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Comment by narkee | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The biggest indication this is not malicious is the benefit/risk ratio. If someone at Yahoo decides that talking about Wall st. protests should be silenced, they will, first of all, only silence a small fraction of the traffic - this is the no-single-point-of-failure nature of the Internet. Second, when they get caught (any subject large enough to be meaningful to censor will have enough tech-savvy protractors to detect this) they get hit by both the Streisand effect and the humiliation.

The very fact that the Streisand effect is a well known phenomenon suggests that people running large corporations can't always evaluate benefit/risk ratios very well.

The very fact Streisand is a person and not a company suggests people can't always evaluate benefit/risk ratios very well, regardless of the size and nature of that ratio.

I'd add that the benefit/risk is being evaluated by an individual or a group of individuals, as opposed to the company at large, so what might be insanely terrible for the greater good of the company can also provide a ton of benefit for a specific individual or a group. In that case, the individual or the group would act contrary to the benefit of the company.

It's the classic agency costs argument. I'm actually rather sad that we tend to jump on the company, forgetting that it's individuals that make these things happen.

Of course we can only observe the outcomes where the Streisand effect kicks in - who knows what the risk ratio actually is if one doesn't know the number of outcomes successfully suppressing info...

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! ;-)

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.

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.

Yahoo was always blacklist happy in my experience of working on projects that send large volumes of email. This always impacted users of BT's online services too (btinternet etc) as they use Yahoo's mail servers. It was always a massive hassle to get emails through.

Which clearly indicates to me that the fault lies with consumers at-large. We, the proverbial and collective we, are far too forgiving of the mistakes committed in the provision of services on which we rely. Relatively few people will be spurred to action over this and will dismiss it out of convenience to themselves.

Also not to be overlooked, Yahoo knows that the pain involved in migrating one's email address is enough to retain all but the most idealistic of customers.

Sure, and if there really was an alien spacecraft detected at Roswell, don't you think the government would try to make it look like a harmless weather balloon?

You can justify pretty much any crazy theory with that sort of wonky logic.

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