Category Archives: Censorship

SPONGEBOB | Unnecessary Censorship | Censored Cartoon Parody Bleep Video
This Week in Unnecessary Censorship, The Spongebob Squarepants Movie! Nope, not Sponge Out of Water, the ORIGINAL version =) Censorship tells the wrong story. Subscribe! comment! thanks...

By: NinjaPandaProductions

Read the original here:
SPONGEBOB | Unnecessary Censorship | Censored Cartoon Parody Bleep Video - Video

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.

Continue reading here:
Governments who want to ban smoking from films should butt out

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.

See the original post here:
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.

See the original post here:
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

Read more here:
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.

Originally posted here:
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

Read the original post:
Valkyria Chronicles - No Censorship - Part 11 - Video

Business | tags: censorship, internet, venezuela February 24, 2014 by Nick Farrell.

The beleaguered Venezuela president, Nicolas Maduro, has shown he has absolutely nothing to hide as protestors take to the streets against his government. Hes turned off the internet and TV.

It would appear that Maduro is worried that protestors might be using the internet to organise their dissent, but shutting down the telly stations indicates that he is more worried about the world seeing what he is doing. Read the rest

US hacks, who have already sold their souls to corporations, are now self-censoring their copy to avoid upsetting the government.

Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the PEN American Centre, said that surveys from Pew Research indicate that the National Security Agency programsmes are actually supported by roughly half of Americans, even though many believe that their own personal e-mails and calls have been read. Read the rest

The crime and security minister, James Brokenshire has decided save the UK from sites which are not British by bringing in censorship.

He announced the end of the free internet in the UK by saying that he will order ISPs to block sites which he thinks are too dangerous to be seen by the great unwashed. Read the rest

Read the rest here:
Tag Archives: censorship

BIG HERO 6 Unnecessary Censorship Censored Disney Pixar Parody Bleep Video Oscars

By: Tangled

Original post:
BIG HERO 6 Unnecessary Censorship Censored Disney Pixar Parody Bleep Video Oscars - Video

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.

By: DireTube.com

See the article here:
DireTube News - This infographic shows the scope of Internet censorship around the globe - Video