censorship

Cina has one of the strictest censorship regimes in the world but little by little information about their dodgy ratbags still seeps out:

Visitors from mainland China climb the narrow stairs to a cramped room here filled with forbidden delights: shelves of scandal-packed exposés about their Communist Party masters.

The People’s Recreation Community bookstore and several others on Hong Kong’s teeming shopping streets specialize in selling books and magazines banned by the Chinese government, mostly for their luridly damning accounts of party leaders, past and present. And at a time when many Chinese citizens smolder with distrust of their leaders, business is thriving.  Read more »

The People’s Daily is the main state-owned newspaper of China’s communist party, and everyone was pretty psyched about the paper’s new Beijing headquarters. The building is massive, imposing, and, uh, currently shaped like a colossal penis. Now, as construction workers try to finish the engineering, the country’s censors are working overtime to stop Chinese people on social media from laughing at the expense of the very paper in charge of controlling the country’s message. According to The International Business Times, the nearly 500-foot tower won’t be finished until this time next year, but the war on mocking it has already begun.

You can’t control what the people decide to call it.  The Cake Tin is a good example of that.  No matter how much they now pretend it’s cute, be assured that there remains a deep down resentment about that name by the people who prefer it to be called by the proper sponsorship name, er… Cake Tin.  See?

Read more »

These are not bouncing Swedish fun bags so what is all the fuss about?

Topless women refuse to take ban lying down

The big question is not about public censorship, it is what the f*** is the public doing funding art anyway?

It is just the guilty pleasure of the liberal elite paid by our tax dollars, and if we don’t watch out we will all be kicking in for Brian Rudman’s theatre.

This is the theatre that the market says isn’t needed because theatre acting is legacy technology super-ceded by technology like TV and Movies that actually makes money, and allows mass distribution, proving people like and want them.

Today is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.

Please submit your drawings via the tipline. I will update this post as they come in.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day - May 20

Mohammed the Killer Whale

I sent this on Friday;

Dear Mr Guy,

This request for information is made under the Official Information Act. I would appreciate your acknowledging receipt of the request, providing the date on which the request was received by your office, the date on which you believe the 20 working day rule expires and the date on which you believe it is reasonably practicable for you to supply the information requested.

Purpose of Request

My request relates to the implementation and operation of the Department of Internal Affairs Internet Filter. The purpose of this request is to identify whether or not the DIA has started operation of the internet filter, whether the department obtained a legal opinion as to whether this filter breaches New Zealand’s Bill of Rights Act 1990 and what the opinion is, and what sites the Department of Internal Affairs is filtering and the process they determined that the sites should be filtered.

Public Interest in Information

Due to the current high level of media interest with public access and the rights contained in the NZBORA 1990 concerns have been raised around the operation, and the legality of the internet filter. Secondly in a democracy it is considered that we should be increasing freedoms not reducing them, especially access to information. For these reasons, it is clearly in the public interest that the information I request be made publicly available, noting that one of the purposes of the Official Information Act is to “promote the accountability of Ministers of the Crown and officials” and thereby “promote the good government of New Zealand”.

Request

My request is therefore for:

a)     Has the DIA Internet filter begun operation in ISP’s anywhere in New Zealand, if so which ISP’s have implemented the filter and on what dates?

b) What is the nature of information collected and when collected how is it reported to the DIA?

c) Has the department sought or obtained a legal opinion from any source regarding their right to implement the Internet Filter, if so what was the advice in full, especially noting the implementation as being compatible with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990?

d)     What are the sites contained within the filter that are banned, why were they banned and what process did the department go through to ensure that no other site legally able to be seen was not inadvertently caught by the filter?

e) In what way does the department consider that they are exempt from the NZBORA 1990, especially Part 2 section 13, Part 2 section 14, Part 2, section 17, Part 2 section 21?

e)    Any correspondence, including letters, faxes, emails, or other physical or electronic documents, and drafts of same, between DIA and the Attorney-General’s Office, the Solicitor-Generals Office, Crown Law or any other legal firm/partnership or Barrister Sole or Barrister and Solicitor regarding the implementation and deployment of the internet filter between 1 January 2009 and 1 March 2010

Conclusion

I look forward to both your acknowledgment letter and to the prompt supply of the information.

Kind Regards

… first they blocked the child porn, but i did nothing for I am not a pedophile…
… then they blocked the small breasted women, but i did nothing for fear of being called a pedophile…
… then they blocked all adult sites, but I did nothing as they were “protecting the children”………
…. then they blocked all objectionable writing, but I did nothing as it was in the “general publics best interests”…
…. then they blocked all free music, but I did nothing as it might be copyright infringement….
…. then they blocked my writing, because i was not sanctioned by the government. and no one did anything because it was too late…

It has started, we now have un-elected officials deciding what we can and cannot see on the internet. Except we don’t know what they are filtering. They won’t tell us that. The Department of Internal Affairs calls it filtering, suck a nice unobtrusive name for C E N S O R S H I P.

But hang on a minute, in the Dirty Doctor of Palmerston North case a judge said that if the child porn is from overseas it is not really the same as if it was here in NZ so not that big on the scale of offending. Welcome to the end of freedom of expression and the start of Net Censorship. Welcome to the true avbent of the Nanny State. Now they are deciding for us, without reference to us what we can and cannot look at on the internet.

My tolerance for this government is fast expiring, ok it is nearly in need of resuscitation. Now, I’m no kiddie fiddler or child-porn advocate, anyone who knows me knows I despise them. In fact I personally dobbed a creepy Scout Leader and got him chucked out. He subsequently moved to Auckland and last I heard was trying to become a Teacher. Lovely. But having a big filtering filtering god knows what on the internet, because they won’t tell us needs to be knocked on the head.

To make matters worse, read this story of how the Iranian Government shut down dissent. For all those people who had a little green box on their Twitter accounts, read this and be afraid.

“Collecting interception data is a process which takes place in the ‘background’, assuring that the intercepted target (end user) is never aware of a possible interception,” the manual describes. “The maximum number of simultaneous active interception sessions is 50,000.”

This manual has been read by police officers in Tehran. It ended up in my hands through the back door.

“Nokia Lawful Interception Gateway”, reads the cover page. This has been rumoured for a long while. Nokia Siemens Networks has supplied Iran with telesurveillance equipment, the details of which I have tried to track down since last summer. Now, one of the products that NSN supplied to Iran has been leaked to Fifi. This system enables just the type of surveillance that NSN has denied participating in.

It looks bad. The package gives users extensive power to monitor citizen mobile phone as well as mobile internet usage.

But it isn’t illegal. Similar systems monitor our own telecommunications. The question isn’t about Iran, but more broadly about what kind of surveillance is permitted – or mandated – in the networks we use. Who controls them?

So what? I hear you say. Well it just so happens our biggest Mobile player and also a rather large ISP has exactly the same gear as the Iranian mobile networks. I know this because I asked Paul Brislen.

Nokia Lawful Interception Gateway (LIG), Has the Government?

So, I sent the article to Paul Brislen and he confirms that they have the gear mentioned in the article, in fact their entire network is provided by Nokia. He thinks it is funny. Well read on;

Nokia Siemens Networks refused to reveal what they had sold to Iran. “Just this small add-on”, the company’s media relations office replied again and again when I questioned them about it. “I don’t recall its name right now”, said Communications Manager Riitta Mård. “It has nothing to do with internet surveillance.”

In fact, at least three separate systems were exported to Iran. Nokia built a GSM network; the GSM network was provided with the LIG system that I acquired; and the LIG has been upgraded with the “add-on” that Mård described. Mård remembers the name of the system now: Monitoring Centre (PDF). It’s a test platform that, according to Mård, only is only suitable for monitoring telephone calls.

The commotion caused by the NSN trading with Iran has been mostly about the Monitoring Centre. The actual problem now seems to be the more extensive LIG.

And this is where it gets interesting, even for the ordinary Western mobile phone user normally untouched by Iran’s political storms. LIG, with its extensive monitoring capabilities, or a comparable system by a different manufacturer, is monitoring all mobile voice and data networks around the world, including here in Finland.

And that dear friends is how a government can shut down dissent overnight. Now you know how the Iranian government managed to shut-up the freedom movement.

In fact, it is precisely because of us Europeans that these extensive monitoring systems first became legal and then mandatory worldwide. Europe has spearheaded the transition from more restricted surveillance methods to extensive systems like the LIG: systems that store all of the target’s communications data during surveillance for future investigation.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Who indeed? Now do you all see why we need a constitution like this. This sort of nonesense is why we need the protection of a constitution especially the First and second amendments. Now watch then implement a more draconian s92a that that which we think there should be. The hugley ironic thing for me is the penalties for breaching copyright is 12 times higher than a “serious breach of the foundation of our law”, that being name suppression. Name Suppression is just one affront to our rights as citizens. Little by little they are being eroded away.

The Australian Censor has banned:

small breasted women in adult publications has been made by the Australian Classification Board allegedly on the grounds that such images could be construed as child pornography, even where those publications comply with American law and keep certification that performers are over 18.

Female ejaculation has been banned on the incredible grounds that “the depictions are a form of urination which is banned under the label of ‘golden showers’ in the Classification Guidelines” and/or “Female ejaculation is an ‘abhorrent’ depiction.” Notably here male ejaculation is completely legal under the same guidelines, attracting an X rating in Australia.

It’s an outrage, what the hell am I supposed to jerk off to now?

Clearly any pretense from the Australian Government that its proposed internet filter will not extend to millions of sites has died with news that the Government has banned small breasts and female ejaculation in adult material.

It is draconian and ill-informed censorship.

Skyhawks sale gets a step closer – The Air Force’s white elephants, the A4 Skyhawks, are one step closer to finally being sold, seven years after they were grounded. [3 News Politics]

The election must be closer than we imagine. Three years ago just before the election, with great fanfare it was announced that the Skyhawks had been sold and it was a bloody great deal. Well they are still here and we are getting told again that the sale is imminent.

I call bullshit on this as well as the white powder scare in Wellington that disrupted the Standard authors daily dose of Key Derangement Syndrome. You would think Helen would get a better play-book than the 2005 one.

Sheesh, two WMD’s in one day, Helen must be going to call the G-G any day soon.

"Helen…..mmmm….my precious"

Caption Contest, fill ya boots.