me
I can't care about anything but you

(anything but you)

Love me love me
say that you love me
fool me fool me
go on and fool me
Love me love me
I know that you need me
I can't care about anything but you

Amazing security at Las Vegas Casinos

2007-04-15T23:07:00.000+03:00

Here, I read a blog post about how the security of casinos are taken serious in Las Vegas. Well, the story of a woman might seem simple but it shows how serious every player is taken. Well, interesting story...

Room with a view...

2007-04-05T11:06:00.000+03:00

Nowadays, there is this song that I listen when I find time to listen some music. Tony Carey sings "Room with a view":

Well he used to be
a tailor
Sew those suits so fine
And he never heard of failure
And he never tasted wine
And he used to be a leader
When he had someone to lead
And he used to be a father
When he had some mouths to feed

And they say it never rains in LA county
But it gets cold enough to wish you had a few
And he laughts tonight and says
""I finally found me a room with a view
How about you""

He was living in a castle
That he built with his own hands
Out of newspaper and cardboard
He was living off the land

What should I call you "Mister"?

2007-03-27T16:11:00.000+03:00

Well, there has been a lot of discussion about Erdoğan's call of Öcalan as a "mister". And Ibrahim wrote a post about the issue after showing funny comics from Bizimcity. Well, I have a few words to say about the issue and you can see it in the comments section.

The Best Career Move?

2007-03-27T08:43:00.000+03:00

Well, the post here might not seem to have anything related to your career. The post discusses about William McAdoo who was -according to the post- one of the unknown financial superhero. He was the man who saved the face of the US dollar around the years of first world war and with the help of his work, US eventually turned to be the global financial leader.

I strongly recommend you to read through that article. Because at the end, you will get the most valuable career advise you will ever hear. In every call in which we talk about the career, my father always gives the same advise but I did not take it so seriously up to now. Perhaps, I should start to do so.

Islamic Finance on Rise

2007-03-27T07:45:00.000+03:00

Well, one of the most compelling ideas I got when I departed from the internship of JPMorgan was getting more information about Islamic Finance –no, they do not offer anything about Islamic Finance here. Well, here in Turkey, the issue is somewhat sensitive due to the indigestion of secularism, but it is often taken as another business opportunity in the rest of the world. I read a lot of articles from different magazines (e.g. the Economist, BusinessWeek) and it is a fact that world’s biggest banking institutions are looking for those candidates who have the knowledge of Islamic Finance.

The oil boom that led to savings of excess money in the Islamic countries also brought urges to use this money in different financial instruments. Due to the laws of Islam, not all of the instruments proposed in the markets are allowed for the Muslim people. Therefore, one should also obey to the rules of Shariah –Koranic law- in terms of his investments.

Well, in this article, BusinessWeek draws attention to another interesting fact about Islamic Finance. According to the article, a lot of colleges including Harvard consider adding courses and programs for those who are seeking more about Islamic Finance. Well, according to the article, the area is one of those very special cases where demand exceeds supply.

While the world is evolving, what happens in our own country? Well, nothing interesting. I can not imagine any college that offers such a course without starting the discussion of secularism. Well, what a pity for us! By the way, it is worth mentioning the fact that even the parties who are supposed to be the representer of Islam started to acknowledge the fact that “money has one color, it is only green and is only for the dollar”. Is that so?

I don’t think so.

I know that there has been a lot of work in this area in Turkey. Especially the special type of banks which were previously called as ‘Finans’, -e. g. Faisal Finans, Anadolu Finans,- offered such services. Their model got such acclaim that they gave seminars in the Western Europe –remember, one of the candidates of recent central bank’s top position was Adnan Büyükdeniz who was one of the founders of such institutions-. But recent laws in banking systems started to limit the capabilities of these institutions. But the authorities should realize that unless our banking system does offer financial services in depth for Islamic finance, we will witness more examples of Yimpaş, Jetpa, etc. in which the people who are seeking to invest their savings according to the Islamic laws were exploited and caused a lot of complaints in the public.

Well, I am taking notes about the issue. When I have more time in the future, I will be looking issue more closely and the opportunities that Turkey can have.

Tiresome Interviewing Processes

2007-03-21T03:49:00.000+02:00

Well, here, I found a good article about those tiresome interviews. Despite they are just for internship, it is a good demonstration of what someone can face. Well, I do not think anyone here in Bilkent had that kind of rash experiences, but it is still worth reading.

By the way Business week B-schools feed is a great source of information for those of you who want to apply for business school, namely MBA. Right after talking about advantages of RSS, it is time to give some good source of feeds, is not it?

What is RSS?

2007-03-20T04:19:00.000+02:00

Well, ever since I knew RSS, it became one of the most useful tools for me. The practical usage of RSS is so huge and so easy that now, instead of checking the websites I am interested in, I usually subscribe to RSS feeds of those web site and start reading the articles of those websites from my favorite RSS Reader (well, I have to mentioned that I first came across to RSS feeds when I first installed IE7, so I suggest you to use it because it does not let you to leave your favorite browser while you are notified with new updates on your RSS subscriptions).

Well, It has been almost 10 months for me to use RSS feeds so heavily but I realize that there are a lot of people around me that say "RSS, hmm, I'm sorry, what was it for?". And to tell the truth, it is not something that you can explain in a few minutes.

But, I came across this beautiful video about RSS, that will be very great start for you to understand what is RSS. For those of you who haven't met RSS yet, go and check it.

Free speech to me..

2007-03-08T22:04:00.000+02:00

Free speech to me!

Well, I have discussed the ban of YouTube in Turkey here. And I recommended you to check Information Week’s Weblog for further comments. Well, IW journal Mitch, happened to answered my comments and he said that:

“Sorry, Turk(another poster on the issue) and Sinan, but you're falling into the logical argument that censors everywhere use today. Free speech includes the right to insult other people. Period. Free speech with regulations isn't free, it's regulated speech.”

Of course, I intended to reply it with what I think of free speech. I don’t know how but the posts that I send, happen to be not seen on the page. Well, perhaps they blocked my IP addresses.

Well, darling... Free speech when it comes to me… So you shut up!

Note: My thoughts about free speech is as the following. Well, I figured out to copy it first when third time I tried to send it.

Mitch,

I strongly recommend you to recheck the sources of your knowledge about the freedom of speech. I strongly agree that everyone can have any idea about anything and he has the rights to express it by using any medium. But when it comes to the publicity, there are some bindings that he or she should care. And these are not for the censorship but for preserving the existence and protection of both the speecher and the community (s)he addresses to.

If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech, almost every part of the world, the speeches that ignite war propaganda, violence and HATE SPEECH are condemned and prohibition of them does not considered as violation of freedom of speech.

Handcuffing the internet...

2007-03-08T16:04:00.000+02:00

Well, the InformationWeek journalist, Mitch Wagner, posted an article to Information's Week' Digital Life Weblog, about recent ban on access to Youtube in Turkey. Well, like in all cases, the western-born journalist gets it as an assault on a "freedom of a speech" -though, this case aside, Turkish authorities often are not at good at dealing with freedom of the speech-.

I tried to give my opinions on the issue there, but I really encourage you to look at and give your thoughts about it.

About relationship and marriage..

2007-03-08T00:22:00.000+02:00

Here, in my Turkish blog site, I posted a small passage about the relationship and the marriage. Well, I hope, you have a minute to look at it.

After Liverpool - Barcelona Match..

2007-03-07T23:51:00.000+02:00

Well,
The holder of the title, Barcelona, had an early finish in Champions League this year. Well, here, in İbahim's blog, I tried to convince others that Barcelona had a very little opportunity in this time and they would need a miracle to pass this round. Well, after the match, I tried to give a detailed analysis of the game, which is you can also see in the comments. By the way, it is Turkish. Believe me, I would write in English but talking football in English does not give same taste as it gives in Turkish.
Enjoy your read...

Accidentally invade...

2007-03-03T16:43:00.000+02:00

The topic might seem a little bit awkward but that is what happened when last training mission of Swiss soldiers, they accidentally crossed the border of Liechtenstein. Since the country is so small, the next time they should double check where they step in.

Yet another blog...

2007-02-24T23:00:00.000+02:00

I know you ask why on earth Sinan needs to open another blog since he has so many -sometimes unneccassary- blogs. Well, it is tough one, but let me explain myself.

One of the thing that I hate blogging is that attitude of blog writers when it comes to their professional blogs. Let's say a guy is a lead developer for a very grade software project and you like to hear about the development of the project. So you subscribe his blog. But most of the time, (s)he posts about general things such as valentine's day -well, the reason I am upset about them is not because I did not have a girlfriend this year-, superbowl -who wants to watch American football since there is such beautiful game of football-, etc. And I do not want to spend time reading about it.

So the solution for that is to divide my blogs according to the topics so that anyone who wants to read about one of my interests, say IT, does not need to be notified about my ideas of valentine's day that is all about another excuse to boast the consumption.

Since my posts are divided into different blogs, I try to give information on new posts of them here. So anyone interested in those posts can find it in that blog.

That's all for now...

How to integrate FeedBurner with Blogger?

2007-01-20T18:14:00.000+02:00

FeedBurner offers services for blogs to track their visitors that use RSS/Atom feeds for reading blog posts. In that case, some visitors choose to use their feed reader programs (some new browsers of IE or Firefox) or services (Google, Yahoo my pages). At this case, they do not need to visit blog site in order to read your blog posts. They only need to use their feed reader to read your blog post.

On the other hand, FeedBurner can be used to track these visitors. What I will show you in this post, to integrate FeedBurner with your blog site so that the actual RSS/Atom feeds will be hidden so that when the user wants to subscribe to your feed, it will subscribe to your FeedBurner feed.

To do so the very first thing, we should do is to change the template of your blogger site.
Here, in the new blogger templates there is a part similar to this at the beginning of the template:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b' xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data' xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'>
<head>
<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
<title></title>
<b:skin>",

replace "<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>" with this:

<link href='http://feeds.feedburner.com/youraddress' rel='alternate' title='yourfeedname' type='application/rss+xml'/>

So the same part will look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b' xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data' xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'>
<head>
<link href='http://feeds.feedburner.com/youraddress' rel='alternate' title='yourfeedname' type='application/rss+xml'/>
<title></title>
<b:skin>

This will tell any browsers or other feed reader program that you use this feed address for your blog site.

The second thing is to make the links of actual blogger site feeds hidden. If they continued to be in your site, some user could subscribe for those feeds. To do so, we need to change the CSS behavior of the layer which these links are stored. Look for your template and find the phrase ".feed-links". An example is:

#blog-pager {
text-align: center;
}

.feed-links {
clear: both;
line-height: 2.5em;
margin-left: 13px;
}

Now, add the line of "visibility:hidden;" to that part:

#blog-pager {
text-align: center;
}

.feed-links {
visibility: hidden;
clear: both;
line-height: 2.5em;
margin-left: 13px;
}

By doing this we make the links to actual feeds of blogger hidden. Now if you want, you can add your FeedBurner links to your blogger template by adding a new link list to your page elements.

Fever

2006-08-14T09:03:00.000+03:00

Nowadays, I have been listening the soundtracks of notorious TV series : Nip / Tuck. The songs are all awesome. Especially, I like the song named "Fever". I have listened the same song from others (Madonna, Bon Jovi, etc), but I gotta tell you that Daniel Ash really rocks. Here, I will write the lyrics. By the way, the lyrics are perfect for me since I have been feeling fever for very special person :)

Fever
Never know how much I love you,
never know how much I care
When you put your arms around me,
I get a fever that's so hard to bear
You give me fever -

when you kiss me, fever when you hold me tight
Fever - in the the morning, fever all through the night.

Sun lights up the daytime, moon lights up the night
I light up when you call my name,
and you know I'm gonna treat you right
You give me fever -

when you kiss me, fever when you hold me tight
Fever - in the the morning, fever all through the night.

Everybody's got the fever, that is something you all know
Fever isn't such a new thing, fever started long ago.

Romeo loved Juliet,
Juliet she felt the same
When he put his arms around her,
he said "Julie baby you're my flame"

You give me fever, when we kiss me, fever with thy flaming youth
Fever - I'm afire, fever yes I burn for year.

Captain Smith and Pocahontas had a very mad affair
When her Daddy tried to kill him, she said "Daddy-baby don't you dare"
He give me fever -

with his kisses, fever when he holds me tight
Fever - I'm his Missus, Oh daddy won't you treat him right.

Now you've listened to my story, here's the point I have made:
Chicks were born to give you fever, be it Fahrenheit or Centigrade
They give you fever -

when you kiss them, fever if you live and learn
Fever - till you sizzle, what a lovely way to burn.
What a lovely way to burn.
What a lovely way to burn.