Items tagged with Censorship
A new bill proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA), aims to grant rights-holders the power to obtain court orders that block access to foreign websites accused of copyright infringement. The bill, introduced by Representative Zoe Lofgren of California (D-18), amends...
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Governments across the world seek to control the flow of information, particularly within their borders, and while it may be popular to think of Facebook as now being an app for grandparents and businesses, the truth is that it is still a titanic social media platform with robust utility for sharing information. With...
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A defamation case in Australia could force Google to censor the internet if not overturned, the search giant claims. The case dates back to 2016 and awarded $40,000 in defamation damages for an article Google linked to through its search engine. This isn’t the first time Google has been sued for defamation, but it...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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