Items tagged with Censorship
China has no love for Taiwan, and the former's censorship has led to strange issues for some iPhone users. If users have their region set to China and someone sends them the Taiwan flag emoji, a bug in iOS could cause the app to crash. That bug has the potential to allow a remote user to launch a denial of service attack on the message receiver by continually sending them the Taiwan flag emoji. The bug was discovered by security researcher Patrick Wardle. Wardle says that the bug was first brought to his attention when a friend told him that iOS apps crashed when she typed the word "Taiwan" or received a message with the Taiwanese flag in it on a fully patched iPhone 7. In his debugging of the...
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Facebook has taken censorship to a new level. The company has reportedly created software that can suppress certain posts from appearing in specific geographic areas. Zuckerberg hopes that this new software will help the company gain access to China’s market of 1.4 billion people. This is not the first time Facebook has blocked content. The company blocked roughly 55,000 pieces of content between July and December 2015 in twenty different countries. Facebook is known for employing this technique in countries such as Russia, Pakistan, and Turkey. Facebook will also block posts, even in the United States, if the post relates to a confidential criminal case. Facebook would not be suppressing the...
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The hashtag #YouTubeIsOver is currently fluttering all over Twitter. Many content creators are up in arms over YouTube’s alleged censorship and have taken to all forms of social media to air their grievances. Has YouTube’s censorship rules actually changed in the last few days? Who is affected by the censorship? How did the campaign against YouTube even get started? We have some answers for you. YouTubers have been complaining about censorship for years. In the past, YouTube has offered some rather vague explanations for removing videos, striking channels, or preventing videos from being monetized. Content creators frequently did not know if their video had been demonetized unless they dug deep...
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Apple is fighting hard to have shoot down a proposed UK law that would require tech firms to work hand-in-hand with government agencies to break encryption and provide easy access to customer data under court order. “We believe it would be wrong to weaken security for hundreds of millions of law-abiding customers so that it will also be weaker for the very few who pose a threat,” said Apple in a complaint filed against the Investigatory Powers Bill. For all its efforts to stop efforts in the UK to break down encryption walls and bend over for law enforcement, a new Chinese law looks to simply steamroll tech companies. Under the guise of counter-terrorism, the Chinese government has passed a law...
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One of the most frustrating things on earth is being censored, and if there's one group that likes to be vocal in battling such things, it's The Pirate Bay. Censorship can come in many forms, however, such as restricting what you can say in public, or which websites you can visit. TPB might not be able to take care of the former, but it is able to remedy the latter, and has, with "PirateBrowser". PirateBrowser, built-upon Firefox (v23, at the moment), is designed strictly for those who have governments that censor the parts of the Web to its citizens. TPB lists North Korea, Iran, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy and Ireland as affected countries, but there are of course more...
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China isn't exactly known for fostering open opinions on the Internet, but hey, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China boasts a "high level of freedom of online speech." The research organization that sits under the State Council then goes on to brag about China dropping the axe on 1.3 million websites in 2010, which effectively reduced the number of online portals in the country by 41 percent. "This means our content is getting stronger, while our supervision is getting more strict and more regulated," Liu Ruisheng, a researcher at the academy, explains to BBC News. That's one way to spin it. The other explanation -- you know, the one that makes sense -- is the recent reduction...
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A year ago, the Chinese government launched a campaign to shut down porn sites. Whether it's been a success or not is hard to say, but it's certainly taken down a huge number of porn sites. The government has shut down some 60,000 porn websites, the official state-run news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday. At a news conference, the director of the Information Office of the State Council, Wang Chen, said that in addition to the 60,000 sites being disabled, approximately 350 million pieces of pornographic or other indecent content was deleted in the crackdown. 2,197 criminal cases were tried, involving 4,965 people. 58 of those people received prison sentences longer than five years. Xinhua...
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Here's something that Chinese users will agree the Kindle does better than the iPad: scale the "Great Firewall of China." Sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which are blocked by Chinese authorities, can be accessed by the Kindle's Internet browsing functionality. The Kindle is only available in China's grey markets, however. A seller in Beijing told the South China Morning Post he has been slipping Kindles into China a few at a time, and that he has sold 300 in the past month. AFP reported that bloggers are recommending the device for its ability to get around the censors. One blogger said, "I still can't believe it. I casually tried getting to Twitter, and what a surprise, I got there. And...
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Google has launched a new tool, the Transparency Report, which shows a global picture of both government requests to remove or censor content, as well as traffic patterns, which could indicate where Google is being blocked (or alternatively, where there is an outage). You can click on countries to see more details. Interestingly, the country with the most requests appears to be the U.S. That, however, may not be correct; it's possible that China has more and Google simply can't reveal it. The reason for that is revealed by clicking on China on the Government Requests map; the message states, "Chinese officials consider censorship demands to be state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information...
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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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Andy Burnham, Britain’s minister for culture, is looking for a way to police the Internet and better protect children from harmful and offensive material on the net. One of his solutions is to apply a rating system to websites, similar to that used for films. Burnham recently said that the government is planning to negotiate with President-elect Barack Obama’s administration to create international rules for English language websites. Of course, giving websites film-style ratings is only one possibility. Another alternative would be for Internet service providers to offer services that would restrict accessible content to only that which is deemed suitable for children. Certainly any moves by...
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Access to editing a Wikipedia article in the U.K. has been effectively blocked after the U.K.'s Internet Watch Foundation added a Wikipedia article on Virgin Killer, an album from German heavy metal group Scorpions, to its blacklist. The album's cover art image, depicting what appears to be a nude underage girl, is what caused the blacklisting. Click through the link above to see the cover art. Reports are that in an attempt to block access to the Wikipedia article, the ISPs Virgin Media, Be Unlimited/O2/Telefonica, EasyNet/UK Online, PlusNet, Demon, and Opal began routing traffic through transparent proxies. However, this caused more problems, as the use of proxies means that to Wikipedia editors...
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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 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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