Tag: censorship

  1. Google has decided to censor parts of my site in the European Union.

    18 April 2015

    One of my bots just received the following message from Google, verified in Google Webmaster Tools:


    Notice of removal from Google Search
    April 3, 2015

    Hello,

    Due to a request under data protection law in Europe, we are no longer able to show one or more pages from your site in our search results in response to some search queries for names or other personal identifiers. Only results on European versions of Google are affected. No action is required from you.

    These pages have not been blocked entirely from our search results, and will continue to appear for queries other …

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  2. Transhuman visions presentation.

    15 June 2014

    To everyone who attended the Global Existential Risks and Radical Futures Conferences yesterday, thank you. It was an honor and a privilege to meet with and speak to all of you.

    As promised, here are my slides in the form of an HTML5 presentation. They were authored in Markdown and run through Landslide to convert them into HTML5 slides.


    This work by The Doctor [412/724/301/703][ZS] is published under a Creative Commons By Attribution / Noncommercial / Share Alike v4.0 License.

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  3. Twitter begins censoring content based upon account and point of origin.

    31 January 2012

    Last week, the addictively simple social networking site Twitter announced that it would be adding the capability to selectively censor tweets based upon where the viewer appears to be sourcing from. Like most websites, when handed a properly acquired takedown notice they're pretty snappy about making certain things disappear (note that some of the taken down posts are reprinted in the takedown notices) but this is, as they say, a whole 'nother smoke. This change of policy means that if you post something that the government of a different country doesn't like (like this), they can request that Twitter make …

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  4. Potential side effects of SOPA.

    23 December 2011

    Note: Updated January 4 2012 in response to a comment by Jamie Zawinski, proprietor of the DNA Lounge.

    I haven't been writing about SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) or PIPA (the PROTECT IP Act) because, frankly, I've been too busy trying to fight them. To keep abreast of them following the #SOPA hashtag on Twitter is really the best way to go about it because things are changing so rapidly. Between the people watching the live stream of the markup hearings and people who are actually attending the hearings and livetweeting (I'm looking at you, @EFFlive) things are changing …

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  5. Mesh networks, censorship resistence, and free ponies.

    01 December 2011

    A couple of weeks ago the crowd over at Reddit started putting together a project that's been referred to online as /r/darknetplan, an effort to build a completely decentralized, encrypted wireless mesh network that is censorship-resistent and anonymized. They kick around a lot of ideas in their discussion threads (mostly links to other articles, with discussion of each on-site) and the project's IRC server is packed with interested people. Now, I'm not one to slam anyone who wants to give such a project a shot but they came under some scrutiny from a blogger whose opinion is that it's …

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  6. Internet censorship, net.warfare, and the balkanization of the Net.

    24 May 2011

    It seems like every time we turn around, somebody else is trying to enact another scheme to make the Internet a little less open, a little less useful, and more of a surveillance tool for people who can't quite make out what the writing on the wall seems to say.

    The latest, and possibly most frightening salvo in the as-yet undeclared War On the Internet is something called the PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act). In a real sense, it's COICA v2.0 in that it still allows the US …

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  7. A few thoughts on what it means to cut a country off.

    11 February 2011

    The hot topic these days is the January 25th revolution in Egypt: the people rose up and demanded that their president (who is known for, among other things, having bloggers raided, torture, censorship, and general repression of the people of an entire country) step down and do whatever it is that retired dictators do (which is usually not what the people wish he or she would do). For the record, the United States was well aware that this was happening, and in fact aided the government of Egypt to the tune of 1.5 billion US dollars a year because …

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  8. Wikileaks, Cablegate, the media, and you.

    07 December 2010

    I've been waiting to put together an article about Wikileaks and Cablegate (the gradual release of a quarter-million diplomatic cables written and archived by the United States diplomatic corps). Mostly, everyday life has prevented me from doing so: the holiday season is here once again and, all things being equal, work and cleaning up the apartment with Lyssa have taken priority. I also didn't want to vent my spleen on the Net without having a coherent idea of what I was going to say. Turing knows, enough of that is happening right now and I won't fall prey to it …

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  9. More evidence of official climate change 'editing' comes to light.

    26 October 2007

    Earlier this week, Dr. Julie L. Gerberding (director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) testified before a Senate subcommittee about risks to the health of the public associated with climate change and global warming. As policy dictates, her testimony was recorded, transcribed, and entered into the public archives. As policy does not dictate, however, the transcript of her testimony was edited in interesting ways, with no evidence of redaction left behind. Dr. Gerberding has stated that such edits are routinely made before the transcripts are put online, and has no problem with her text being altered.

    Major semantic …

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  10. US Army worries more about bloggers than leaks back home.

    17 August 2007

    Since almost the beginning of Iraq II, the US military has been concerned about bloggers leaking information about upcoming operations and situations in the field that hadn't been cleaned up yet. Lately, they've been commanding troops to police their weblogs and clear all posts through a superior officer before actually posting in the hopes of minimizing the amount of sensitive information that gets out, which makes sense when you think about it. Remember what Geraldo Rivera did back in 2003? URLs and names of blogs have to be registered with the chain of command so that they can keep an …

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