New Examples of Censorship in West Europe, Facebook, Google, Saudi Arabia, China, Japan, and North America
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2013-12-18 16:23:49 UTC
- Modified: 2013-12-18 16:23:49 UTC
-
Today, a special police unit can decide that a certain website needs to disappear from the Internet, and threaten its domain name registrar into revoking the address “until further notice”, without any legal basis whatsoever.
The name of the unit is PIPCU (Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit) and it has just reported on the success of Operation Creative – a three month long campaign that resulted in 40 websites accused of copyright infringement shutting down, or at least moving to a new Web address.
-
Speaking at the Internet Service Providers Association, Security Minister James Brokenshire said that an announcement on blocking extremist websites is ‘forthcoming.’
-
Numerous reactions are now being voiced against the inclusion in the 2014-2019 Defense Bill of article 13 whose provisions enable a pervasive surveillance of online data and communications. Gilles Babinet, appointed in 2012 as French Digital Champion to Nellie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, was quoted [fr] in the French newspaper Les Echos, “This law is the most serious attack on democracy since the special tribunals during the Algerian War” (our translation).
-
Social networking giant Facebook has been granted a patent to use profile information to analyze whether shared files are “pirated” or not. The data is carefully analyzed using several social indicators including the interests of the poster and recipient, their geographical location, and their social relationship. According to Facebook the patent can help the company to “minimize legal liabilities,” but whether users will be happy remains to be seen.
-
Facebook is developing a speech impediment. The recent fracas over beheading videos was marked by severe bouts of waffling from the social media giant. On one hand, it seems to want to ease unfettered expression. On the other hand, it's set itself up as the content police.
These two aspects often collide with disastrous results. Beheadings are a go, but breast cancer groups can't post photos of mastectomies. Recent partnerships with government agencies see Facebook willing to censor by proxy, even as it attempts to roll back its control in other areas. Giving 800+ million users access to a "report" button is well-intended, but the reality is more troubling. Something that's simply unpopular can be clicked into oblivion in nearly no time whatsoever.
-
It seems that Google now wants you to make use of words in a more careful and responsible way, and thus, has drawn off many words, including a bunch of profane words, from its built-in dictionary for Android. With the rollout of Android 4.4 KitKat, Google has now stopped giving you predictive suggestions for a raft of words.
-
Last Tuesday (26 Nov) representatives from the country’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — the Haya’a — raided several bookshops selling the novel H W J N by Ibraheem Abbas and Yasser Bahjatt’s, demanding it’d be taken off the shelves. H W J N is a “fantasy, sci-fi and romance” novel about a genie who falls in love with a human, and is a best-seller in Saudi Arabia.
-
China's campaign against online rumors, which critics say is crushing free speech, has been highly successful in "cleaning" the Internet, a top official of the country's internet regulator said on Thursday.
-
The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe this month rammed through Parliament a state secrecy law that signals a fundamental alteration of the Japanese understanding of democracy. The law is vaguely worded and very broad, and it will allow government to make secret anything that it finds politically inconvenient. Government officials who leak secrets can be jailed for up to 10 years, and journalists who obtain information in an “inappropriate” manner or even seek information that they do not know is classified can be jailed for up to five years. The law covers national security issues, and it includes espionage and terrorism.
-
Fukushima continues to spew out radiation. The quantities seem to be rising, as do the impacts.
The site has been infiltrated by organized crime. There are horrifying signs of ecological disaster in the Pacific and human health impacts in the U.S.
-
The drawn-out process in which a bill becomes a law lends itself to harmful things, like mission creep and bloating. Canada's new cyberbullying legislation, problematic in its "purest" form, is now becoming even worse as legislators have begun hanging language aimed at other issues (child porn, terrorism, cable theft [?]) on the bill's framework.
As was noted earlier, language aimed at punishing revenge porn had already been attached to the bill. But the urge to target as much as possible with a broadly written bill is too much for Canada's politicians to resist. Michael Geist notes that Bob Dechert (Secretary to the Minister of Justice) took a moment during the debate to speculate about the "dangers" of "stolen" cable.
-
This month, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Department of Homeland Security must make its plan to shut off the Internet and cellphone communications available to the American public. You, of course, may now be thinking: What plan?! Though President Barack Obama swiftly disapproved of ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak turning off the Internet in his country (to quell widespread civil disobedience) in 2011, the US government has the authority to do the same sort of thing, under a plan that was devised during the George W. Bush administration. Many details of the government’s controversial “kill switch” authority have been classified, such as the conditions under which it can be implemented and how the switch can be used. But thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), DHS has to reveal those details by December 12 — or mount an appeal. (The smart betting is on an appeal, since DHS has fought to release this information so far.)
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Generation Chaff - Phase V: Censorship of Dissent (Painted as Harassment or Terrorism)
- Censorship is all around us now
- Generation Chaff - Phase IV: Apps Only Few Companies Decide On
- Tools are being collectively confiscated, under the premise or false prospect of "security"
- Why We Support Richard Stallman and You Probably Should Too
- It's not about being "Richard Stallman fan", it is about maintaining the right to hold positions (on technology) like his
- Some Large German Media Covers Richard Stallman's Talks in Germany Earlier This Week
- LLM-based chatbots are just "bullshit generators" (as he has long called them)
- Trouble in Red Hat/IBM and a Retreat to Ponzi Economics in Search of Wall Street Market Heist
- Would you invest your life savings in this kind of crap?
- Who Asked Software in the Public Interest (SPI) for a Refund? ($100,000, Resulting in Losses of $267,201 in 12 Months, Highest-Ever Losses)
- The IRS does not reveal who or what's tied to this refund (or the cause/reason)
-
- Coping With the Site Going More Mainstream
- Fame is no laughing matter
- They Never 'Put Down' Corporations
- There are "pests" that are traded in Wall Street
- 21 Pages in Less Than 7 Hours is No Joking Matter
- We've become a lot more effective and efficient
- Correct Information is a Valued Asset in the Age of Slopfarms and Public Relations (PR) or Spin
- Publishing suppressed facts is never easy
- The Register MS Continues to Bag Money to Promote a Ponzi Scheme, Even Money From China
- Today in the front page
- analytics.usa.gov: The Only Supported Version of Windows (This Past Week) is Only Used by About 13.9% of People in the US, the Home Base of Windows
- Even Vista 7 is still used more
- Rust is Very Secure
- If only Rust itself is secure
- Who Will be Held Accountable for Breaking Ubuntu by Imposing Rust on Otherwise-Functional Programs, in Effect Replacing GNU With Proprietary Microsoft (GitHub)?
- they're practical people who merely point out that a bunch of buffoons not only ruin Ubuntu but also every future distro based on Ubuntu
- Generation Chaff - Phase VIII: In Summary
- Like "Science" with a capital "S", what we see here commercial interests usurping everything
- Generation Chaff - Phase VII: Curtailing Alternative Media
- There was always an obligation - a collective duty of sorts - to uphold independent journalism
- Generation Chaff - Phase VI: Centralisation of Information (X, Cheetok/Fentanylware)
- Would you trust information when controlled by such people?
- Generation Chaff - Phase III: Slop and Plagiarism
- A lot of the current so-called 'economy' is built upon false valuations
- Generation Chaff - Phase II: "Cloud", Blockchains and Other Hype
- For those of us who turned down those propositions there was a struggle; we needed to justify not having skinnerboxes or "social" accounts in some site run by a private company
- Generation Chaff - Phase I: Social Control Media
- IRC predates the Web
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 23, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, October 23, 2025
- More Clues Shed on Collapse of Microsoft XBox
- XBox is basically circling down the drain as Microsoft implements 2-3 waves of layoffs each month
- 'Vibe Coding' Doesn't Work
- In a lot of ways, so-called 'Vibe Coding' is already considered vapourware or a passing fad promoted in the media by managers who try to justify mass layoffs, especially ridding companies of "very expensive" software engineers
- Links 24/10/2025: Microsoft's Killing of XBox Connected to Revenue/Profit Problems, "How Elon Musk Ruined Twitter"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 24/10/2025: 86,400 Seconds and "Society's Task"
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: Google News and Slopfarms That Relay Nonsense From LLMs
- Google News, which once prioritised or used to care about provenance and quality, is feeding slopfarms
- Links 23/10/2025: More Health Concerns Over Dumb Chatbots (LLMs) and "Talking Cars" as Latest Buzz
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 23/10/2025: Daylight Savings Time and Duration Shorthand
- Links for the day
- Links 23/10/2025: LLM 'Hallucinations' (Defects) in Practical Code 'Generation', China Becomes More Economically and Technologically Independent
- Links for the day
- Linux Foundation Uses LLM Slop to Promote Microsoft in Linux.com (Again), Rendering It a Linux-Hostile Slopfarm
- Openwashing with slop by "Linux.com Editorial Staff", which basically seems to be a bot
- Links 23/10/2025: Windows TCO Galore and "The Internet Is Going to Break Again"
- Links for the day
- Social engineering attack: Debian voted to trick you on binary blobs
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Techrights Will Always Stand for Women's Rights
- We even invest money - personal savings that it - in our principles
- Certified Lawyers Should Know Better (Than to Intimidate Us With Man Who Drives on Motorcycle Through a Really Bad Storm Between Distant Cities, Then Collects Photos of Our Home)
- Mentioning someone was in prison for bad things isn't a crime, it's a public service
- The "AI" (Slop) Bubble is Already Imploding
- "ChatGPT Usage Has Peaked and Is Now Declining, New Data Finds"
- The So-called "Sexy" Buckets (AI, Quantum) Cannot Save IBM From Reality, Shares Tank
- "No matter how much financial hocus-pocus they use to reclassify revenues to land in the "sexy" buckets (AI, Quantum), it still smells old and musty - just like this company."
- Paul Krugman is Wrong About the Scope of Mass Layoffs in the United States
- A few years ago society was accelerating its journey towards feudalism, boosted by COVID-19
- Links 23/10/2025: Proprietary Blunders and CISA's Latest Disclosure of Holes
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 23/10/2025: Fast Past (F1), 99.9% Uptime
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 22, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, October 22, 2025
- Slopwatch: Google News is Promoting Fake 'Articles' About Fake Xubuntu, Fake Articles About Replacing Windows With GNU/Linux
- The quality of the Web deteriorates and unless someone cleans up the mess, real sites will lose an incentive to produce anything
- When "AI Layoffs" Mean Layoffs Due to the "AI" Bubble Popping
- many people that are laid off by Microsoft claim to be specialists in "AI"
- Mysterious grant forfeited, $100,000 from Software in the Public Interest accounts 2023
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Evidence: bullying, student union behaviour: Armijn Hemel's FSFE resignation
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Evidence: psychological abuse, stalking, Galia Mancheva, Susanne Eiswirt ignored by FSFE judgment for Matthias Kirschner
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Helping FSFE scam victims and conference organisers
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Nigerian fraud in FSFE constitution
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Worrying and Amusing Stories of "Clown Computing" Gone Awry
- Many of these disasters could be avoided
- Links 22/10/2025: Amazon Plans to Replace Workers With Robotics, AWS and Clown Computing in General Ridiculed
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 22/10/2025: Niri Completely Changes Multitasking and Overview of Diff-ers
- Links for the day
- Links 22/10/2025: Study on Misinformation by Slop and Heavily Debt-Sabbled Microsoft OpenAI (ClosedSlop) Uses "Browser" as Gimmick/Distraction
- Links for the day
- They've Already Spent Close to a Million Dollars on Lawyers and Sent Us About 50 KG of Legal Papers (Sponsored by Mysterious Third Party) to Try to Censor Techrights, Without Success
- They try to overcompensate with sheer volume for a lack of solid, clear arguments (we are the victims here)
- 12 Months Ago the 'Hulk Hogan of UEFI' Officially Went 'Tag-Team'
- We're actually sort of flattered or proud that such despicable people are so desperate to censor us
- "Cloud Computing" Was Always a Joke, But This Week Was the Punchline
- Maybe stop following tech trends and fashions
- "Cloud Computing" Does Not Mean Safety
- Fault tolerance is related to the notion of software freedom
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 21, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, October 21, 2025
- The Fall of Windows: From Something to Nothing
- Of course Microsoft will pretend everything is fine and "just trust the hey hi" (AI)