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qiyi liao

Online Censorship: Obama urged to fine firms for aiding censors - 3 views

Internet activists are urging Barack Obama to pass legislation that would make it illegal for technology companies to collaborate with authoritarian countries that censor the internet. -The Guardi...

started by qiyi liao on 02 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Paul Melissa

Google to censor content in China - 5 views

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2006/01/25/google-china060125.html Google agreed to Beijing's censorship policies limiting search results in order to get broader access to the large market. Google s...

Online Censorship

started by Paul Melissa on 31 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

Humanist census posters banned from railway stations | UK news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • The posters, bearing the slogan "If you're not religious, for God's sake say so", have been refused by the companies that own the advertising space, which say they are likely to cause offence.
  • The British Humanist Association (BHA), which published the posters, said it was astonished that such an everyday phrase should be deemed too contentious for public display. "It is a little tongue-in-cheek," said the BHA chief executive, Andrew Copson, "but in the same way that saying 'bless you' has no religious implication for many, 'for God's sake' is used to express urgency and not to invoke a deity.
  • "This censorship of a legitimate advert is frustrating and ridiculous: the blasphemy laws in England have been abolished but we are seeing the same principle being enforced nonetheless."
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  • The posters ask those who are not religious to tick the "no religion" box when they fill in forms for the 2011 census."We used to tick 'Christian' but we're not really religious. We'll tick 'No Religion' this time. We're sick of hearing politicians say this is a religious country and giving millions to religious organisations and the pope's state visit. Money like that should go where it is needed," says one of the banned posters.
  • The ban followed advice from the Advertising Standards Authority's committee of advertising practice that the advert had the potential to cause widespread and serious offence.The poster display company involved also said it did not want to take adverts relating to religion.
  • British Humanist Association has amended the campaign slogan on the adverts to read simply: "Not religious? In this year's census say so." The posters are being displayed from this weekend on 200 buses in London, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Birmingham, Cardiff and Exeter.
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    The posters, which encourage people to tick the 'no religion' box if they do not believe in God, were judged too likely to offend
Weiye Loh

Report: Piracy a "global pricing problem" with only one solution - 0 views

  • Over the last three years, 35 researchers contributed to the Media Piracy Project, released last week by the Social Science Research Council. Their mission was to examine media piracy in emerging economies, which account for most of the world's population, and to find out just how and why piracy operates in places like Russia, Mexico, and India.
  • Their conclusion is not that citizens of such piratical societies are somehow morally deficient or opposed to paying for content. Instead, they write that “high prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. If piracy is ubiquitous in most parts of the world, it is because these conditions are ubiquitous.”
  • When legitimate CDs, DVDs, and computer software are five to ten times higher (relative to local incomes) than they are in the US and Europe, simply ratcheting up copyright enforcement won't do enough to fix the problem. In the view of the report's authors, the only real solution is the creation of local companies that “actively compete on price and services for local customers” as they sell movies, music, and more.
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  • Some markets have local firms that compete on price to offer legitimate content (think the US, which has companies like Hulu, Netflix, Apple, and Microsoft that compete to offer legal video content). But the authors conclude that, in most of the world, legitimate copyrighted goods are only distributed by huge multinational corporations whose dominant goals are not to service a large part of local markets but to “protect the pricing structure in the high-income countries that generate most of their profits.”
  • This might increase profits globally, but it has led to disaster in many developing economies, where piracy may run north of 90 percent. Given access to cheap digital tools, but charged terrific amounts of money for legitimate versions of content, users choose piracy.
  • In Russia, for instance, researchers noted that legal versions of the film The Dark Knight went for $15. That price, akin to what a US buyer would pay, might sound reasonable until you realize that Russians make less money in a year than US workers. As a percentage of their wages, that $15 price is actually equivalent to a US consumer dropping $75 on the film. Pirate versions can be had for one-third the price.
  • Simple crackdowns on pirate behavior won't work in the absence of pricing and other reforms, say the report's authors (who also note that even "developed" economies routinely pirate TV shows and movies that are not made legally available to them for days, weeks, or months after they originally appear elsewhere).
  • The "strong moralization of the debate” makes it difficult to discuss issues beyond enforcement, however, and the authors slam the content companies for lacking any credible "endgame" to their constant requests for more civil and police powers in the War on Piracy.
  • piracy is a “signal of unmet consumer demand.
  • Our studies raise concerns that it may be a long time before such accommodations to reality reach the international policy arena. Hardline enforcement positions may be futile at stemming the tide of piracy, but the United States bears few of the costs of such efforts, and US companies reap most of the modest benefits. This is a recipe for continued US pressure on developing countries, very possibly long after media business models in the United States and other high-income countries have changed.
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    A major new report from a consortium of academic researchers concludes that media piracy can't be stopped through "three strikes" Internet disconnections, Web censorship, more police powers, higher statutory damages, or tougher criminal penalties. That's because the piracy of movies, music, video games, and software is "better described as a global pricing problem." And the only way to solve it is by changing the price.
Weiye Loh

Cut secrecy down to a minimum - 0 views

  • This is not an anarchist call for the ransacking of government files, in the manner of Julian Assange. WikiLeaks has raised the issue of whether the unauthorised and anarchic acquisition and leaking of government records is legally or ethically defensible. I don't wish to embark on that debate. I believe it is a distraction from a much more important debate about how to enhance the quality of political and public deliberation while drastically reducing secrecy.
  • If public policy is sound, it must be possible for the grounds of such policy to be made public without caveat and to withstand public scrutiny. We should not be left guessing, as we too commonly are; and deploring the evasions of politicians and their minions.
Weiye Loh

The App Store Moral Quandary - 0 views

  • the App Store is Apple's world. They rule it, and can pull or approve whatever they want. They'll keep selling tons of apps regardless of what they remove or don't remove, or what some people find offensive. There's little consequence for Apple in the end. But as long as Apple makes itself the arbiter of App Store morality, or concerns itself with what one group finds offensive versus another, this stuff will never stop.
  • Who's to say where it ends? Everybody finds something offensive, and everything offends somebody.
  • a handful of senators are calling on Apple to pull apps that allow users to self-report DUI (and speeding and other law enforcement) checkpoints, like Trapster and FuzzAlert. Which, on the face of it, sounds almost like a no-brainer-the apps facilitate breaking the law. On the other hand, the data is entirely user reported. Somebody could tweet all of it, theoretically. Should Apple take down apps comprised entirely of user-generated data? Both of those apps are still in the app store.
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  • Apple occasionally places itself in an awkward position. Like, for instance, when Exodus International, one of those ministries that promotes "gay cures," released an iPhone app. People complained that it was offensive (I don't like it myself), and Apple removed it, saying it violates their "developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people." Just last year, Apple repeatedly rejected the app Gay New York: 101 Can't-Miss Places-basically a gay sight-seeing app. The creator found Apple's rejection of the "PG-13" app to be "homophobic and discriminatory to the point of hostile," since, he claims, that "far racier photographic material is routinely available on other apps."
  • Apple doesn't want people to perceive the App Store as a seedy place (which the Android Market kind of seems like sometimes!), or a place where kids can get their hands on stuff they shouldn't. It's family friendly, mostly. (Apps that could lead to bad stuff, like browsers, carry 17+ warnings and can be blocked via parental controls.) And it keeps regulators and Congressmen off their back
Weiye Loh

Chinese city draws ire with controversial cloud zone | ITworld - 0 views

  • That has sparked an uproar among some Chinese Internet users, because the unfiltered Web access will be available only to foreign companies, according to the reports. People commenting on social-networking sites have slammed the zone as a throwback to the days of "No dogs and no Chinese allowed,"a reference to how local Chinese were prohibited in the early 20th century from entering certain foreigner communities.
  • Chongqing Economic and Information Technology Commission, which is overseeing development of the cloud zone, declined to comment on whether the media reports about Web access were accurate. A spokeswoman said the commission continues to "push forward" with the project.
  • "It goes beyond ironic," he said. "The Chinese government is marketing an uncensored, unfiltered Internet connection as a selling point, while they so blatantly and purposely deny that right to the vast majority of their citizens."
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    A cloud development zone being constructed in the Chinese city of Chongqing has drawn scrutiny for an alleged plan to offer uncensored Internet access, but only for foreign businesses. The city's Cloud Computing Special Zone will be home to a handful of state-of-the-art data centers and is designed to attract investment from multinational companies and boost China's status as a center for cloud computing. To attract business, the Chongqing municipal government will provide the site with unrestricted access to the Internet, meaning companies located there won't be restricted by China's pervasive Web filtering system, according to Chinese media reports.
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