Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig makes a daft suggestion: require adult content providers to wrap <porn> … </porn> around the naughty stuff, and direct brower developers to ignore such tags unless a parent approves. This fails in the same way domain schemes such as .xxx or .adult fail: There can be no universal standard for [...]
Margaret Cho remembers how Elvis Costello could do subversion: Elvis has always been political. Once on Saturday Night Live, as a last minute replacement for The Sex Pistols, he awkwardly but gracefully – the Elvis way of doing things – stopped the performance of a second song, “Less Than Zero,” to play the song they [...]
Well the FCC’s jihad on naughtiness isn’t going to win them any friends among the Cuban ex-pats. The Federales want to fine a Spanish-Language station from Miami who managed to get Cuban dictator and former MLB pitching prospect Fidel Castro on the phone, then harangue him on-air. There’s apparently a rule prohibiting the use someone’s [...]
To those who’d filter packets without our consent: you’ll have to answer to a higher authority: Let the Censors spill theirs O’er “beaver”, “breast”, and “cocaine”. Metcalf’ll strike them down for Each packet that’s dropped in vain. A clever filk (even if it doesn’t quite scan) of the original Python.
Google routes traffic to most, if not all sites on the web, so if their “SafeSearch” filter generates false positives, then it becomes an unwitting bottleneck. Benjamin Edelman’s working on a list of false positives and published his results at Harvard’s Berkman Center.
Since a large number of web servers are virtualy hosted and share an IP address, content blocking schemes based on IP address block more sites than intended.
I haven’t written about NPR’s loopy you-must-get-our-permission-to-link policy because PNH and Cory have done a fine job of lambasting it thus far. Tom, over at IMproPRieTies, got a response from NPR when he asked them where they lost clue: Second, as a journalistic organization we do not want our content associated inappropriately with, or appearing [...]
[ via Tom Becker ] Marc Rotenberg at EPIC considers Bradbury’s classic: It seemed both appropriate and ironical to review Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 at this point in time. Earlier this month the US Congress began consideration of a bill that would ban the unauthorized reproduction of digital works. At almost the same time, federal [...]
[ via Doc ] Cintra Wilson watched the Academy Awards, and found that el Ron Hubbard’s pet robot boy was well on his way to becoming an evil god: People in the audience started laughing, until they realized that Tom was Not Being Funny At All. He was chosen to frankly address the post-Sept. 11 [...]
[ via JillMatrix ] In an unfortunately too common story, a group of teachers in a Kentucky high school have challenged 50 titles in the schools library on religous grounds. Can someone find these teachers jobs in a religous school? Well, the Jesuits would laugh them out of the room, so if you know of [...]
[ via Flutterby ] We may have Mullah Ashcroft in the DoJ, but at least we don’t have the UK’s Blasphemy laws. The archaic laws, which only pertain to Christianity, have been mustered by a group of evangelicals to bludgeon a popular UK TV personality for reading a Gay themed poem on the BBC. One [...]
[ via Lynne Ann Morse ] Germany decides to kick it old school (that should be in a gothic font). Airport security arrests a visiting writer at the Munich airport because of his surname, and the book he was reading. On the way [ to police HQ ] the arresting officer gave me a triumphant [...]
Citizens will be forbidden to fly if they carry counterrevolutionary materials. Check with the National Guardsman with the automatic weapon for the approved reading list.
Phil Agre collected hundreds of URLs related to the WTC/Pentagon attacks. All the URLs are now archived in one place.
When most of the commerical radio stations in the US are owned by a small number of firms, who needs government censorship? Clear Channel, one of the oligopolists, banned 200 songs from their stations after the bombings. You won’t hear “New York, New York”, or “Imagine” on a Clear Channel station, and that’s probably half [...]