Valleywag
politics
Posts Tagged “
Censorship
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politics
great moments in pr
Sergey Brin schools us on how to take a stand, boldly do nothing
CEOs and founders feeling hounded by pesky profit-hating humanitarians could learn a lesson or two from Google cofounder Sergey Brin. At Google's annual shareholder meeting yesterday, Amnesty International presented two shareholder proposals on behalf of the New York State Pension Funds involving Google's difficulties with China, privacy and censorship. Brin handled the PR mess, no problem. More »
politics
On Saturday, the Great Firewall of China started blocking YouTube. The apparent cause: Uploads of videos showing protests in Tibete, including this clip from CNN. A YouTube spokesman told Portfolio.com that Google is "looking into the matter, and working to ensure that the service is restored as soon as possible." Details are thin on what Google is actually doing, but Google has made compromises with China in the past. When Google launched its Chinese-language search engine, it stripped out results referring to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the Falun Gong movement, among other things.
Google fighting China's YouTube ban
On Saturday, the Great Firewall of China started blocking YouTube. The apparent cause: Uploads of videos showing protests in Tibete, including this clip from CNN. A YouTube spokesman told Portfolio.com that Google is "looking into the matter, and working to ensure that the service is restored as soon as possible." Details are thin on what Google is actually doing, but Google has made compromises with China in the past. When Google launched its Chinese-language search engine, it stripped out results referring to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the Falun Gong movement, among other things.
censorship
Go Daddy is fightin' mad
GoDaddy writes in on our report of a customer fighting with the domain-name and Web-hosting servicehe situation was absolutely NOT about censorship in ANY way... Go Daddy's concerns were about how the RateMyCop site was far exceeding the amount of server usage for which it had contracted.The letter from GoDaddy continues: More »
web hosting
Is Go Daddy struggling with the First Amendment or bandwidth?
While everyone agrees that GoDaddy.com shut down a police-rating site, the hosting service and the owner of RateMyCop.com can't agree on why. PR folk at Go Daddy say the site was a bandwidth hog, while the RateMyCoppers say they were shut down for "suspicious activity" — i.e. offending the police. In any case, RateMyCop is now moving to Rackspace.com and will live to rate another day. Back to those controversial posts, like the one calling Officer Michael Mannino of Phoenix, AZ "kind, caring and courteous."
military intelligence
Airman says Air Force Web ban hurts military
Type "dildo" into Wikipedia's search bar and what do you get? If you happen to be on a U.S. Air Force computer, a warning that the link you were about to view has been blocked. No big deal, right? At stateside bases, the Air Force justifies blocking Web pages as a productivity move. Similarly, crossword puzzles, Flash videogame sites, YouTube, and even eBay are now off-limits. Understandably. But blogs — some of the Web's most diverse sources for news and commentary, which we might translate into actionable intelligence? With each passing week, fewer and fewer remain available. More »
Last year, China shuttered 44,000 websites and arrested 868 people as part of its campaign against Internet porn. The government employs tens of thousands to discover and censor such sites. Skeptical human rights groups call the project an effort to crack down on political dissidents ahead of the 2008 Olympics. The rest of us wonder: The Chinese government thinks it can shut down porn? [Sydney Morning Herald]
censorship
China to own all Internet video
China has upped the ante on censorship, moving beyond the Great Firewall of China to mandate that all Internet video sites must be state-owned. Websites would then be required to follow the same censorship rules as television broadcasters and newspapers, which are already operated, and strictly regulated, by the state. The move is aimed at clearing up technical difficulties in regulating video on the Internet, an area that the Chinese government has sought to control but has been less effective at censoring than the standard Internet. However, plenty of ambiguities remain. More »
australia
Australia's firewall and Net libertarians' outrage both full of holes
The decision by the Australian government to institute filtering of the Internet at the ISP level to protect children from pornography and violent websites is being received with anger and comparisons to the Great Firewall of China. Of course, these critics are ignoring reality. More »
censorship
China bans all RSS feeds
The Middle Kingdom's net censors have finally patched up a great gaping hole in the Great Firewall of China, its not-so-effective Internet defense against the rest of the world's free press. It's now blocking all RSS feed traffic in an effort to stop the flow of information critical of the Chinese government. The Public Security Bureau has attempted to quash blogs and other forms of forbidden information ever since the great Chinese Internet surge in 2006. Of course, this ban will probably get swiftly dropped once China's intelligentsia discovers that RSS, besides being used for blog-headlines distribution, is also a vital tool for data transfer from Web-based applications. Photo by David Baron)
The Internet Society of China forced blog service providers like Yahoo and MSN to sign a "self-disciplinary pact," says Reporters Without Borders. The pact requires blog hosts to "censor content and identify bloggers." Alas, it does not require bloggers to "add value." [Boing Boing]
Yahoo photo-sharing subsidy Flickr is unavailable in China due to a government-imposed block of the site. [Reuters]
digg
Post this number, get banned from Digg.
NICK DOUGLAS — 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. Apparently that number (represented in hexadecimal here) is a key used to decrypt movies from DVDs. Because it helps bypass technological locks arguably meant to protect copyrighted information, publishing it may violate the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It could definitely earn a takedown notice from a regulatory group. A user posted this number on Digg. The post rose to the front page on the social news site, whence it disappeared. So someone posted it again. That post earned a record-breaking 15,000+ diggs: that's 15,000 Digg users voting it up, one hundred times the diggs on a typical front-page post. And then it disappeared — utterly deleted. So why is this a big deal? See below. More »
law
Children Online Protected From Children Online Protection Act
Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.So says a federal judge who struck down a law today that would have made it illegal for a commercial web site to let kids access "harmful" material. The 1998 Children Online Protection Act was Congress's second try at censoring the net after it failed to ban online porn altogether in 1996. The "harmful to minors" category even includes pictures of female breasts. If the court hadn't repeatedly suspended COPA since 1999, site owners could have gone to jail if kids even saw a pair of boobs. Of course, the law could only apply to U.S.-based commercial sites, so it wouldn't have done much good on the, um, world wide web. That's why (according to the blog Sexerati) plaintiffs who fought the law included online magazines Nerve and Salon, as well as a sex-education site. — NICK DOUGLAS
verizon
83 words you can't say on Verizon Wireless
Don't ask us how we got it, or how many honkeys and limeys we had to kill for it, but after the jump is Verizon Wireless's list of inadmissable naughty words. Verizon content providers (including many online news and entertainment sources) are banned from using obvious words like "fuck" and its derivatives, a smattering of racial slurs, and "queer" and "lesbo" — always a perfect way to pick a fight with more audacious gay rights activists. Ahh, the freedom of communication under New Media. More »
myspace
MySpace's new age restrictions made simple
MySpace bowed to critics yesterday and stepped up earlier minor-protection efforts. The social site announced new restrictions that take effect on its site next week. These restrictions (collectively called "no such thing as a free speech") sound confusing, but they're really quite simple: More »
china
Official anti-censorship code words
Another bad day for Chinese dissidents as Yahoo gets accused of ratting out a third writer to the government, Skype admits to censoring Chinese conversations, and the NYT Magazine running a 10-page piece on Google's China trouble. More »
porn
