Internet News

Fotografiska, a contemporary photography museum in Stockholm, has elected to censor its own promotional material for an upcoming exhibition to draw attention to Facebook's ludicrous nudity ban.

We censored the photographs because Facebook removed our pictures, said Fotografiska spokesperson Jens Hollingby to The Local: Our purpose was to bring attention to the issue and to open a discussion

The photographs in question are by the controversial US photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and form part of a major new exhibition of his work which recently opened at the museum.

Hollingby told The Local that Facebook is an important channel for the museum to market

Beneath the photographs, which are censored with a large blue rectangle with the text facebook-friendly square , the museum has explained its position:

Facebook thinks that naked bodies cause offence. They remove our photos. For them, it does not matter if it is art or not. I you would like to see the photos in their full glory, we invite you to visit us.

The exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's work runs until October 2nd 2011.

In Denmark, police have recommended to Parliament that it create laws that make it impossible for citizens to surf anonymously. According to Danish-language blog Computerworld Denmark, the proposal is intended to help investigate terrorism.

In the proposal, locations providing open Internet, like cafes and libraries, would have to confirm a user's identity, with some form of official ID, before letting them get online. Companies may also have to register and verify users' identities before providing access, as well as retain records of user logs.

Danish law already requires that ISPs store user data for at least a year, as an anti-terrorism measure. The proposal suggests that with such information, police would be able to see who exactly is on the network, where they go, and who they talk to.

While the Malaysian government has continually ensured that there would be no censorship of the Internet in the country, an alleged leaked memo requesting Malaysian ISPs to block file-hosting sites suggests otherwise.

The memo in question appears to be issued by Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) on May 30, and was leaked on Facebook, Malaysia-based Lowyat.Net forum, and blogs on June 9.

The MCMC, which is the country's internet censor, has yet to deny or confirm the memo's authenticity.

In the memo, the MCMC requested that Malaysian ISPs block access to ten file-hosting and sharing URLs, including Megaupload, Fileserve, and The Pirate Bay. It cited Section 268 of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998, which states that ISPs (licensees) must try their best to prevent its network from being used for activities that contravenes with Malaysian law.

See article from globalvoicesonline.org

International hacktivist group Anonymous has carried through on its threat to attack the Malaysian government's main website www.malaysia.gov.my over the government's proposed censoring of several file sharing websites, including the Pirate Bay and Megaupload.

A few days ago, the group posted a YouTube video about its intentions to carry out the attacks at 3.30am (local time) on Thursday.

At least 50 other government websites were attacked, including the state of Sabah's tourism website, and the Tourism Malaysia website. The websites of the Royal Malaysian Police, the Malaysian Parliament, the Ministry of Finance as well as the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Tourism, which were restored before 9 am (local time).

Update: Protests

20th June 2011. See  article from  security.cbronline.com

Thousands of Malaysians took to the roads in protest of the decision made by the regulatory body Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission to block 10 file-sharing websites in its effort to combat piracy.

The websites are mostly used to download pirated content including movies, TV shows and music.

The protest could be seen on Facebook as well, with over 6,500 people posting messages against the decision.

Thomas Hammarberg, the commissioner for human rights for the Council of Europe has said that freedom on the internet is a matter for the United Nations (UN) to decide because it is an international concern.

He said the UN should look at the differences between privacy and freedom of expression on the internet and added that politicians need to become more involved in the discussion.

He criticised the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for not taking responsibility for this, as he felt this was the relevant body in charge of this area.

He said a balance needs to be struck between regulation, which would filter out pornography, incitement to war and hatred, and the right to freedom of expression. He said that some countries are imposing restrictions, while others are letting the web run wild.

He said the UN should appoint a special commission to work on this issue and that there has to be an international dimension to regulations since so many web sites are run by private companies, according to the Guardian.

Hammarberg also criticised the use of super injunctions in UK courts, like the recent one relating to footballer Ryan Giggs and Twitter. He said that it means people are not allowed to even mention that there is a court case, which is a violation of the right to free expression. ?

The Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Human Rights Council has denounced three strikes laws that would cut off Internet users as a penalty for copyright infringement. The advice comes in a Report to the UN General Assembly on the Protection and Promotion of Freedom of Opinion and Expression.

While blocking and filtering measures deny users access to specific content on the Internet, States have also taken measures to cut off access to the Internet entirely. The Special Rapporteur considers cutting off users from Internet access, regardless of the justification provided, including on the grounds of violating intellectual property rights law, to be disproportionate and thus a violation of article 19, paragraph 3, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The Special Rapporteur calls upon all States to ensure that Internet access is maintained at all times, including during times of political unrest. In particular, the Special Rapporteur urges States to repeal or amend existing intellectual copyright laws which permit users to be disconnected from Internet access, and to refrain from adopting such laws.

The Special Rapporteur also acknowledged the importance of protecting Internet intermediaries from liability in order to protect human rights. Internet intermediaries should only act to limit the rights of their customers following a legitimate court order.

Parental warning logos are set to be introduced before songs and music videos on services such as Spotify and YouTube that contain explicit material, following recent 'concern' about supposedly risque music content available to children online.

Music industry body BPI is to update its 15-year-old Parental Advisory Scheme. Updated guidelines will expand the scheme for the well known advisory logo to appear with songs and videos available to stream or download on UK digital music and music video services.

Most audio and video streaming services including Google-owned YouTube, Spotify, Napster and Vevo do not currently have a uniform parental guidance system, according to the BPI.

We think it is important for parents to get the same standards of guidance and information online as they get when buying CDs or DVDs on the high street, said Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI. We are updating our scheme for the digital age to ensure that explicit songs and videos are clearly labelled.

It has emerged that You Tube is complying with thousands of requests from governments to censor and remove videos that show protests and other examples of citizens simply asserting their rights, while also deleting search terms by government mandate.

The latest example is You Tube's compliance with a request from the British government to censor footage of the British Constitution Group's Lawful Rebellion protest, during which they attempted to civilly arrest Judge Michael Peake at Birkenhead county court.

Peake was ruling on a case involving Roger Hayes, former member of UKIP, who has refused to pay council tax. Hayes has embarked on an effort to legally prove that the enforced collection of council tax by government is unlawful because no contract has been agreed between the individual and the state.

When viewers in the UK attempt to watch videos of the protest, they are met with the message, This content is not available in your country due to a government removal request.

We then click through to learn that, YouTube occasionally receives requests from governments around the world to remove content from our site, and as a result, YouTube may block specific content in order to comply with local laws in certain countries.

You can also search by country to discover that Google, the owner of You Tube, has complied with the majority of requests from governments, particularly in the United States and the UK, not only to remove You Tube videos, but also specific web search terms and thousands of data requests, meaning demands for information that would reveal the true identity of a You Tube user.

Between July 1 and Dec. 31 (2009), Google received 3,580 requests for user data from U.S. government agencies, slightly less than the 3,663 originating from Brazil, reports PC World. The United Kingdom and India sent more than 1,000 requests each, and smaller numbers originated from various other countries.

Automatic image-analysis systems are already used to catch filtered pornography before it reaches a computer monitor. But they often struggle to distinguish between indecent imagery and more innocuous pictures with large flesh-coloured regions, such as a person in swimwear or a close-up face. Analysing the audio for a sexual scream or moan could solve the problem, say electrical engineers MyungJong Kim and Hoirin Kim at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea.

The pair used a signal-processing technique to create spectrograms of a variety of audio clips, each just half a second long. They found that speech signals are normally low-pitched and musical clips have a wide range of pitches; both vary only gradually over time. In contrast, pornographic sounds tend to be higher-pitched, change quickly and also periodically repeat. These characteristics allow software to distinguish porn audio from other content.

It's quite ingenious, says Richard Harvey, a computer scientist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, who previously worked on image-based pornography detection. But image-based methods are no less accurate, he says, and only require a single frame whereas the performance of the audio method needs to analyse longer clips.

He suggests it might be better to combine both methods to weed out unusual cases: Think of that scene in When Harry Met Sally [in which a female character fakes an orgasm while fully clothed in a diner] -- the audio is very clearly pointing in one direction, but the video is not.

Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has warned that government plans to block access to illicit filesharing websites could set a disastrous precedent for freedom of speech.

Speaking to journalists at Google's Big Tent conference in London, Schmidt said the online search giant would challenge attempts to restrict access to the Pirate Bay and other so-called cyberlocker sites,  part of government plans to fight online piracy through controversial measures included in the Digital Economy Act.

Schmidt described website blocking as akin to China's restrictive internet regime:

I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [implementing] simple solutions to complex problems, he said. So, 'let's whack off the DNS'. Okay, that seems like an appealing solution but it sets a very bad precedent because now another country will say 'I don't like free speech so I'll whack off all those DNSs' -- that country would be China.

It doesn't seem right. I would be very, very careful about that stuff. If [the UK government] do it the wrong way it could have disastrous precedent setting in other areas.

Speaking at the same conference, the culture minister, Jeremy Hunt, said plans to block access to illicit filesharing websites were on schedule. He admitted that a challenge of the controversial measure is deciding which sites get blocked.

Ofcom is due to present its report on the practicability of the site-blocking measures included in the DEA to Hunt in the coming weeks.

Eight New York residents have filed a lawsuit against China and Chinese online-search provider Baidu Inc., alleging they violated the plaintiffs' U.S. constitutional rights by blocking prodemocracy speech from Baidu search results. The complaint seeks damages of $16 million, or $2 million for each plaintiff.

The plaintiffs allege their articles or videos about the Chinese democratic movement are unavailable via searches on Baidu, which the lawsuit calls an agent and enforcer of the anti-democracy policies of China. The censorship violates their rights under the U.S. Constitution, the New York constitution and New York law, the suit alleged. It didn't elaborate on why Baidu should be punished for actions that Baidu says are required by Chinese law.

Senator Richard Durbin earlier this month wrote a letter to Baidu Chief Executive Robin Li expressing concerns that the company wasn't taking measures to safeguard human rights, including freedom of expression and privacy. Durbin said he was working on legislation that would require companies to take steps to protect human rights or face liability, and that Baidu would be subject to such legislation because its shares are traded in the U.S.

A 13 year old schoolboy faced US federal interrogation at school for what he posted on his Facebook page.

After Osama bin Laden was killed, 13-year-old Vito LaPinta posted an update to his Facebook status that got the Feds attention.

I was saying how Osama was dead and for Obama to be careful because there could be suicide bombers, says Vito.

A week later he was called in to the principal's office. A man walked in with a suit and glasses and he said he was part of the Secret Service . He told me it was because of a post I made that indicated I was a threat toward the President. The Tacoma school district acknowledged a Secret Service agent questioned Vito.

The teen's mom says she rushed to Truman Middle School immediately and arrived to discover her son had already been questioned for half an hour. I just about lost it, she said. My 13 year-old son is supposed to be safe and secure in his classroom and he's being interrogated without my knowledge or consent privately.

Vito said that once his mom showed up, the agent finished the interview and told him he was not in any trouble. Now he's more careful about what he posts online.

Breast-feeding advocates are angry that Facebook has once again removed photos of mothers nursing their babies.

In the latest ludicrous censorship, last month Facebook removed breast-feeding images from Earth Mama Angel Baby's Facebook page.

Babies get hungry, explained a post on Earth Mama's website. And breasts feed babies. We don't consider either photo obscene. Each shows a human baby having lunch.

Peggy O'Mara, editor of Mothering magazine, decried the move in a lengthy blog post that called for readers to post pictures of themselves nursing on their personal Facebook pages if you agree with me that breast-feeding is normal and not obscene :

A Swedish film distributor's attempt to use an image of two women kissing in a Facebook advertising campaign has been rejected by the ever censorial website.

Sweden-based TriArt Film was hoping to use Facebook to publicise the Greek film Attenberg , currently showing in Swedish cinemas.

Our ad for Attenberg, using the poster image of two women touch tongues, has been DISAPPROVED, TriArt said in a statement on its own Facebook page. TriArt went on to suggest that Facebook appears to have a double standard when it comes to who can be seen locking lips in advertisements running on the site, explaining that their ad for the film Tre , featuring a male-female couple engaged in a deep kiss, was approved.

We're confused, TriArt CEO Eva Esseen Arndorff said in a statement.

The Lahore High Court has directed the government to submit the complete judicial record in connection with the issue of blasphemy on facebook and remarked that it would not be accepted at any cost.

The petitioner Muhammad Azhar Siddieque arguing before the court said that Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) and the Ministry of Communication completely has failed to detect the blasphemy on internet and especially on facebook.

The petitioner said some people who had their agenda to disgrace Mohammed and to defame the dignity of Islam. He prayed before the court to issue notice to the concerned authorities on the negligence on their part. He also prayed that PTA and Ministry for communication be directed to ban facebook on permanent basis.

The court will sit again on May 10 for further proceedings.

The .XXX domain has finally opened for business.

Following approval from ICANN, a US quango, the new pornography-only suffix has been added to the Domain Name System.

The first registered addresses, porn.xxx, sex.xxx and xxx.xxx are being used to promote sales of .xxx domain names.

A trade organisation, the Free Speech Coalition, said that it will make it easier for governments to block access to pornography websites and has called on pornographers to boycott .xxx. Saudi Arabia and India have already said they want to block all the new addresses.

The first tranche of addresses, which will allow brands to buy their trademarks, will reportedly go on sale in November.

Once other high-value keywords have been auctioned off, .xxx addresses are expected to cost around $70, seven times as much as a typical .com address.

A Frenchman is suing Facebook for severing his account after he posted a painting of nude woman as his profile picture.

He used an image of a 19th century oil by Gustave Coubet called The Origin of the World on the social networking site.

But he claims he missed messages and social contact from his 800 Facebook friends when the page was taken down on the eve of his birthday on February 27.

He is now demanding the site compensate him in an substantial manner for barring his access.

The unnamed man's lawyer Stephane Cottineau said repeated emails to the California based company demanding the page be reinstated had also gone unanswered.

Facebook has apologised for removing a photo of a gay kiss taken from the  UK soap EastEnders, It was removed for being sexually suggestive and supposedly abusive .

It was used by US writer Niall O'Conghaile to accompany a blog post about the kiss-in held to support a gay couple who were kicked out of a pub.

Facebook said in a statement: The photo in question does not violate our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and was removed in error. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Hundreds of people added the image to their profiles to complain about the removal.

Facebook prudes have picked on acclaimed photographer Renee Jacobs over lesbian imagery.

The issue arose over an advert for an exhibition. This showed two topless women embracing in a modest pose.

Facebook's Terms of Service prevent the posting of anything that is pornographic, contains nudity or is inappropriately sexual.

Jacobs gave the following Statement regarding her removal from the Facebook to SheWired:

Well, we all know that there's been much worse material on Facebook. It's hard to see how this is anything but discriminatory. As a photographer with a background in law, I've tried to adhere strictly to Facebook's Terms of Service.

I believe they have the right to be as prudish and ridiculous as they want, as long as it's applied evenhandedly. This--however--is blatantly discriminatory. The photo does not in any way have nudity (you can barely see the side of one breast), it's not pornographic (not even under the Supreme Court's nebulous standards of I know it when I see it......

Jacobs, who routinely censors work she puts up on Facebook with strategically placed black bars, is hoping, demanding actually, that Facebook reinstates her original profile, she told SW:

I had more than 1,700 friends and business contacts. If Facebook wants to be taken seriously as a place of business and networking for adults, they need to address this issue.

Once upon a time Facebook had an anything goes attitude to what people posted. But now Facebook walks on eggshells, fearing obscenity suits and nutter 'outrage'.

Facebook have just made the University of North Florida's newspaper, The Spinnaker , take down their profile pic, the cover of their latest edition.

The cover depicts a couple engaging in oral sex, the cover story being about the news that there may be a link between throat cancer and performing oral sex on someone infected with the human papillomavirus, or HPV.

Spinnaker's Editor-in-Chief Josh Gore defended the image, which was taken of UNF students, saying that it got people to read the story and this was not pornography.

America inflicts its prudery on Sweden

See  article from  thelocal.se

Many companies use Facebook to reach the 4 million or so users in Sweden. One of these is Bjo rn Borg, who since 2007 has a large platform of user-generated content on their page. Fans upload their own images and every week the company chooses a picture, which becomes the Swedish export of the week .

The happy snapper gets rewarded with free underwear and a chance to see his or her image posted on the official Bjo rn Borg Facebook page. But this particular image, taken by Jacob Mohr Hansen from Denmark, proved too much for Facebook. The picture got many hits and many users left comments. But by the evening it had been erased.

We realized it was probably the most daring image we had ever uploaded, but were confident it was still within what is considered OK, Micke Kazarnovicz, responsible for digital communication at Bjo rn Borg, told The Local. But Kazarnovicz' Facebook account had been frozen. In order to get his account back he had to promise not to upload any more 'pornographic' images.

They saw this as pornographic, but to us it was really more a laugh, completely tongue in cheek. There is no eroticism at all in the picture, just nudity, said Kazarnovicz.

Kazarnovicz said that : Facebook needs to be more aware of the cultural differences of its users. Otherwise they are promoting a cultural uniformity that really shouldn't be pursued.