This week I learned of the soon to be demise of an old blogging buddy: Google Reader. I use reader to follow many blogs and use posts to as inputs or reposts on my blog. So I have a sad face about no more Google reader. But in fact there’s a much more serious problem.
Chinese and Iranian users rely on Google Reader to evade government firewalls. Did Google think of that? techdirt.com/articles/20130…
— George Musser (@gmusser) March 15, 2013
The discussion around Google’s announcement that it will shut down its Reader service has focused largely on the impact on the American blogging crowd. Zachary Seward takes a broader view:
[M]any RSS readers, including Google’s, serve as anti-censorship tools for people living under oppressive regimes. That’s because it’s actually Google’s servers, located in the US or another country with uncensored internet, that accesses each feed. So a web user in Iran just needs access to google.com/reader in order to read websites that would otherwise be blocked. And, indeed, Google Reader has long been accessible in Iran, where it is the most popular RSS reader.
RSS vs The Regime
Andrew Sullivan
Sat, 16 Mar 2013 00:05:07 GMT
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