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Is yahoo evil?

Submitted by Rick on Sun, 03/12/2006 - 9:14am.

Rob Richards has brought the following to my attention:

In addition to being boring capitalists, yahoo.com is in the practice of helping to jail Chinese reporters and dissidents. On December 2003, Chinese dissident Li Zhi was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for inciting "subversion" using evidence provided by yahoo. On April 2005, Shi Tao (a journalist working for a Chinese newspaper) was sentenced to 10 years in prison for leaking details of a censorship order, again using evidence provided by yahoo.
This horror is not isolated to yahoo: gmail, hotmail, and aol all make it standard practice to turn over requested documents without even attempting to contest the request. The much reported refusal by google to turn over historical search statistics to the US government misses the fact that they already allow the government to scan all gmail traffic (as do yahoo, hotmail and aol).
We encourage you to stop using yahoo and the other services it owns (flickr, del.icio.us, and geocities, to name a few).

This brings up several questions:

Do we like using del.icio.us?
Is boycotting del.icio.us the right response to the information above?
Is there an alternative response?
If not del.icio.us, then what sort of system should we use for links?

What do Olybloggers think?

Rick's blog
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I say stop using del.icio.us.

Submitted by Rob Richards on Sun, 03/12/2006 - 10:14am.

I say stop using del.icio.us. Do you know of any other similar services out there?

The Chinese government has a

Submitted by Robert Whitlock on Sun, 03/12/2006 - 10:37am.

The Chinese government has a long-running practice of horrible and barbarous treatment of certain groups. Practicioners of the nonviolent Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa) movement have been incarcerated, tortured and murdered by the Chinese government. This is not to mention the occupation of Tibet by China.

On another subject, I am willing to be that the US government can read emails that are run on servers other than yahoo, google, hotmail and aol. If the gov't wants access, it can get access. If you don't want your communications monitored by the gov't, don't use email or a telephone!

Although I use yahoo! mail, I think that we ought to boy-cott them b/c it sends a message. I will start looking for an alternative to my yahoo and gmail services.

I use Runbox , a Norway ba

Submitted by Rob Richards on Sun, 03/12/2006 - 11:16am.

I use Runbox , a Norway based company, which gives you 100mb of storage and 10mb attachments. It is not free, I believe it is $29.99 for one year. I paid $69.99 for three years. Because they are based in Norway, you avoid the risk of our gov't seeing your emails. An extra nice bonus is that there are NO advertisements on the site. I highly recommend them, if you can afford it.

Heck, I am paying $19.99/year

Submitted by Robert Whitlock on Sun, 03/12/2006 - 5:54pm.

Heck, I am paying $19.99/year for yahoo!.

I'm not for not using del.ici

Submitted by emmettoconnell on Mon, 03/13/2006 - 2:53pm.

I'm not for not using del.icio.us, I think it would be more effective to lobby them to do the right thing. That said, popular alternatives to deli.icio.us are blinklist.com, shadows.com, and clipmarks.com.

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