The Null Device

After the US film industry tried to buy a law outlawing the internet as we know it, the internet is striking back: Paul Graham's venture-capital startup Y Combinator is now planning to explicitly fund driving Hollywood into extinction, before the dying beast drags anything worth saving into the tarpit it's sinking in:

Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.

That's one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they're resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn't stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it's only when he's beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

¶ censorship copyfight hollywood mpaa usa 1 Share

Reasons to be careful about visiting Thailand: a US citizen who went there for medical reasons has been arrested for having posted excerpts from a biography of the Thai king banned in the country in his blog in 2007. He is charged with lese majeste and also under the Computer Crimes Act (ostensibly for entering false information into a computer system).

¶ authoritarianism censorship monarchy thailand 0 Share

Shortly before the Royal Wedding, Facebook shut down the groups of 50 UK-based protest groups, most of them not specifically anti-royalist. These groups included anti-corporate-tax-avoidance group UK Uncut, anti-cuts and pro-NHS protesters, and the Green Party, as well as socialist and anarchist groups. Facebook says that the groups were using fake personal accounts, rather than pages, in violation of the terms of service. However, to nuke them, immediately prior to a "national security event" and suspension of civil liberties, without any warning being given, does look somewhat suspicious.

I wonder what really happened there. Does Her Majesty's Government have in its arsenal a D-notice-style order to secretly oblige internet services operating in the UK to deny services to suspicious persons, and also deny the existence of the order? Has Prince Charles escalated his personal interventions in affairs of state from sacking modernist architects to calling up internet companies and getting protest groups silenced? Or is this a strategic decision by Facebook, a company which reportedly has its eye on the vast Chinese market, demonstrating to the Chinese Communist Party that it is extremely comfortable about enforcing "harmony" on its platform?

Meanwhile, Cory Doctorow argues that activists should avoid Facebook, because the system (a) gives one no democratic rights that cannot be arbitrarily taken away if it suits the powers that be to do so, and (b) is a surveillance system which gives the authorities lists of suspicious persons who have communicated with other troublemakers. It strikes me that if the world's activists take this advice, then these actions will have done to their causes the same sort of damage Wikileaks sought to do to the authoritarian conspiracy Julian Assange wrote about seeking to stop: by increasing the risks of organising in public, forcing them to fragment into small, secretive cells, with a greatly reduced organisational capacity.

¶ authoritarianism censorship china facebook politics royal wedding uk 0 Share

Pentagon Papers investigative journalist Daniel Ellsberg's letter to Amazon concerning its termination of WikiLeaks' hosting:

I’m disgusted by Amazon’s cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China’s control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.

For the last several years, I’ve been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That’s over. I have contacted Customer Service to ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.

¶ censorship journalism wikileaks 0 Share

A few items, in no order:

• "You're either with us or with WikiLeaks": A right-wing pundit who previously denounced WikiLeaks as a terrorist organisation to be taken down by all means necessary has now called for a Stuxnet-style virus to destroy all copies of the leaked data, as well as anything else on any computer used to connect to WikiLeaks.
• Australian PM Julia Gillard has condemned WikiLeaks, and made noises about revoking Julian Assange's passport and throwing him to the wolves, David Hicks fashion. Now, a leaked US embassy memo reveals that a glowing assessment of Gillard's leadership potential eight months before she became PM. The memo, among other things, praises her right-wing voting record, despite her coming from the left faction.
• US to Host World Pres Freedom Day in 2011.

¶ australia censorship irony julia gillard politics usa wikileaks 0 Share

Australia's federal government has backed a proposal to add an 18+ rating for video games, legalising games not suitable for 15-year-olds. Currently, such games are illegal to sell in or import into Australia. This has led to some anomalies: games are banned because the classification board considers that they might encourage illegal activity, however tenuously (one shooter was banned because medical kits one could pick up to boost one's life force looked like syringes which could encourage intravenous drug use), while elsewhere, the censorship board gives games which would get 18+ ratings elsewhere MA15 ratings (after all, you don't want to ban everything this side of Little Big Planet, do you?)

Of course, it's not a done deal yet; any change would need unanimous support from state attorneys-general, and until recently, South Australia's AG, a right-wing Christian authoritarian (and Labor Party member), has been vetoing it.

The government's hand was possibly forced by its tenuous coalition with the Greens, who are far more progressive on these issues than the major parties; the Labor Party who lead the coalition still officially support a national internet censorship firewall, after all. The conservative opposition coalition have not made any statements on an 18+ rating for video games.

¶ australia censorship politics videogames 0 Share

Twitter has denied rumours that it suppressed traffic promoting student demonstrations in the UK at the request of the police. The allegations claim that the #demo2010 hashtag had been suppressed from trending topics, and that the Twitter account "UCLOccupation", used by protest coordinators, had been disabled during the protests; Twitter claims that there was no censorship of trending hashtags and no disabling of accounts.

It's not clear why the organisers were unable to use the UCLOccupation account during the protest; perhaps it coincided with part of Twitter's network being down. The other alternative is that the internet surveillance powers Britain's authorities have allow them to use deep-packet inspection to selectively suppress the traffic of troublemakers as to maintain order, and that the surveillance boxes installed on all internet trunks have facilities to take out Twitter posts in this fashion. That wouldn't explain the non-appearance of the #demo2010 hashtag, though, unless the government's black boxes were designed to suppress posts for everyone but the original poster.

¶ censorship conspiracy theories leftwingers politics twitter uk 0 Share

Another place not to visit: Kuwait has banned the use of DSLR cameras in public places except by registered journalists. Compact cameras are exempt from the ban, presumably because banning them would have involved banning most mobile phones.

Restrictions on photography aren't unprecedented for Middle Eastern monarchies. In the United Arab Emirates (which includes Dubai, one of the region's more liberal enclaves), for example, photo-sharing site Flickr is blocked.

¶ authoritarianism censorship kuwait middle east photography 0 Share

Recently, in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia has blocked Facebook, on the grounds that it doesn't conform with the kingdom's conservative Wahhabi Islamist values. (The big surprise: Facebook was apparently not blocked earlier. Given that even the relatively liberal Dubai blocks sites like Flickr, it's surprising that the Saudis have let their subjects wilfully poke each other online for so long.) The ban is said to be temporary; presumably Facebook doesn't usually contravene Wahhabi values.

Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Palestinian Authority police have arrested an atheist blogger after intelligence officers traced him to an internet café; 26-year-old Walid Husayin could get life in prison for heresy, though the Palestinian equivalent of the Daily Mail readership are calling for him to be put to death:

Husayin used a fake name on his English and Arabic-language blogs and Facebook pages. After his mother discovered articles on atheism on his computer, she canceled his Internet connection in hopes that he would change his mind.

Instead, he began going to an Internet cafe — a move that turned out to be a costly mistake. The owner, Ahmed Abu-Asal, said the blogger aroused suspicion by spending up to seven hours a day in a corner booth. After several months, a cafe worker supplied captured snapshots of his Facebook pages to Palestinian intelligence officials.

Officials monitored him for several weeks and then arrested him on Oct. 31 as he sat in the cafe, said Abu-Asal.

¶ atheism authoritarianism censorship islam middle east palestine secularism 0 Share

A British author has been found guilty of insulting the Singaporean judiciary for criticising Singapore's use of the death penalty, and alleging a lack of impartiality. Alan Shadrake, based in Malaysia, made the claims in a book titled Once A Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock; he was arrested when he entered the city-state and "managed democracy" to promote his book. He is also being investigated for criminal defamation, and the police have seized his passport.

Justice Loh said Shadrake had written a "selective and dissembling account" of half-truths and falsehoods which could cause the unwary reader to doubt Singapore's rule of law.

News organisations covering Singapore critically have paid large fines or had their circulation in Singapore restricted. Human rights groups say the Singaporean authorities too often resort to the courts to silence their critics. But the government insists it has a right to quash inaccuracies, our correspondent says.

¶ authoritarianism capital punishment censorship singapore 0 Share

The Libyan government's domain registry has seized a .ly domain, vb.ly, on the grounds of the content of the site, an adult-oriented link-shortener, not being compliant with Libyan Islamic/Sharia law. The moral of this story: don't go for the domains in countries with sketchy records of freedom of speech and/or rule of law, no matter how cool their suffix looks.

At time of writing, popular link shortener bit.ly has not posted Sharia-compliance policies. Given that Libya's pulling of vb.ly is virtually guaranteed to trigger a flood of provocative bit.ly links, from high-interest-rate bank accounts to whisky distilleries, pages on the awesomeness of bacon, pictures of women with uncovered faces and drawings of random entities said to be named Muhammad, things are going to get interesting.

Meanwhile, the world's porn enthusiasts are waiting in the hope that North Korea's next God-Emperor will see fit to start selling .nk domains, thus allowing http://wa.nk/, http://spa.nk/ and/or http://bo.nk/ to fill the gap left by vb.ly.

¶ censorship internet islam libya 0 Share

The rumours of the Australian Labor government's mandatory national internet censorship firewall being dead may be premature: the government is still planning to put the legislation forward in parliament. Of course, the numbers seem to be against them: the independents who hold the balance of power in the lower house will oppose it, as will the Greens in the Senate.

The Coalition, which has among its number many social conservatives who would welcome such a scheme (not least of all its leader, an authoritarian paternalist of the first water), has opposed it, vowing to whip its MPs to vote against it as well. However, now that it no longer needs to woo Labor voters, there is the possibility of the party changing its mind, and either supporting the filter or leaving it to a conscience vote. In either case, a whipped Labor government plus a handful of Liberal/National social conservatives could be enough to get such a filter through both houses, regardless of what the Greens, those uppity independents and the majority of the Australian public have to say.

Of course, the question remains of whether Labor would keep its faith in censorship after it no longer had to deal with a religious fundamentalist in the Senate. One theory is that Labor's pro-censorship zeal is all an act to keep Fielding on-side and get its budgets through, though in this case, it's an act which is approaching its use-by date, if not past it already. (Fielding does not have a vote on any supply bills, which won't appear until the new Senate, with Greens holding the balance of power, is in place, and while he could be petulant and uphold other legislation, it would be a bit pathetic.) Others speculate that the Great Firewall of Australia has now got a purpose beyond placating a few cranky wowsers; one theory is that, while it's ostensibly going to block illegal pornography, suicide instructions and content banned in Australia, its real purpose is to block sites used for sharing copyrighted materials. Though given that the US Government, which is pushing for a War On Copying on the scale of Nixon/Reagan's War On Drugs, has criticised the filter might count against this theory. Any others?

While we're in Australia, News Limited (roughly one half of the oligopoly which controls the Australian media) has declared open war on the Greens, with the Australian vowing to destroy them at the ballot box; the culture war against the progressive elements in Australian society is on again, if Rupert Murdoch has his way. And, with a fragile minority government in power, some are predicting all sorts of hijinks, including possibly a Murdoch-sponsored Tea Party-style right-wing protest movement.

¶ australia censorship culture war media murdoch politics rightwingers 0 Share

Australia may soon be the land without iPhone and Android games, as the government is making noises about requiring all games to be classified by the national censor prior to distribution. All games sold in shops have to be classified, a process which costs A$470 to A$2040 per title; until now, Apple and Google have been distributing games through their online application stores without them having passed through the Office of Film and Literature Classification; Apple have their own (largely voluntary) classification regime.

Perhaps pragmatism will win out at the end of the day and the government will realise that a mass-media-style classification regime cannot be imposed on apps without modification, and perhaps they'll come to a compromise (such as accepting Apple's voluntary ratings and liaising with Apple's enforcement officials). Though, given the extraordinary efforts to force through internet censorship against both expert advice and popular opinion, I'm not sure one can count on the Australian government to exercise common sense.

(via folded) ¶ apple australia censorship 4 Share

According to GetUp, the Great Firewall of Australia is dead(ish); the Coalition have now committed themselves to blocking it in the Senate, should Labor try to force it through, meaning that there's no way it can get through. Mind you, the national firewall plan was written off as dead a year ago, before making a remarkable recovery, so I'd want to see it staked through the heart and its ashes scattered to the four winds before I break out the champagne.

Whether it rears its ugly head again depends on the makeup of the next parliament. While much has been said about Kevin Rudd's genuine religiosity and wowserism, the plan was as much a bargaining chip with the Christian Fundamentalist party Family First, who held an important vote in the Senate, as anything else. If the Religious Right retain their position, or gain the balance of power, in the next senate, it's likely to be back in play; however, if they lose their influence (as some say is likely; keep in mind that the half of the Senate that Family First inhabit was elected in the more conservative times of Howard's culture war, and is now outgoing), it looks to be pretty much dead. (Which is not to say that, in three or four years' time, someone won't introduce something similar, but if they did, they'd hopefully have a harder time convincing anyone that it's not a terrible idea.)

¶ australia authoritarianism censorship politics 4 Share

Fresh from its triumph with the national firewall (now a bipartisan commitment, due to appear some time after the next election), the Australian government is planning a proposal to require internet service providers to record certain details of all users' access to the net. The proposal itself is secret; while a document about the plans have been obtained through freedom of information laws, in the finest traditions of a well-managed democracy, 90% of the document was blacked out, to stop "premature unnecessary debate", or, in other words, to keep the subjects from sticking their noses into matters they have no business with.

¶ australia authoritarianism censorship irony managed democracy surveillance 0 Share

What on earth is going on in Australia? First came the internet censorship firewall plan (which may be on hold until the next election, but is still Labor Party policy, and while the Coalition have been strategically holding their tongues about it, reading between the lines, it seems like Tony Abbott (a known religious hardliner) would take it even further), then the plan to require ISPs to record what websites all users visit and whom they email, a record of which will be linked to users' identity details including passport numbers. And now, a parliamentary inquiry has proposed requiring users to run government-mandated "cyber-security" software on their computers to access the internet. A proposal which sounds a lot like China's "Green Dam" spyware.

Of course, if implemented, this would lock out anybody who uses an unsupported operating system for which the government hasn't made available a version of its Green And Gold Dam software, not to mention the scope for abuse. Imagine that, a year later, a law is quietly passed and the software updated to search users' hard drives for images that might be pornographic and forward them to the police, in the guise of hunting down paedophiles, or for text documents that might conceivably be "terrorist materials". Other than a few people being raided for possessing nude images of small-breasted models or similarly suspicious materials, all of a sudden, the police have a copy of everyone's private photos and other files; it's a good thing that the Australian police are renowned for their incorruptibility, and neither individual officers nor the police forces would ever abuse such sweeping powers.

Of course, once the software is, by law, on everyone's machine, the possibilities don't end there. In the age of the Long Siege, it's not unlikely that security agencies would have special powers to use this in a targeted fashion to go after persons of special concern (which, in the eyes of the Murdoch tabloids and their readership, means bloodthirsty paedoterrorist extremists who should all be locked up, but in reality is likely to mean environmental protesters, social-justice groups and anyone who looks suspicious). If ASIO or the AFP can surreptitiously modify files on computers at, say, Greenpeace or the Greens, think of the COINTELPRO-style hijinks they could get up to; changing the plans of protests, planting evidence that key organisers are informers, or just disrupting campaigns at key moments. And so, as if by magic, protests fizzle, media campaigns fail, opposition groups disintegrate in acrimony, and Australian democracy becomes a lot more efficiently managed. Confound their politics, indeed.

Of course, the Green and Gold Dam is by no means a done deal. Perhaps it's a proposal which will die, recognised for its heavy-handedness and unfeasibility. Or perhaps it's an ambit claim, to make the government's existing plans (the national firewall and ISP-based surveillance infrastructure) seem more moderate by comparison.

¶ australia authoritarianism censorship surveillance the long siege 1 Share

The War on Copyright Piracy has many uses: in Kyrgyzstan, for example, the government is using the pretext of anti-piracy raids to shut down opposition media, by having goons with alleged Microsoft affiliations seize computers:

Stan TV employees told CPJ that police were accompanied by a technical expert, Sergey Pavlovsky, who claimed to be a representative of Microsoft’s Bishkek office. According to the journalists, Pavlovsky said he had authorization papers from Microsoft but was unwilling to show them. After a cursory inspection of the computers, they said, Pavlovsky declared all of the equipment to be using pirated software. Stan TV’s work computers, as well as the personal laptops of journalists, were seized; the offices were also sealed, interrupting the station’s work.

Meanwhile, enterprising malware entrepreneurs have jumped onto the copyright lawsuit bandwagon; a new piece of malware for Windows scans users' hard drives for torrents, and threatens the users with lawsuits, demanding payment by credit card:

(via Boing Boing, Download Squad) ¶ authoritarianism censorship copyfight copyright crime extortion kyrgyzstan malware microsoft riaa scams 0 Share

The possibility of Australia legalising video games not suitable for children moves a little closer, now that the main obstacle, South Australian Witchfinder-General Attorney-General Michael Atkinson, has resigned from his post, in the wake of a poor election result. Atkinson, a religious conservative, was exercising his power of veto over the possible introduction of an 18+ rating for video games, and was on record making statements comparing video gamers to motorcycle gangs. He also tried to pass a law banning anonymous speech on the internet prior to the election.

¶ australia authoritarianism censorship politics videogames wowsers 0 Share

A study by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism has revealed that more than half of news stories in Australia were spin, driven by public relations. The Murdoch tabloids were the worst, with 70% of stories in the Daily Telegraph being PR-driven, while the Fairfax "quality" papers are as good as it gets; only 42% (only 42%!) of stories in the Sydney Morning Herald were PR-driven.

These statistics probably say as much about the Australian media landscape as anything else. Australia's media is quite homogenised and uncompetitive; a handful of proprietors have the mass media sewn up (there are two newspaper proprietors and about three commercial TV networks). The lack of competition has resulted in low standards of quality; for example, the Fairfax papers (The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald are the biggest ones) are generally regarded to be the "quality" papers, but compared to the British equivalents (such as The Guardian and The Independent), they come out poorly, heavy on the sex, sensationalism and celebrity gossip and light on content and analysis. (The effect gets worse as one moves away from Sydney and Melbourne; for several weeks a few years ago, the most-read story on the front page of Fairfax's Perth paper was "Man gets penis stuck in pasta jar".) Or compare The Australian (Murdoch's "serious" paper in Australia) to its UK equivalent, The Times: The Australian is more nakedly biased.

The Australian press, controlled by an incestuous oligopoly and not subjected to the indignity of competition, has become a stagnant pond. (Australian television, mind you, is much worse.) This is bad news for the kind of discourse required to sustain a mature democracy; a public fed simplified half-truths leavened with gratuitous doses of sensationalism will be in no state to engage on a meaningful level in debate about where their country is heading, leaving all that boring stuff to technocrats and vested interests. The internet provides some competition, but the alarming open-ended censorship firewall plans (all content "refused classification" will be filtered; this includes sites advocating euthanasia, illegal drug use (including offering safety advice) or video games unsuitable for children; the list itself will be a state secret, giving plenty of scope for other sites to be "accidentally" banned if convenient to do so) which look set to become law before the next election, leave a lot of scope for rival sources to be nobbled. (Not surprisingly, the Australian press has been quiet about the plans, echoing the official line that the plans are to "combat paedophilia" and are opposed only by some anarchistic extremists.) As such, it doesn't surprise me if Australia's press oligarchs make the most of their privileged position and cut costs by bulking their papers out with press releases to a greater extent than in more competitive markets.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ australia censorship democracy journalism media spin 0 Share

England's severe libel laws have claimed a casualty: science writer Simon Singh, who is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association, has resigned from his Guardian column, citing the onerous requirements of preparing his defence:

The crippling and prohibitive financial cost of defending a libel case is often highlighted, but the equally terrible cost in terms of time and stress is rarely mentioned.

I recently discussed this with Dr Peter Wilmshurst, the eminent cardiologist who is being sued for libel for commenting on the efficacy of a new heart device... Perhaps it was just as well that Peter was not aware of the full implications of what lay ahead of him, namely at least two years of anxiety, misery and the threat of bankruptcy. Almost all his spare time has been spent on the libel case. When finalising his defence, he took two weeks of annual leave to work on the documents. Moreover, dealing with ongoing legal issues has prevented him from carrying out his usual medical research, and a number of publications have been put on hold.

You might feel that I am being alarmist, but major US newspapers, such as the Boston Globe and The New York Times, sent a memo last year to the House of Commons select committee on media, libel and privacy. They warned that they are considering stopping the sale of their publications in Britain due to the threat of libel. The benefits of selling newspapers here in terms of profit are outweighed by the potential losses in libel cases.

If publishers stopped selling hard copies in Britain, they would almost certainly also block their online content, because otherwise the threat of libel would remain.

The libel laws have their fans, though; other than the usual litigants, the recording industry seems to have used them as the models for the new copyright expansion laws they're trying to get passed, which will make any sites capable of sending potentially copyrighted files in private a prohibitive liability to make available to UK users.

¶ censorship copyright law libel simon singh uk 1 Share

The Iranian government, boldly pushing the boundaries in how to make totalitarianism work in the age of the internet, has announced that it will block Google's Gmail permanently. Instead, Iranians will be provided with "a national email service", intended to "boost local development of internet technology" and "build trust between people and the government".

Australian communications minister Senator Conroy is said to be watching developments carefully.

¶ censorship google iran totalitarianism 0 Share

The Australian government asked Google to block Australian users from accessing YouTube content which would be illegal in Australia, which would include material promoting euthanasia, graffiti and safer drug use, on the grounds that they already do similar things in China. Google, thankfully, tells the government to go jump.

University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt, one of Australia's top communications experts, said that to comply with Conroy's request Google "would have to install a filter along the lines of what they actually have in China".

"What we're saying is, well in Australia, these are our laws and we'd like you to apply our laws," Conroy said. "Google at the moment filters an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Chinese government; they filter an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Thai government."

Let's hope that Google stick to their guns here.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ australia censorship google youtube 0 Share

From a Guardian piece on Massive Attack's artwork, this interesting fact:

"We can't use any of the Heligoland artwork I've painted for the posters on London Underground. They won't allow anything on the tube that looks like 'street art'. They want us to remove all drips and fuzz from it so it doesn't look like it's been spray-painted, which is fucking ridiculous. It's the most absurd censorship I've ever seen. "

¶ censorship culture london london underground massive attack music street art uk 0 Share

The state of South Australia has long been at the vanguard of Australia's lurch towards authoritarianism; the conservative state's veto is keeping video games unsuitable for children illegal in Australia, and the state recently required R-rated films to be displayed in plain packaging; now, Australia's Deep South continues its position of leadership by banning anonymous online comments about the upcoming state election, a law supported by both major political parties.

I imagine that once such a law becomes established in South Australia, it will most probably spread federally, expand into a general mandate for online communications to be labelled with the sender's legal identity, and be hard to eradicate; after all, a law making all internet content legally trackable would be a boon not only for the plan to eradicate pornography (for a broad definition of that word) from the Australian-viewable internet but would also be welcomed by Big Copyright, who would undoubtedly have hefty electoral donations for politicians favouring it. And the fundamental ideas of liberalism—that it is unacceptable to restrict the rights of individuals unless they actively harm others—are looking decidedly shaky in post-Howard Australia.

Update: the law has been retroactively repealed, after mass opposition, and after South Australia's Attorney-General and Wowser-In-Chief, Michael Atkinson, went on air claiming that an online critic, Aaron Fornarino, didn't exist, after which the website AdelaideNow posted a picture of Fornarino.

(via /.) ¶ australia authoritarianism censorship politics 2 Share

The Australian censorship authorities are now banning nude images of small-breasted women, on the grounds that they "encourage paedophilia". From now on, both porn models and sexual appetites in Australia must be traditionally built.

Australia is expected to have a national internet firewall in place before the next election; I wonder whether there's a team at CSIRO working on an image analysis algorithm for detecting unacceptable breast sizes as we speak.

¶ australia censorship paedoterrorists wtf 3 Share

In Italy, the Berlusconi government is planning to introduce regulations requiring anyone uploading videos to the internet to obtain government approval. The government claims that the regulations (which can be passed without a vote) are an enactment of an EU directive on product placement; conveniently, they also outlaw a lot of competition to established media, such as, for example, the Mediaset group owned by the current Italian Prime Minister.

Article 4 of the decree specifies that the dissemination over the Internet "of moving pictures, whether or not accompanied by sound," requires ministerial authorization. Critics say it will therefore apply to the Web sites of newspapers, to IPTV and to mobile TV, obliging them to take on the same status as television broadcasters.

(via /.) ¶ authoritarianism censorship italy silvio berlusconi 0 Share

South Australia has led the fight in keeping Australia a censorious society; the wowser-state's Attorney-General's veto has been the main stumbling block to legalising video games unsuitable for children. Now, state laws have come into effect requiring R-rated films to be displayed in plain packaging, with nothing more than the title:

Adults aged over 18 seeking to buy or borrow a copy of Mad Max, the acclaimed desert war drama Three Kings, starring George Clooney, the Brad Pitt classic Fight Club or the 2009 Blu Ray release of Sasha Baron Cohen's fashion parody Bruno will now find them in plain packaging displaying nothing more than the film's title.

Under changes to the state's classification act, which came into effect on Sunday, businesses will face fines of up to $5000 for displaying a "poster, pamphlet or other printed material" for films classified R18+.

The law was announced by the office of South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson, whose conservative campaigning is well known to the film industry.

(via M+N) ¶ australia censorship culture war film wowsers 1 Share

Having discovered a sophisticated attack, presumably by Chinese security forces, against its infrastructure, aimed at compromising the details of Chinese human-rights activists, Google has announced a new hard line on dealing with the Chinese government:

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

¶ censorship china google human rights totalitarianism 1 Share

In an attempt to fight pornography and disharmony on the internet, the Chinese government has banned individuals from registering personal domain names, and announced that those with personal websites might lose them. From now on, only licensed businesses will be able to own domain names in China.

Meanwhile, the Italian government is considering restricting criticism on the internet, after a violent assault on the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, which his party have argued was caused by "a climate of hate generated by virulent opposition criticism". Italy already requires anybody using internet access facilities to show and register identity documents, under the guise of fighting terrorism and paedophilia.

¶ authoritarianism censorship china internet italy paedoterrorists totalitarianism 0 Share

Australia's communications minister Stephen Conroy has announced that the government will go ahead with its mandatory internet censorship firewall, pushing through the legislation before the next election. This is despite a lack of public support for such a scheme (except from fringe religious groups), opposition from child-welfare and civil-rights groups, and a broad consensus that the firewall won't achieve its stated aims and will be prone to abuse. (Under the legislation, ISPs will have to block access to any sites on a secret blacklist. This will nominally include any material that is "refused classification", which could be anything from illegal pornography to information on euthanasia or safer drug use or material pertaining to sexual fetishes, though as the list is secret, there will be little in the way of a future government adding things to it for political advantage.)

In the past, the legislation would have been unlikely to have made it through the Senate (religious wowser Fielding, whom the government courted with the proposal, was all for it, but the other independent, Nick Xenophon, was against it). Now, with the Tories fronted by religious-Right culture-warrior Tony Abbott (whose ascent the government themselves have compared to Joh Bjelke-Petersen's 1987 Prime Ministerial campaign), perhaps they can count on the Opposition to vote for it.

And so, at a fork in the road, Australia turns its back on the cosmopolitan, dynamic 21st-century society it has evolved into and moves to reembrace the small-minded, punitive values of the string of authoritarian penal colonies it was formed from, in the process, joining the club of nations that includes Iran, Burma and China. Say goodbye to the "clever country". Of course, if you're displeased with this, you can let your MP know here. (If you want the government to actyually notice you, read this.)

¶ australia authoritarianism censorship politics 1 Share