
Yahoo blocked emails about Wall Street protest - danso
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20109134-93/yahoo-blocked-e-mails-about-wall-street-protests/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
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eof
I'm not saying this _was_ blatant censorship; but the overwhelming consensus
in this thread of 'this is obviously a case of dozens of people hitting `mark
as spam`' or some other coincidence is really surprising.

Twitter blocked #occupywallst from trending; people switched to
#takewallstreet and it was trending again.

I don't see any really good reason to think of yahoo or internet in the USA as
some bastion of freedom; especially when it can be 'blocked' by such murky
means as a spam filter (plausible deniability allows people to act out just a
bit more).

Our government has shown again and again that it is willing to tap all our
means of communication (to the point of potential constitutional infringement)
and mega corps have been generally willing participants.

To dismiss some phrase or website being manually dropped into a spam filter as
an outrageous conspiracy theory makes me wonder if _I_ am insane; because it's
my perception these mega corps, banks, and government agencies will go to
whatever extreme they can get away with; rather than up to some arbitrary
point of what is 'right or wrong'; and this certainly seems like something
they can get away with.

~~~
gavinlynch
Not to put words in your mouth, but I am asking myself this question:

Yahoo! and Twitter care enough about between 200-5,000 protestors marching on
Wall Street to commit acts of censorship? Why? What does this accomplish for
these companies? They're protecting the tight-knit oligarchy which they are a
part of?

I'm struggling to see why this would even be on Yahoo!'s radar.

~~~
forensic
It's not Yahoo's radar. It's individual(s) who work for Yahoo that have their
fingers on the censorship button and also happen to be part of a tight-knit
oligarchy.

Some New York government official phones up his old Harvard buddy at Yahoo and
asks him for help in avoiding civil unrest and an outbreak of violence. In
exchange he promises undying love and future favors. The Yahoo guy realizes he
has plausible deniability and so is happy to indulge.

How do you climb the status ladder in America? You do favors for powerful
people.

Who wants to avoid the scary possibility of a massive viral wall street
protest that inspires the nation to rise up? Lots of powerful people.

Powerful people are by definition capable of getting shit done and influencing
others. This is why the cookie crumbles in their favor so often.

~~~
mseebach
In order to have plausible deniability, the guy at Yahoo has to have direct,
personal access to ban this domain. This makes him an ops person. Pretty much
anyone else needs to go through a chain to get anything like this into
production, denying them deniability.

If there's a conspiracy, it's an ops guy showing off to an oligarch friend. I
don't see how any member of a thigh-knit oligarchy could get this done without
leaving a trail that could get him fired for cause and publicly humiliated.

~~~
forensic
VP of whatever at Yahoo shoots an email to his pet nerd in ops and asks him to
add a few domains to the spam filter. A list of 20 who personally spammed an
angry customer.

VP of whatever says, "Nerdbro please add these domains to the filter before
noon. An angry advertiser wants immediate action on this before closing a big
deal. By the way I've recommended you to the division head for that position.
Thanks for helping me out on this."

In the corporate world almost everything that happens has it's genesis in an
exchange like this. If you need a citation: Robert B. Cialdini

Awhile later there is some PR consequence to this decision. Some PR guy in
yahoo goes to ops and asks what happened.

Immediate answer: "they were mistakenly added to the spam filter." "how did
thus mistake happen?" "its technical; and anyway I'm not authorized to reveal
the workings of the filter because hackers/spammers want to know how it works.
"

PR guy: "say no more. I understand. I'll make sure to let the public know it
was an accident"

------
scscsc
This makes me think about an interesting attack vector ;-)

If you want to silence emails in email provider Y about subject X, you send
email to many accounts of Y about X. Then you have the accounts report the
messages as spam. Now every email to an account of Y about X goes into the
spam folder...

~~~
0x12
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job>

~~~
aidenn0
Anyone know what the legality of that is? What would my recourse be if someone
forged an e-mail from me that caused me damages? Is it just a civil matter, or
would this be criminal?

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narkee
Not to say that this is malicious, but if it was, they always make excuses
like that.

"It was inadvertent, and we're working to fix the problem".

And by the time the problem is fixed, the damage has been done and the desired
censorship in this case has been achieved.

~~~
mootothemax
_Not to say that this is malicious, but if it was, they always make excuses
like that._

 _"It was inadvertent, and we're working to fix the problem"._

The problem is, most of the time any IT-related issue rears its ugly head, the
problem _is_ caused by incompetence and not by malice.

Given the usual bugs, don't you think that a system like this would catch
enough false positives that people would notice? Unless... they're censoring
such complaints as well! ;-)

~~~
Iv
I would have sided with you before the news that showed US and EU companies
are building net censorship tools for governments. They have been exposed in
Syria, Libya and Tunisia but how could they not sell services to democratic
governments too ? Saber-rattlers have been talking about cyber-warfare for
several years now. Some of the millions spent on this buzzword was probably
spent on equipments that can block messages with a deniable excuse.

~~~
marshray
But one doesn't need that type of infrastructure to block an URL. Yahoo has
already spent millions building an infrastructure to block emails that look
like spam.

It's "dual use" technology.

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pitiburi
If this happens in China, it would be immediately declared an obvious case of
censorship and mass control. But it happened in the very "house of the
freedom", so it is obviously a simple error and anyone thinking it was on
purpose is a lunatic conspiracist. I read the comments of people that know
nothing about (place the subject -antispamming algorithms-) but they are more
than ready to defend (place the corporation or government -Yahoo-), and just
an image comes to my mind. Sheeps. Blind sheeps.

~~~
william42
In general, the country with less of a constant trend towards mass censorship
gets the benefit of the doubt. And for all the United States' faults, they
have a significantly better censorship record than China.

------
ig1
Looks like a typical spam filter block. Go to your spam folder copy a url and
send an email containing it and you should get the same response.

There's the question of how the url got on the spam filter blacklist, but it
could easily have been an automated process.

Plenty of startups have issues with their invites getting marked as spam.
Doesn't mean it's a conspiracy.

~~~
faulty
Conspiracy theories make better headlines.

------
camdykeman
Care of Wikipedia :A Yahoo is a legendary being in the novel Gulliver's
Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift. Swift describes the Yahoos as vile and
savage creatures, filthy and with unpleasant habits, resembling human beings
far too closely for the liking of protagonist Lemuel Gulliver, who finds the
calm and rational society of intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnms, far
preferable. The Yahoos are primitive creatures obsessed with "pretty stones"
they find by digging in mud, thus representing the distasteful materialism and
ignorant elitism Swift encountered in Britain. Hence the term "yahoo" has come
to mean "a crude, brutish or obscenely coarse person".[1]

------
forgotAgain
Anyone remember the HBGary hack. After what came out about government and
corporate dirty tricks during that episode is it so unreasonable to think that
somewhere in the US a consulting service was working for some Wall Street
billionaire to derail the protests.

------
vidar
They are responsible for the service that they provide, even if they farm some
of it out to third parties.

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icandoitbetter
Those conspiracy theories are actually hurting the credibility of the
movement. Right now the protest simply does not have the critical mass to
threaten anyone.

------
tomjen3
Hmm, I could see it as a spam filter which notice a really high volume going
into one account and flag it as suspecious, but it would seem much more
suspecious if the emails were going out of a new account at a very high rate.

Personally this seems fishy to me. Moreso since it is comming from Yahoo.

~~~
dexen
A spam filter should act when one account sends several similar mails to
numberous accounts unrelated to the sender.

A spam filter should not act when a hot topic is `trending' -- being send
around from multiple accounts mostly to accounts related to them (with
existing history of communication).

A spam filter acting on mere global volume of a keyword is a prime example of
solution more troublesome than the original problem itself.

~~~
esrauch
Doesn't it seem possible (likely even?) that one or more overzealous "99ers"
sent numerous similar mails to many accounts to try to spread their message?

------
pullo
I will not be surprised if this is by oversight. I am regular yahoo mail user
and their spam filters suck. I frequently need to look into the trash and spam
folders to check for wrongly filtered emails.

------
Vivtek
Yahoo has always been overzealous about spam. I can't email anybody on Yahoo
because my entire hosting company is on their block list, and has been for
years. So this doesn't surprise me in the least.

~~~
Thrymr
Overzealous and yet incompetent. Yahoo mail became unusable to me due to spam
very quickly (I have a 4-letter Yahoo handle), and I'm not sure it's much
better now (I don't look at my account there often). Whereas Gmail blocked
spam pretty efficiently from the beginning.

~~~
kooshball
I see this kind of statement all the time from people and its just not a fair
test. If you want to do a real test of the spam rates you must use the
accounts in the same way.

its a known fact that older accounts get more spam than newer ones. And who
knows what services you have signed up before with your yahoo account that you
didn't with your Gmail.

~~~
eli
Fair enough.

But my Yahoo account spam filtering appears to get suffer roughly as many
false positives as false negatives which actually makes it worthless.

------
pkteison
Occam's razor: A few hundred people getting e-mails about an event hit the
'this is spam' button. How is this news?

At least this time the headline doesn't says "blocked" instead of "censored",
but still, it's not like this was a willful malicious act. An automated system
hit a (debatably) false positive. Happens every day. Isn't a headline.

------
tripzilch
Algorithmic censorship?

I bet it's just the machines' way of getting back at us for CAPTCHAs.

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Axure
Inadvertent my ass. I hope Anonymous retaliates.

~~~
untog
Yeah, who needs evidence? Vigilante justice every time!

~~~
Axure
And how exactly do you expect the evidence to appear? Will the FBI investigate
Yahoo for this? ;)

