How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censor Google results (2017)

Re:How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censo... by PeterisP on Monday October 01, 2018 @04:03AM (#18110783)

Ignore the claimed creation date, and use the earliest date that you know for certain, i.e. the time you crawled it.

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Re:How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censo... by jacquesm on Monday October 01, 2018 @04:25AM (#18110870)

That only works if you happen to crawl the original first. Given that copies could be plentiful that's a losing game.

Content creators signing their content with a private key would be a better idea.

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Re:How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censo... by icebraining on Monday October 01, 2018 @04:51AM (#18110959)

Content creators signing their content with a private key would be a better idea.

How would that help? Wouldn't the copier simply sign with their own key?

Maybe Google should run a timestamping service. It could be stateless: send an hash of the content, get it back timestamped and signed, then include it in the page before publishing it.

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Re:How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censo... by jacquesm on Monday October 01, 2018 @04:58AM (#18110985)

They could, but it would not be registered before the other one would be.

- create signature

- post signature, possibly publicly, (wow, maybe an actual use for a blockchain)

- post content

Anybody copying it could be proven to be a copyist.

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Re:How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censo... by icebraining on Monday October 01, 2018 @05:17AM (#18111080)

Right, you'd need something like the blockchain - ie, a timestamping server - to validate the posting date. But then you don't need a signature, just a hash. The advantage of using Google's timestamping service is that it wouldn't need to store the hash/signature, unlike the blockchain.

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Re:How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censo... by Boulth on Monday October 01, 2018 @06:22AM (#18111355)

No, you don't need blockchain for that, just a good old RFC 3161 timestamping server, most big CAs run one and timestamp stuff for free.

Actually secure timestamping is already used by Windows to verify software signatures, even when the signing key expires: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/47289/how-is-an...

Heck, you can even use Roughtime [0] to achieve secure timestamping as it uses digital signatures and allows you to provide a nonce. Even the design doc [1] mentions this use case:

> This means that Roughtime replies can be used as a time-stamping service, and thus that Roughtime servers can be used to check each other.

[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/roughtime/

[1]: https://roughtime.googlesource.com/roughtime

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Re:How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censo... by JetSpiegel on Monday October 01, 2018 @06:25AM (#18111362)

- Change "a" to "а", hash changed - ... - Profit?

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Re:How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censo... by icebraining on Monday October 01, 2018 @07:46AM (#18111735)

The hash is just to identify the individual article, so it can be timestamped. Google would still use its existing algorithms to decide if the two articles are copies or not.

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Re:How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censo... by Natanael_L on Monday October 01, 2018 @10:46AM (#18112950)

The publication of the hash proves who came first (to the timestamping service). Content comparison can be done by other means than the hash.

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Re:How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censo... by IncRnd on Thursday October 04, 2018 @09:59AM (#18139917)

How could that possibly solve the problem of determining exact creation dates?

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