Deepika Padukone Kisses Anushka Sharma at minister rajyavardhan singh rathore over censorship
Deepika Padukone Kisses Anushka Sharma at minister rajyavardhan singh rathore over censorship Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting Rajywarddhn Bollywood Selebs meeting with ...
By: The Online India
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Save Our Culture! Thousands of Russians protest over Soviet-style censorship in arts
A Russian protest for freedom of expression. Thousands took to the streets after a threatre director in the city of Novosibirsk was fired, for the way he presented the Wagner opera. Culture...
By: UKRAINE TODAY
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Save Our Culture! Thousands of Russians protest over Soviet-style censorship in arts - Video
Its not censorship until the journalists are "censored"
By: Vee
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Its not censorship until the journalists are "censored" - Video
Have you ever experienced unnecessary censorship?
Don #39;t be a victim of unnecessary censorship. What the faith? If someone were to repeatedly blurt out expletives in a public place, work office, or school classroom there would most likely...
By: Faith Counts
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YouTube Censorship of TVC, Paul Walker, 9-11 Being an Inside Job More EXPOSED
YouTube/Google is beginning to censor alternative media! In this video found out how they are attacking our right of free speech! Please share this video! God Bless, STAY VIGILANT FEAR NO...
By: The Vigilant Christian
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YouTube Censorship of TVC, Paul Walker, 9-11 Being an Inside Job & More EXPOSED - Video
Unnecessary Censorship - Kpop Edition
By: Sazerboo
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Obama speaks out against censorship and "I #39;m offended by that" culture.
It #39;s now very common to hear people say, #39;I #39;m rather offended by that. #39; As if that gives them certain rights. It #39;s actually nothing more... than a whine. #39;I find that offensive. #39; It has...
By: Red Falcon
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Obama speaks out against censorship and "I'm offended by that" culture. - Video
Funhaus: Necessary Censorship
By: b londers
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China has moved beyond censoring Internet content seen by its own citizens to using a new cyberweapon researchers have dubbed"the Great Cannon" to silence critics around the world, according to a report released Friday.
The first use of this capability was a weeks-long attack against Web sites that offer tools to help users evade Chinese censorship.By sending crippling amounts of Web traffic, the attacks attempted to knock offline the anti-censorship site GreatFire aswell as GitHub, a San Francisco-based Web service that is popular with programmers.
"This is very much an escalation," said Bill Marczak, one of the authors of the report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. While China long has used the Great Firewall - as its censorship system is called- to block users within the country from accessing news stories or other information it deems inappropriate, the recent attackreached beyond international borders and effectively blocked a wide range of content for Web users around the world.
China took control of millions of Web browsers and used them to send a flood of traffic to GreatFire, according to an earlier report from the non-profit, and later to GitHub.
But the type of assault used against the sites, known as a distributed denial of service attack or DDoS, represents only a small fraction of the possible uses of this tool, according to the Citizen Lab. The Great Cannon likely could also be used to deliver malicious code to any computer visiting a Web site based in China that does not use encryption to protect the privacyof its users.
China has become more brazen about attempting to block what its citizens see online under President Xi Jinping, who is tryingto promote domestic stability, according to Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow James A. Lewis. "Gettingcontrol over the Internet and information is a big priority for the Chinese - they're going after things they used to tolerate,and you're seeing a general clampdown," he said.
The recent attacks against GreatFire and GitHub appear to show that the country is willing to put ideological control over other goals such as the economic success of its tech sector, which could be damaged by censorship efforts, said Sarah McKune,another of the report authors.
The U.S. government has expressed concern about the recent attacks. "Malicious cyber actors who target critical infrastructure,U.S. companies, and U.S. consumers are a threat to the national security and the economy of the United States, and we areparticularly concerned about activity that is intended to restrict the ability of users around the world to access information,"State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach said in a statement.
"In this case, the attackers appeared to have leveraged Internet infrastructure located in China to overwhelm Web sites in the United States," Gerlach said. U.S. officials have asked China to investigate the incidents, he said.
The Chinese Embassy did not directly respond to questions about the Citizen Lab report or the attacks on GreatFire and GitHub.China supports the development of "Internet news communications" and "at the same time guarantees the citizens' freedom ofspeech," Embassy spokesman Zhu Haiquan said in a statement.
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China deploys new weapon for online censorship in form of Great Cannon
China is deploying a tool that can be used to launch huge distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to enforce censorship. Researchers have dubbed it the Great Cannon.
The first time the tool was seen in action was during the massive DDoS attacks that hit software development platform GitHub last month. The attack sent large amounts of traffic to the site, targeting Chinese anti-censorship projects hosted there. It was the largest attack the site has endured in its history.
That attack was first thought to have been orchestrated using Chinas Great Firewall, a sophisticated ring of networking equipment and filtering software used by the government to exert strict control over Internet access in the country. The firewall is used to block sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as several media outlets.
However, while the Great Cannon infrastructure is co-located with the Great Firewall, it is a separate, offensive system, with different capabilities and design, said researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Toronto on Friday.
The Great Cannon is not simply an extension of the Great Firewall, but rather a distinct tool that hijacks traffic to individual IP addresses, and can arbitrarily replace unencrypted content by sitting between the Web server and end usera method known as a man-in-the-middle attack. The system is used to manipulate the traffic of systems outside of China, silently programming browsers to create a massive DDoS attack, the researchers said.
The attack method deployed against Github injected malicious Javascript into browsers connecting to the Chinese search engine Baidu. When the Great Cannon sees a request for certain Javascript files on one of Baidus infrastructure servers that host commonly used analytics, social, or advertising scripts, it appears to take one of two actions. It either passes the request to Baidus servers, which has happened over 98 percent of the time, or it drops the request before it reaches Baidu and instead sends a malicious script back to the requesting user, which has happened about 1.75 percent of the time, the report said.
In the latter case, the requesting user would be an individual outside China browsing a website making use of a Baidu infrastructure server, such as sites with ads served by Baidus ad network. In the DDos attack against GitHub, the malicious script was used to enlist the requesting user as an unwitting participant, the report said.
These findings are in line with an analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that described the attack method used last week. According to the EFF, the attack was obviously orchestrated by people who had access to backbone routers in China and was only possible because the Baidu analytics script that is included on sites does not use encryption by default. A wider use of HTTPS could have prevented the attack, it found.
The Berkeley and Toronto researchers confirmed the suspicions about the origin of the attack, saying they believe there is compelling evidence that the Chinese government operates the cannon. They tested two international Internet links into China belonging to two different Chinese ISPs, and found that in both cases the Great Cannon was co-located with the Great Firewall. This strongly suggests a government actor, they said.
While DDoS attacks are quite crude, the Great Cannon can also be used in more sophisticated ways. A technically simple configuration change, switching the system to operating on traffic from a specific IP address rather than to a specific address, would allow Beijing to deliver malware to any computer outside of China that communicates with any Chinese server not employing cryptographic protections, they said.
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China's 'Great Cannon' DDoS tool enforces Internet censorship
There's a new tool in China's arsenal of Internet censorship tools: In addition to the well-known "Great Firewall" blocking those in the country from visiting certain sites, there is now a "Great Cannon" that deluges foreign websites with traffic in order to take them offline. The technique is detailed in a new report from the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which also coins the term. It essentially works by hijacking traffic to a popular website, in this case Chinese search giant Baidu, and redirecting it toward a target this time it was GreatFire.org, a site hosted outside China that monitors censorship in the country and provides access to blocked material.
"Conducting such a widespread attack clearly demonstrates the weaponization of the Chinese Internet to co-opt arbitrary computers across the web and outside of China to achieve China's policy ends," reads the report. Such systems could also be configured to redirect and modify traffic coming from a target individual, instead of any crossing a border or going to a certain website. But Western authorities may have an awkward time condemning the Great Cannon, the researchers note, because the U.S. and U.K. have built very similar systems with very similar intentions, as indicated by documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The best defense against any adversary of this type, foreign or domestic, is good encryption, the report concludes. If the data can't be read by hackers or spies in the first place, it can't be tampered with.
First published April 10 2015, 11:55 AM
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16 hours ago by Rob Lever China has expanded its Internet censorship efforts beyond its borders with a new strategy that attacks websites across the globe, researchers say
China has expanded its Internet censorship efforts beyond its borders with a new strategy that attacks websites across the globe, researchers said Friday.
The new strategy, dubbed "Great Cannon," seeks to shut down websites and services aimed at helping the Chinese circumvent the "Great Firewall," according to a report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.
"While the attack infrastructure is co-located with the Great Firewall, the attack was carried out by a separate offensive system, with different capabilities and design, that we term the 'Great Cannon,'" the report said.
"The Great Cannon is not simply an extension of the Great Firewall, but a distinct attack tool that hijacks traffic to (or presumably from) individual IP addresses."
The report supports claims by the activist organization GreatFire, which last month claimed China was seeking to shut down its websites that offer "mirrored" content from blocked websites like those of the New York Times and others.
The technique involves hijacking Internet traffic to the big Chinese search engine Baidu and using that in "denial of service" attacks which flood a website in an effort to knock it offline.
The report authors said the new tool represents "a significant escalation in state-level information control" by using "an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users."
The Great Cannon manipulates the traffic of "bystander" systems including "any foreign computer that communicates with any China-based website not fully utilizing (encryption)."
'Puzzling' openness
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'Great Cannon' is widening China censorship, say researchers (Update)
Martin Ruetschi/Keystone/Redux
These should be salad days for anti-smoking crusaders. New data show only 15 per cent of Canadians currently smoke, and just 11 per cent on a daily basis. These are the lowest rates ever recorded; as recently as 1999, smokers made up a quarter of the population. The decline is even more pronounced among teenaged Canadians, suggesting this downward trend will continue well into the future. Despite such success, however, tobacco-control advocates seem perpetually unsatisfiedto the extent theyre now pushing measures that threaten the limits of good science, artistic freedom and civil society.
Smoking is obviously a significant health risk. While adults may choose to take it up in full knowledge of its dangers and costs, we properly restrict adolescents from making a similar choice. But how far should this effort go? The conference, Silencing Big Tobacco on the Big Screen, held in Toronto earlier this month, garnered considerable attention for its proposal that all movies featuring characters who smoke should be rated 18A (those under 18 need adult accompaniment). Impressionable young moviegoers would thus be shielded from the sight of such Hollywood role models as Cruella de Vil, the cigarette-wielding, dog-napping villain of the Disney movie 101 Dalmatians, and Gandalf, the pipe-puffing wizard from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies.
Public health groups claim, with scientific certainty, that movie censorship will prevent teens from taking up the habit. U.S. research argues that 37 per cent of all teenaged smokers do so because theyve been influenced by movies. Building on this, a study released last year by the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit obsessively toted up every glimpse of tobacco smoke across a decades worth of top-grossing films and declared that 4,237 residents of the province will die prematurely as a result of tobacco imagery in movies. Despite such exactitude, however, these claims are complicated by important questions of causality. Does the sight of a smoker in a movie seduce innocent teenagers into a lifetime of cigarette use, or do teenagers predisposed to rebellious behaviour simply prefer movies that show smoking, not to mention plenty of other equally risky activities? While anti-smoking researchers insist that their studies carefully isolate the effect of smoking on young viewers, teasing out such a nuance is simply not feasible, as Simon Chapman, editor emeritus of the academic journal Tobacco Control, has pointed out. Chapman strongly chastises the censorship movement for its crude reductionism and questionable precision in ignoring the near-perfect correlation between smoking and other dangerous activities in movies. The only solution to this statistical obstacle, he notes, would be to conjure a genre of movies full of smoking but lacking car chases, violence, guns, drugs, alcohol, sex, nudity, profanity and abuse of authority. Good luck with that.
The proof arising from this data is often underwhelming, as well. One of the most frequently referenced studies claiming to prove a link between cinematic smoking and youth behaviour surveyed 2,603 adolescents over 2 years. Only six became new regular smokers. Most of the subjects mustered as evidence of the power of movie-induced smoking took just a few puffs of a cigarette over the entire period. Its hardly a smoking gun. As the study itself reveals, parental behaviour exerts far more influence on adolescent tobacco use than personal taste in movies.
And, even setting aside serious defects of science, does anyone really think slapping an 18A rating on a movie will prevent unaccompanied teenagers from seeing the forbidden act of smoking? The tidal wave of pornography available for free on the Internet suggests not.
Then again, the end game is not to hide teenaged eyes from smoking in movies, but to eliminate it entirely. Faced with proposed ratings guidelines, advocates hope Hollywood will eventually remove cigarettes from all (or nearly all) of its movies to ensure the widest possible audience for its product. The campaign thus seeks control over the content of a popular art form through government regulation and coercion. Forcing the movie industry to deliver state-sanctioned religious or moral instruction would be immediately repulsive to Canadian society. Why should such a thing be acceptable in the name of promoting anti-smoking policy?
Lately, it has become popular for tobacco opponents to talk of de-normalizing cigarette use. New rules in Ontario and elsewhere, for example, have banned smoking outdoors in parks and sports fieldswhere second-hand smoke poses no legitimate health threat to othersto control what is considered normal, everyday behaviour. Plans to censor movies are similarly offensive, in that they also seek to limit what may be seen in public space. Disseminating information on the hazards of smoking remains an important function for the field of public health. But it is the not job of government to decide what normal looks like.
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Governments who want to ban smoking from films should butt out
Kill La Kill Episode 9 - Censorship Comparison
If I can, I might do these for KLK #39;s episodes......since there are some "naughty" scenes coming up.
By: ToonamiOPED2
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After facing a DDoS attack, an activist group isnt backing down in its attempts to end Chinas Internet censorship.
I think that we are more confident than we were before that our successful execution of our strategy is going to lead us to achieve our mission, said the group via email on Tuesday.
GreatFire.org suffered a distributed denial of service attack last month that threatened to cripple its activities. The anonymous group, which is based out of China, believes the countrys government was behind the attack.
Although China has always denied any involvement in state-sponsored hacking, the country has been suspected of carrying out cyberattacks against U.S. companies and other activist groups.
GreatFire tries to offer ways to bypass Chinas censorship, including by hosting mirror websites to blocked destinations such as Google, the BBC and The New York Times.
Links to these mirror websites are hosted on GitHub, a software development platform China hasnt censored. But last month, GitHub also suffered a DDoS attack that was the largest in its history and appeared to target GreatFires page on the platform.
Both DDoS attacks have ended. During the attack against GreatFire, the group requested public support, and said that its bandwidth costs had reached up to US$30,000 a day, as a result.
We learned a lot from the attacks and there was a great outpouring of support and folks offering their financial and technical assistance, GreatFire said.
GitHub continues to host links to the mirror websites the group has created. But on Tuesday, the actual mirror websiteswhich are hosted through Amazon.com and othersappeared to be down.
We are experiencing minor hiccups but everything is moving forward on our end, the group added, without elaborating.
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Group fighting 'Net censorship in China presses on despite DDoS attack
Big corporations have a history of bullying whistleblowers into submission. Photograph: Grant Faint/Getty Images
Corporations intent on blunting the whistleblower reforms embodied in the Dodd-Frank Act have long been muzzling their employees with non-disclosure agreements. Restrictive confidentiality agreements are nothing but corporate censorship - and it needs to end.
People working in big financial services industries need to be able to alert the public and the courts of questionable practices. Thats why President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act into law in July 2010: it was designed to address the fraud that contributed to the massive financial meltdown experienced in Europe, the United States and the rest of the world.
Its thanks to whistleblowers that we learned about illegal activity at Enron, Bernie Madoffs offices and Swiss banks like UBS and HSBC, resulting in the collection of billions of dollars in sanctions. Any doubt as to the importance of whistleblower protections in exposing corporate fraud was laid to rest in 2012 by the US Attorney General Eric Holder who described them as nothing short of profound.
No wonder that companies tried to undermine Dodd-Frank from the get go.
Numerous companies have developed broadly worded non-disclosure agreements that restrict the release of confidential information to the companys legal department as a condition of employment though the exact number is unknown. When leaving the company, employees who have threatened to file a whistleblower claims were also forced to accept non-disclosure requirements as a condition of a settlement or before they could obtain a severance payment after they were fired or laid off.
These agreements explicitly prohibit employees from communicating with anyone, except attorneys hired by the company. Some go as far as explicitly barring communication with regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission.
We have seen numerous companies require employees questioned by the government to secretly provide them with insights into the scope of the investigation. These employees can then be effectively turned into informers against the government itself.
Whats even more Kafkaesque is that almost every non-disclosure agreement strictly prohibits the employee from telling the government of the existence of these secrecy agreements, and the restrictions placed upon them.
But thats about to change. On 1 April, the US Securities and Exchange Commission fined the mammoth defense contractor, KBR, Inc. (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root), for requiring employees to sign restrictive non-disclosure agreements. It took the courage of a single whistleblower, Harry Barko, to get us to this point.
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Corporations cannot muzzle whistleblowers with secrecy agreements any longer
Censorship is paralleling political turmoil in parts of the Middle East
Reuters is reporting that "a source in Turkey's telecoms industry" shares that Google Inc.'s (GOOG) video-sharing site YouTube and microblogging platfrom Twitter, Inc. (TWTR) were both blocked in Turkey on Monday, following a court decision. The crackdown comes after "individuals" complained to the court claiming that terrorists were posting political propoganda to the popular web services. The court agreed, and the services were ordered to be censored.
It's unclear how long the current censorship will last, but this isn't the first time Turkish courts have imposed such a ban. YouTube was banned for periods in 2007 and 2008 amid local unrest. Most recently in March 2014, Turkish courts temporarily ordered both Twitter and YouTube blocked to prevent the dissemination of supposed leaks ahead of Turkey's elections.
The leaked audio recordings were puportedly ofPrime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's inner circle. In the recordings officials appeared to be engaging in corrupt dealings. Erdogan's camp, however, claims the recordings were fakes generated by opposition leaders. His administration successfully petitioned the court to impose internet blockades to limit their impact.
The latest crackdown comes amid a fresh wave of violent political unrest.
Pro-communist/far left Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) stormed the office of a prosecutor in Istanbul whom they allege was corrupt. When police tried to storm the facility, the prosecutor was shot. He eventually died in surgery at a local hospital. Both gunmen were also shot dead by police commandos during the raid.
The U.S. callsDHKP-C a terrorist group and there's claims that it's backed by Putin's regime in Russia. The group claimed responsibility for a 2013 suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Istanbul. The DHKP-C is just one of several groups -- both pro- and anti-Erdogan that's been vying for public sentiment in the Turkish state. Earlier this year nationalist, pro-Erdogan hackers defaced a number of websites.
Source: Reuters
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Court Blocks Twitter and YouTube in Turkey After Pro-Communist Attack in Istanbul
Sometimes its censorship. Sometimes its unfortunate implications. And sometimes its straight-up unexplainable. But whatever the justification may be, games get renamed all the time when theyre released across different regions.
Lets look at ten particular cases of video game name changes:
Edited Title: Retitled to Canis Canem Edit in the United Kingdom.
The Reason? Bully, a game about high school life that was presumed prior to release to be all about, well, bullying, attracted a lot of controversy in both the U.S. and Europe. In the U.K., specifically, where Rockstar changed Bullys title to Canis Canem Edit, anti-bullying organizations campaigned against the games release, and even the countrys rating board came under fire for giving it a 15 rating.
Strangely, the games updated version for the 360 and the Wii, Bully: Scholarship Edition, was allowed to keep the Bully title when it came out two years later. It still caused controversy though.
[Image via Movie-censorship.com]
Edited Title: Gryzor, then Probotector in Europe and Oceania.
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10 Video Games That Got Weird Name Changes In Other Countries
Valkyria Chronicles - No Censorship - Part 11
Check out and support the game here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/294860/ Press the Like button below if you liked it! Subscribe if you wanna subscribe! Recorded with Bandicam. Edited...
By: Yukister
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DireTube News - This infographic shows the scope of Internet censorship around the globe
DireTube News - This infographic shows the scope of Internet censorship around the globe DireTube is the Largest online Media in Ethiopia Since 2008.
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DireTube News - This infographic shows the scope of Internet censorship around the globe - Video