Tag Archives: censorship

Ubisoft has spent years building up good will with players of Rainbow Six Siege. A chunk of that work was undone in recent weeks, as the publisher announced plans to expand the game into China. Since China has strict content laws, Ubisoft's plan was to censor the game by making …

A popular Final Fantasy Discord server lost its partner status this week, after allegedly breaching the relatively new policy regarding not safe for work (NSFW) content. Although admins rectified the situation in record time, Discord has refused to reinstate its title, prompting concerns over double standards and inconsistency within the …

Californian's attempting to access some of the world's most popular pornographic websites this week will have found it a little harder than normal. In protest of Proposition 60, which would make it mandatory for porn performers to wear condoms during shooting, a number of sites blocked Californians from viewing any …

Mark Zuckerberg has been attacked by a Norwegian newspaper and many international commenters, for what many people see as outright censorship of an iconic photo from the Vietnam war. He has been accused of abusing his power and making Facebook limit freedoms with its aggressive editing of certain images. Perhaps the …

Apple has found itself unable to sell both ebooks and films over in China, after a government regulator took issue with the iBooks and iTunes movie stores. Right now, it is being reported that China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television is behind the block on two …

A German court has just made it harder for copyright lobbyists to sue content platforms for what their users post, after it ruled that Youtube was not responsible for the content published on its site by its members. It reinforced that by stating that this was the case even if …

Shortly after Netflix's worldwide rollout, the company has arrived at its first hurdle as the largest telecom company in Indonesia is going to begin blocking access to the service due to the content available on it. The company is known as Telkom and as the Wall Street Journal reports, it …

The debate on how to deal with the online interactions of those who take part in or sympathise with terrorist attacks is raging in the wake of recent events, and now Google's Eric Schmidt has weighed in. In a somewhat confusing message, he's called for tolerance and understanding, but at …

AAISP – the unfiltered network Most internet service providers are quite typical. They offer phone and broadband products and have lacklustre callcentre support systems that are so ubiquitous, they've been the punchline of every comedian's closing bit for a decade; but that's not the case with every ISP. Recently we sat …

Google gets hit with thousands of takedown requests a day, a significant portion of which tend to be from movie studios attempting to combat piracy. Unfortunately, these requests often tend to be automated and sometimes don't make any sense at all. This week, Universal Pictures sent a Google a new …

A new draft law being considered by Chinese parliament could increase the censorship of its internet even more, making information harder for average citizens – without the knowledge of proxies – to access. It's raising concerns among international businesses operating in the region too, as they would need to comply …

The Motion Picture Association has been doing a solid job of getting piracy sites banned in the UK, with the high court already ordering the likes of BT, Virgin and Sky to block access to many sites, including PrimeWire, KickAss Torrents, The Pirate Bay and ISO Hunt. Now, the UK …

Phony DMCA takedowns have been a staple of anti-piracy lobby groups for years, the debate often being not whether they did it, but whether it was their fault or the over-zealous reporting of their automated takedown tools. Even in the case of clear unjust use of the law however, it's rare …

Even though it barely seems to be operational these days, The Pirate Bay is the most iconic torrent search site in the world and is frequently cited by media lobby groups as a URL that ISPs should block – often with the courts backing that decision. While some ISPs might …

In a move that sounds an awful lot like David Cameron's recent announcement that he would go after effective encryption standards in the event of his re-election, a member of parliament in Putin's government is pushing for a ban on VPN and TOR access, in an attempt to stop people …

In a very strange video that has leaked out, despite Chinese efforts to keep it off the internet (we all know that never works), officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China perform a song about how amazing internet censorship is. This seems a bit odd when it is coming from the very …

Sky is backing David Cameron's mandatory porn blocking system with a new mandatory adult content filter, which will roll out to customers over the next ten days and switch itself on by default. In order to turn these blocks off, you will need to log in and manually switch off …

Britain's favourite hate figure and Sun columnist, Katie Hopkins, is once again under fire for comments made on Twitter. This time around though she's garnered police attention after over 7,000 people signed a petition demanding that the authorities take action for her “racist” and “offensive” tweets. Hopkins is a semi-regular …

It turns out that Bandai Namco is currently blocking access to the Dark Souls I port fixing mod, DSFix, and serving Dropbox accounts with DMCA take down notices in order to have it removed. However, unconfirmed reports are popping up, claiming that this was indeed a mistake. The DSFix mod …

Google is set to shut down its Russian office, presumably due to growing restrictions on the internet freedom in the country, including a new law which is due to go in to effect next year targeting foreign web companies. Authorities say that the law will improve data protection but it …

Showing just how out of touch it is with the state of pornography, the British government is set to further limit how it can be sold in the UK, with new legislation set to come into play on the 1st December. It's called the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 act and …

The European court has been forcing Google to evaluate and remove search links based on ‘right to be forgotten' applications for some time now. The company has struggled to keep up with demand and it looks like things might get worse as the ruling may now extend out of Europe. …

It turns out that Google is currently receiving and processing an all time high of one million piracy link removal requests per day, proving that copyright holders and media lobby groups just don't give up. The media Industry's new tactic is to simply overload Google with DMCA takedown requests, all …

Certain Internet providers around the world have been ordered to block The Pirate Bay in some countries and so far, media groups have claimed that these blocks are effective and sufficient enough to deter piracy. However, new statistics are suggesting otherwise as it turns out that TPB's traffic has doubled since …

Google has been flooded with “right to be forgotten” requests in Europe, so many that it accidentally began censoring news posts from the likes of The Guardian and the BBC. However, the company's top lawyer has come out to explain that Google is in-fact struggling to cope with the amount of …

The Pirate Bay is one of those dogs that not matter how many times you kick it, it just won't stay down. Despite its owners being in jail, its servers raided at times and massive studio funded lobby groups the world over gunning to take it down, it's still alive …

There's a big anti-pornography campaign going on in the UK at the moment, with David Cameron using it as a way to curry favour with Chinese investors, media lobbies as a way to get more proxies and pirate sites blocked and the cries of “think of the children,” being used once …

The British government and specifically it's glorious leader, David Cameron, have shown quite a penchant for internet censorship, whether it's the insistent DNS block orders being handed out by the High Court like it's giving away free drink coupons, or Cameron's personal infatuation with porn (filtering). However it's pushing us …

We heard a couple of days ago about how the console versions of Matt and Trey's upcoming South Park: The Stick of Truth, were being censored in some specific areas, mainly involved abortion and anal probing. However, it turns out that this wasn't some ratings board or government forcing the …

If you were planning on picking up the expectedly raunchy South Park: Stick of Truth on either the Xbox 360 or PS3, you might want to reconsider a PC purchase, since the console versions of the game are being censored in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, with key scenes …