|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 . '/' . substr('9780307377906',-6,3) . '/' . '9780307377906' . '.jpg'; ?>)
By Jonathan Haidt
$28.95
$25.00
$24
|
|
|
|
|
Aaron Swartz, the Internet freedom advocate who committed suicide in mid-January, was an intern in Florida Congressman Alan Grayson’s office after the onset of the economic crisis. Grayson recently paid tribute to Swartz at a memorial service in Washington, D.C.
Posted on Feb 22, 2013
READ MORE 
|
EleArt (CC BY 2.0)
|
Major papers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have complied with requests from the Bush and Obama administrations to conceal sometimes-illegal acts performed by the government in the name of national security, writes Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian.
Posted on Feb 8, 2013
READ MORE 
|
Screenshot of 500px
|
Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs once told an irritated blogger that the iPhone offered “freedom from porn,” but what about freedom from artsy photography?
Posted on Jan 22, 2013
READ MORE 
|
jiadoldol (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
|
China’s state television network broadcast the anti-authoritarian movie that has become a symbol in the West of anarchic uprising against oppressive or totalitarian governments.
Posted on Dec 21, 2012
READ MORE
|
Ben Fredericson (xjrlokix) (CC BY 2.0)
|
The hacker collective’s Twitter account was temporarily suspended Wednesday after the group posted personal information belonging to members of the Westboro Baptist Church.
Posted on Dec 19, 2012
READ MORE
|
eofstr (CC BY 2.0)
|
The failure to concur on a global Internet treaty at the end of a two-week summit Friday “seems to safeguard the role of the Internet as an unregulated, international service ... free of direct interference by national governments,” The Guardian reports.
Posted on Dec 14, 2012
READ MORE
|
AP/Alexander Zemlianichenko
|
“If this political system throws itself against three girls ... it shows this political system is afraid of truth,” a member of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot said as a judge set a verdict date on charges that the musicians engaged in hooliganism against the Russian government.
Posted on Aug 8, 2012
READ MORE
|
screenshot
|
Internet censorship by governments is on the rise, according to a troubling new report on transparency from Google. Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the report is that it is Western democracies typically not associated with censorship that are among the countries asking the search engine to remove content for political reasons.
Posted on Jun 18, 2012
READ MORE
|
s4n8eep (CC-BY)
|
Chinese Internet users were prevented from accessing all foreign websites for about an hour Thursday morning, prompting questions as to whether the problem resulted from a technical failure or was a test of the government’s censorship system.
|
|
By David Sirota — Financed by the Pentagon, “Act of Valor” is a new film that seeks to make us forget our past military blunders.
|
shawncampbell (CC-BY)
|
One year after the beginning of the Egyptian uprising that it helped make possible, Twitter began its descent down what media commentator Jeff Jarvis called the “slippery slope of censorship,” announcing that it would begin to locally censor tweets that governments find objectionable.
|
Screen capture of Google.com
|
By Amy Goodman — Wednesday, Jan. 18, marked the largest online protest in the history of the Internet. Websites from large to small “went dark” in protest of proposed legislation before the U.S. House and Senate that could profoundly change the Internet.
|
ShardsOfBlue (CC-BY)
|
The House Judiciary Committee, reviewing a proposal for a new law aimed at combating online piracy, suspended discussions Friday without setting a date to reconvene. The move pleased top Internet companies and others who warn that the bill could lead to a new age of censorship on the Web.
Posted on Dec 17, 2011
READ MORE
|
Thomas Galvez (CC-BY)
|
In the spirit of fostering a more “socialist culture,” the Chinese government is banning commercials that interrupt television dramas. Judging by this BBC report, China’s TV executives seem much more concerned with lost revenue than with government interference.
|
Alpha (CC-BY-SA)
|
British Prime Minister David Cameron and four of the country’s Internet service providers are bending over backwards to accommodate parents concerned with the allegedly corrosive influence of titillating adverts and porn sites on youth, because teenagers never thought about sex before billboards were invented. (more)
|
|
Amazon’s warehouse has brutal working conditions; women are beginning to take over the workforce; meanwhile, a website and app have been developed to tell you how many slaves are working for you. These discoveries and more after the jump.
|
|
Project Censored, a media research program founded by Carl Jensen in 1976, has for a long time drawn attention to stories that the mainstream media for one reason or another censor or ignore. The project will publish its 2012 edition this month, highlighting the most censored stories in the last year.
|
Mr. Fish
|
By Mr. Fish — This was in 1979 when I was 12, and we were all doing it for Zeeker, who hadn’t been the same since he saw the Easter Bunny drop dead at Pennebaker’s Drugstore three months earlier.
|
|
By David Sirota — Wielding its increasing market leverage, China is now countering our First Amendment ethos with a push for what L.A. Times reporter Ben Fritz calls pervasive “self-censorship.”
|
|
Apparently the heavy-handed radio stations of Malaysia are not too keen on the pro-gay message of Lady Gaga’s newest ubiquitous single and have taken to editing out parts of “Born This Way.” The monster-in-chief told her Malaysian fans to “do everything that you can if you want to be liberated by your society, you must call, you must not stop, you must protest peacefully.”
|
Illustration from Mr. T in DC
|
By Derek Lazzaro — Apparently having learned nothing from its failure to rein in Enron, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and the rest, Congress is pushing to deregulate Internet service providers.
|
YouTube
|
This week we throw our support behind former CIA analyst, Army veteran and peace activist Ray McGovern, whose arrest while protesting as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid tribute to the wave of demonstrations in the Middle East made a troubling statement about the state of our own freedoms.
|
news.bbc.co.uk
|
In a BBC interview with Eric Schmidt, Google’s outgoing chief executive, Schmidt spelled out his ambitions for Google in China as well as declaring that the search giant will deny government attempts to censor WikiLeaks documents.
Posted on Jan 28, 2011
READ MORE
|
Mr. Fish
|
By Mr. Fish — Tuchuses and nay-nays, to me, became a metaphor for what it meant to replace the literal meaning of something with the figurative meaning; that is, to replace the facts with a value judgment that had less to do with the truth and more to do with a particular interpretation of the truth.
|
|
According to a tweeting Hugh Hefner, Playboy magazine, “both old & new” is coming to the iPad, and it “will be uncensored.” That’s somewhat surprising, considering that Apple CEO Steve Jobs once claimed that the iPad was designed to offer “freedom from porn.” (Update)
|
Composite image / Wikimedia Commons
|
By Marcia Alesan Dawkins — If you find this book offensive, don’t buy it or read it. There are plenty of books that none of us have an interest in reading for one reason or another. We don’t rewrite them. We simply choose not to read them.
|
Gizmodo
|
In addition to selling books, Amazon does a nice side business hosting websites. WikiLeaks was paying for space on Amazon servers this week until the retailer sent the leakers packing. No comment so far from Amazon, but WikiLeaks, now hosted in Sweden, responded with a dig about “the land of the free.”
|
|
For the second straight week, “The Simpsons” mocked Fox News, but the gag is mysteriously absent from the show’s online versions. After all these years has Rupert Murdoch finally had enough, or is this just a case of the randoms?
|
AP / Irwin Fedriansyah
|
The former editor of Playboy Indonesia has begun a two-year prison stint for publishing images of scantily clad women. Playboy Indonesia began circulation in 2006, but Islamic hard-liners found issue with the magazine’s ethos and started legal proceedings against its editor.
|
Flickr / shaho (CC-BY-ND)
|
Iran’s Islamic government has long had a fairly dodgy relationship with music, but just in case the crackdowns and dearth of public performances weren’t making things clear enough, the country’s supreme leader announced that teaching and promoting music is “not compatible with the highest values of the sacred regime of the Islamic Republic.”
|
google.cn
|
After months of a much-publicized row over censorship of search results, Google and the Chinese state have come to an agreement that will extend the search company’s license to operate for at least another year in the world’s most populous country.
|
Flickr / Greg Davies aka cGt2099
|
The implementation of a national Internet filter in Australia, hilariously dubbed the “Clean Feed,” has been postponed as “sections of the community” continue to criticize the extent to which the filter would block content.
|
Flickr / Spencer E Holtaway
|
Eagle-eyed Pakistani officials will be fixing their gazes on major websites like Amazon, Yahoo, Google and MSN in an attempt to zero in on, and even block, content that might be considered offensive to Muslims.
|
facebook.com
|
Following Pakistan’s ban on Facebook last week, Bangladesh has become the second country to block the popular social networking site due to “objectionable” representations of the Prophet Muhammad and national political leaders.
|
Flickr
|
A bill has been approved by the Arizona Legislature that would ban ethnic studies programs in the state, a move that comes on the heels of passage of an extraordinarily controversial anti-immigrant law.
|
|
Call its decision soulless and/or good business, Microsoft has decided to stay in China despite the departure of its competitor, Google, from the country after a row between the government and the search site over the censorship of Web pages.
|
Illustration from an image of Hong Kong by Flickr user skyseeker
|
In an effort to work through some of its issues with the Chinese government and circumvent Web censorship, Google is pulling its search operations out of the mainland and routing Chinese traffic through the company’s Hong Kong portal. Google will leave its engineering and business operations in China proper. (continued)
|
youtube.com
|
Say you’re a tampon manufacturer, you think the dictionary of euphemisms historically used to describe female genitalia is a thing of the past, and you decide you want to use the word vagina in your advertisement. If your case is like that of Kotex, you’ll find your ad banned by major U.S. television networks.
|
Flickr / Mike Gonzales (CC-BY-SA)
|
Can we bring George W. Bush out of retirement so Venezuela’s president has something more appropriate to rant about? A reportedly pissed Hugo Chavez said Saturday, “The Internet cannot be something open where anything is said and done.” Someone tell @shitmydadsays.
|
AP / Dario Lopez-Mills
|
Violence in the Mexican border town of Reynosa has endangered both the lives of its citizens as well as the quality of its journalism. Fearing violent reprisal, many journalists have left, while others are admittedly censoring themselves after being threatened by the drug cartels.
|
AP / Rafiq Maqbool
|
The Afghan government has stepped away from a total ban on the broadcasting of “disturbing images” that was implemented earlier this month. The move had set off howls among media and rights groups.
|
AP / Jae C. Hong
|
Google is “99.9 percent” certain it will shut down its search engine operation in China after the government in Beijing warned the company that it was flouting the country’s censorship laws, which require limited access to content like “Tiananmen Square” and “democracy.”
|
U.S. Air Force / Senior Airman Wesley Farnsworth
|
The Department of Defense didn’t have an official policy on what it calls “new/social media”—until now. Starting immediately, DoD employees (including troops) are free to use most of the non-porn Web, from Facebook to YouTube, without worrying about a court-martial. The usual rules on national security still apply. (continued)
|
Wikimedia Commons
|
A Danish newspaper that published a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban has apologized for offending Muslims. The penitence was part of a settlement between the paper and eight Muslim groups. The apology has been denounced by other members of the Danish media, which previously stood united in rejecting calls to back down in the face of Islamic outrage over the cartoon.
|
Illustration based on an Apple press photo
|
If you’re looking for sex appeal, there isn’t an app for that. Apple is killing applications on its iPhone and iPod Touch that show women in such obscene dress as beachwear. Despite parental controls, mature-content warnings and a lack of anything truly provocative, the company apparently decided things had gotten too raunchy.
|
AP / Greg Baker
|
It certainly did sound dramatic, the whole idea that execs at Google were throwing down the virtual gauntlet and threatening to pull out of China after clashing with the government over censorship, but it turns out that there hasn’t exactly been an uproar among the Chinese about the possibility of losing Google’s services.
|
Flickr / mrfink
|
More than a week after a row between China and Google over censorship practices, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly called on Beijing to lift restrictions on Internet use, to which China responded by denouncing the criticism as “groundless.”
|
Flickr / ashwinnavin
|
A highly publicized campaign against Internet pornography swept China in 2009, with 5,394 people arrested and 4,186 criminal investigations conducted against the circulation of “smutty and lewd pictures”—a fourfold increase in smut cases compared with 2008.
|
View older articles:
1 2 >
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
Guantanamo Prisoner’s Case Demonstrates Unfairness of Military Commissions
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
