Items tagged with Censor
It looks like Sony is finally going to bring its gaming consoles over to China after the county ended its 14-year ban on foreign gaming consoles back in January of this year. The PlayStation Vita is expected to go on sale January 11, 2015 alongside the PlayStation 4. The PlayStation 4 will be arriving about four months after Microsoft’s Xbox One Chinese launch. Microsoft was the first company to take advantage of the third largest gaming market, dominated by PC and mobile gaming, which saw the company sell over 100,000 units within its first week when the console was release September 29. "PS4 is expanding at the fastest rate in PlayStation hardware history, and the global gaming community...
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Net neutrality. Censorship. Freedom of speech. Global search. All of these items are becoming more and more visible in an interconnected world, and we suspect that these issues will become even more important as the Internet spreads. Recently, Google brought some of these matters into the mainstream light by taking on China in a way that no search engine ever had: Google refuses to continue censoring results, and redirected searches to their Hong Kong portal in order to achieve their goal while maintaining within China. This week, Google has opened another can of worms. The new Government Requests Tool is quite the eye-opener, giving mere citizens the ability to see how many times a given government...
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We've written about China's Green Dam censorware a couple of times, and there's no doubt it's drawn a great deal of criticism. On Tuesday, China announced it would be indefinitely delaying the rollout of the product, which it had earlier said would have to be installed (or at least provided) on all PCs sold in the country as of July 1st. The change in plans was reported late on Tuesday by the official Xinhua news agency, which said the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology would "delay the mandatory installation of the controversial 'Green Dam-Youth Escort' filtering software on new computers." While being advertised as primarily preventing access to pornography, the software was to...
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We wrote earlier about China's new censorship moves with regards to PCs, mandating that new PCs there have site-blocking software installed, or at least provided via an included CD. Ironically, though not surprisingly, it turns out that the filtering software, "Green Dam-Youth Escort," contains pirated code.According to Solid Oak Software, the makers of CyberSitter, one of the more popular Internet-filtering programs, not only does Green Dam look similar to CyberSitter, it uses DLLs identified with CyberSitter, and even gets updates from Solid Oak's servers. Piracy? A Chinese company stealing intellectual property? No way... CYBERsitter - Solid Oak SoftwareGreen Dam - SoftwareSeriously,...
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While it's no secret that China blocks web sites that it doesn't want its citizens to view, the Wall Street Journal is reporting an escalation in this censorship. The WSJ reports that China plans to require that all PCs sold in the country as of July 1st be equipped with software that blocks access to certain Web sites. The software's Chinese name is "Green Dam-Youth Escort." The software was developed by Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co. Additional input came from Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Co. According to Bryan Zhang, founder of Jinhui, Green Dam operates in a way similar to such products as Net Nanny, that allow parental blocking of sites. Green Dam would use a...
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Perhaps those of us who live the United States take our freedoms for granted. We can complain all we want about inappropriate content in Grand Theft Auto IV, but we'll stand behind the right of Rockstar Games to sell it. We might not want our children surfing for porn, but we have no intention to tell other folks that they can't view it just because we might find the content objectionable. We're obviously generalizing here; there are plenty of U.S. citizens out there who would love to ban all objectionable content, but they do not represent the majority.In the U.S., we have a self-regulating organization that assigns and enforces content ratings: the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB)....
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The Pirate Bay, the popular BitTorrent tracking site, has decided to expand its services and opened its own blogging site. The site, BayWords, is uncensored, and advertised as a place for bloggers who want to write whatever they want without fear of being shut down by their blog host.The Pirate Bay is known for defending people’s right to freedom of speech on the Internet, and this is exactly what motivated them to start this new blogging service.Brokep, one of the co-founders of the site, told TorrentFreak that the idea to start a blogging service came up when the weblog of one of his friends was taken down from Wordpress recently, for linking to copyrighted material.This, of course, goes against...
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It's free, so do they have the right to censor it?Officials have blocked access to content they deem provocative on the airport's free Wi-Fi service.The Denver Post points out that some of those questionable sites include, Vanity Fair, the gossip column perezhilton.com, the hipster-geek site boingboing.net, and photos from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Of course, hard copies of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue are displayed on newsstands in the airport along with issues of Penthouse and Hustler.But the airport's spokesman Chuck Cannon told the Associated Press on Wednesday that he would rather "weather infrequent complaints about access than handle angry parents whose children might...
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Australian Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy today announced a requirement for ISPs to provide a "clean feed" for all homes, schools and any public PCs accessible by children. This follows up on a pre-election Nov. 19th Labor Party press release which first announced a proposed Cyber-safety plan.Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy says new measures are being put in place to provide greater protection to children from online pornography and violent websites. Senator Conroy says it will be mandatory for all internet service providers to provide clean feeds, or ISP filtering, to houses and schools that are free of pornography and inappropriate material. Online civil libertarians...
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Call it "Hot Coffee" take two, for Take Two games. You may recall the "Hot Coffee" mod that exposed, er. sexual content in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas? This isn't quite as successful, but some of the AO content that was hidden rather than removed from Manhunt 2 has been unlocked.In "Manhunt 2," the player takes the role of a man who escapes from an insane asylum and goes on a killing spree.Take-Two edited parts of the game, including blurring some of the most gruesome killing scenes, to get the less restrictive rating.Hackers defeated that blurring on the version of the game for Sony Corp.'s PlayStation Portable. The game is also available for the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Wii...
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Besides the obvious breaches in personal information we all hear about - lost laptops, stolen hard drives, lost CDs - there is the less obvious. An example would be accidental or intentional sending of sensitive information, such as Social Security numbers, via email. Or even, as has happened fairly recently, sending denigrating comments via email, which then eventually come back to haunt the sender. For example, one communications-control vendor, Orchestria Corp., says its software could have prevented the CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc. from posting the rival-denigrating comments on Internet message boards that he later came to regret. How so? Because Orchestria’s software...
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The game 'Manhunt 2' by Rockstar Games has been in the United Kingdom by the British Board of Film Classification. BBFC director David Cooke stated that the game was banned due to its "unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone in an overall game context which constantly encourages visceral killing." Rockstar Games' Rodney Walker responded to the ban by stating that Manhunt 2 is meant to be horrific and that the violence and gore help create that atmosphere. Walker believes that the BBFC has effectively censored the game from the UK public and as a result is "putting a limit on what sort of creative choices people can make." Manhunt 2 is the first game the BBFC has banned since 1997 when the...
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