Saturday, January 25, 2025

China Scolds US For Banning TikTok In Ironic Twist

Blaming the move on America’s own ‘insecurities’, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson seems to forget that the makers of all our favourite plastic toys also ban Facebook, Twitter, and whatever apps don’t agree with the ruling party’s communist-ish views.

WATCH: F#@!ing Nemo [VIDEO]

All it takes for your dirty mind to ruin a children’s movie is by adding a couple of bleeps and pixelated censoring. Unnecessary censorship turns ‘Finding Nemo’ into an R-rated movie. Just watch and let your filthy imagination do the rest.

Twitter Has Officially Silenced Its First Account Ever

In the first move of its kind, Twitter has officially banned the account of a German neo-Nazi group. The action came after a request from German police, who claimed the account holders were a “criminal organisation”.

US Business Giants Skittish About Foreign Governments’ Threats To Internet

American tech companies are increasingly wary of a growing movement to hand control of the Internet over to the United Nations, led by China, Russia and Arab states. They are worried that this could empower foreign governments to restrict free speech and civil rights, not to mention negatively affecting the bottom line for Silicon Valley giants including Google and Microsoft.

FPB Exec Suggests Board Has A Duty To Suppress Criticism Of Political Leaders

As the dust settles between the ANC and the Goodman Gallery, all that’s left is for the Film and Publications Board to render their decision on the classification of our dear leader’s “umthondo” after a fraught hearing yesterday, but the how do you classify as offensive something that is no longer visibly offensive? And, what is the connection to “political criticism” in South Africa?

Google Co-Founder Says Facebook & Apple Threaten Internet Freedom

Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder everybody keeps forgetting about except when he talks about stuff like this, has pointed to a handful of “threats to internet freedom” – Facebook, Apple, the entertainment industry, and governments that censor their citizens. By which I guess he means threats to Google.

Meet CISPA, The Latest Bill To Try And Destroy The Internet

A new bill is making its way through congress – CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which is pretty much SOPA in different shoes. It’s another attempt to give copyright enforces carte blanche to spy on internet users and censor online content without just cause. Which is sort of bad.

Iran To Cut Off Internet, Completely

Iran’s government, not wanting to be outdone by other censorship-crazed nations like China, North Korea, and Great Britain, are taking things to the next level – they are cutting off the internet, permanently. As always, they only have their citizens’ best interests at heart.

Twitter BlackOut Protest Results In Mass Tweeting

Man, look, I know the successive restriction of online liberties is something we should be fighting tooth and nail, but I can’t be the only one who heard about last Saturday’s ‘Twitter Blackout,’ in protest of Twitter’s new censorship policy, and failed to care.

Twitter Can Now Censor Tweets By Country

Over the past few years social media has transformed the proliferation of information, particularly mainstream news. It’s now almost more likely that you’ll first learn about breaking news on your Facebook feed or Twitter account than from a legitimate news source. That’s all about to change.

Google Blacked Out For SOPA Too

Google has joined Wikipedia, BoingBoing and a number of other popular websites in the SOPA protest – not just by ‘blacking out’ their logo, which is cute but largely ineffective, but by putting together a comprehensive and informative infographic on the SOPA bill and piracy, along with access lines for voters to contact members of Congress through.

Google Now Censoring The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, & Other File-Sharing Services

Google seems to be dabbling in the censorship game too, these days. They’ve added sites like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, and 4Shared to their “blacklist”, which doesn’t prevent the pages from showing up if searched for, but does prevents the names of sites appearing in their Instant and Autocomplete services.

ANC WikiPedia Page Suffers Sustained Hacks

In the wake of Parliament’s majority vote to send the controversial Protection of Information Bill to the National Council of Provinces for consideration, the ANC’s Wikipedia has suffered numerous mischievious revisions, or hacks.The information under the heading “Controversy over corrupt members” appears to have been censored, or redacted, in a style similar to a government-censored document. You need to see what these guys did.

China Further Tightens Its Strict Censorship Laws

China is renowned for its seemingly ridiculous stance on freedom of speech and the proliferation of unauthorised news – a stance which has seen prominent members of society detained without legitimate explanation and popular social networks such as Facebook banned. Now, it seems, actions like that were only the beginning.

English Man Arrested For Planning Water-Fight With BBM

A 20-year-old man in Essex has been charged with “encouraging or assisting in the commission of an offence” because he used Blackberry Messenger to invite people to a public water fight. Whether this means British cops can now wiretap the Blackberry messaging network is unclear, but either way: great job, democracy.

Elton John Magazine Cover Censored

A supermarket in Arkansas has caused a stir by placing a ‘family shield’ in front of the US Weekly cover which features Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, cradling their adopted baby boy. NSFW if your screen is within the vicinity of small homophobic children.