The War Of Terror

The war of terror is a strange mix of state-sponsored terrorism, psychological warfare, war on the truth and a endless matrix of misinformation designed to keep those who are seeking the truth occupied with matters of minor importance.

Information warfare is one of the most important aspects of the war of terror which is currently waged by the NATO alliance against the population of all NATO-countries, and NATO-partner countries, and the world in general.

Control of information is of major importance in information warfare. Few people are aware that the west has a very high degree of censorship - because that is among the subjects who’s censoring has the highest priority.

The 23rd Chaos Computer Club Congress which took place late December had quite a few interesting talks regarding censorship. Two comes to mind:

“Tor and China” (23C3-1444-en-tor_and_china.m4v, ftp, 362 MB) and
“The worst part of censorship is XXXX” (censorship-t3s2.wmv, ftp, 277 MB)

Both of these lectures are highly interesting and worth viewing. They are both about censorship in China and how you can by-pass it. They are both about how China limits people’s access to websites who contain given keywords, and the methods who can be used to bypass their censorship.

However, there is one vital aspect of Internet censorship which is sort of ignored by both these talks, security experts, computer experts and most people in general:

If you can control all the information an individual has access to then you can control their perceived reality.

How do people get access to the information on the Internet? Sometimes friends tell recommend websites in person, by e-mail, IM, and so on, but the majority of sites visited on the Internet are accessed using search engines.

First, some terms. The indexable web is the part of the Internet which search-engines are able to visit and index. The visible web is the part of the web which shows up in major search-engines, and the deep web are websites who, because of password-protection and so on, can’t be indexed.

Every single one of todays major search-engines are admittedly censoring localized search-engines. This is now close to common knowledge because of headlines such as “Bill Gates Defends Google’s Censorship In China” at Slashdot (Notice how this is the head of the corporation who are making the worlds most used operating system who is saying that it is alright for the biggest search engine corporation, Google, and his own corporation, Microsoft, to censor if the local government asks that it is done).

So there is no question that search engines are censoring. It is admitted. They haven’t admitted to doing it in supposedly “free” countries such as the NATO-countries, but most major search-engines have been cought.

You have to ask yourself: Are they censoring in countries in “the free” western world? If so, to what degree are they censoring? The answers to these questions are yes and unknown. You’re naive if you think that what major search-engines present as the visible web includes everything which is available on the indexable web.

If you understand this then your first question is probably so what can we do? (or: is resistance futile?).

Luckily there are some clever German Open-Source developers who have taken the matter into their own hands.

They have developed a free and open-source Java-based P2P search-engine called “YaCy“. It is a computer program you install on your computer which allow you to search the web. It also crawls the web and stores a small portion of the index on your computer. Searching is done by your program contacting the other peers who are also running the same software. This clever method allows your local YaCy-program to search the entire web without knowing about more than a very small portion of it.

There are two draw-backs of using a local P2P program such as “YaCy“: 1) It runs in the background and uses resources (if you do not have a dedicated server) and 2) It does take longer to search, because of the time it takes to ask the other peers for the search-results.

But YaCy also has a major feature which you simply can’t get in any other search-engine:

• You can not censor the search-results.
• Again: You can not censor the search-results.

This censor-ship resistance, and this alone, makes YaCy the search-engine of the future. There is no central point where you can censor the search-results.

You can censor what your YaCy crawls, and you can censor what search-results are shown in your YaCy program. But you - or anyone else - can not say “http://blahblahblah.tdl/? We don’t like that one. Nobody is allowed to know that it exists.”. If some peer has indexed a site then it doesn’t make much different if 5 or 10 YaCy-peers are blocking it.

Free software is about freedom, not price. You can be sure that the YaCy-software respects your freedom. You have no idea what is really going on inside the big corporation(s) who are operating todays largest search-engines. Are you 100% sure your favorite search-engine are not deliberately censoring away websites just because they may contain information which goes against what they (or the local government) would have people believe? Do you really want to take that chance?

Now you know. There is a way to take back the web:

Simply run your own search-engine. It’s easy. Just download and install your personal copy of YaCy and become a peer in the global web-search P2P.

Or use the web-version: YacySearch. It runs the very same YaCy-software you get if you download and install your own local copy. But remember this minor detail: You can’t be 100% sure that the YaCy installation running at YacySearch does not feature a blacklist, but you can verify that your personal copy of YaCy does not censor or have a blacklist if you download a copy from http://www.yacy.net/yacy/, check the source and run your very own search-engine on your own computer. It’s free. It’s open-source. It’s easy to use. Get used to the idea that it probably will become just as normal to run a P2P search-engine as it is to run P2P file-sharing programs, a web browser, and so on.

• YacySearch - a search-engine running YaCy, try before you “buy” (or in this case, install for free)
• http://www.yacy.net/yacy/ - Official website for the YaCy software.

Technorati Tags: Search-engines, Search, Technology, Web, Internet, censorship