Apple in the US considers the word 'jailbreak' to be an obscenity in need of asterixing to 'j*******k. They may consider it an obscenity that people may want to break free of their control freakery and use Apple devices on the network of their choice.

However it does seem a bit much that the Thin Lizzy album of the same name should get subjected to this nonsense.

But there you go!. The odd bit of censorship was first discussed on Twitter and apparently iBooks are also subject to the same j*******k censorship. It also transpires that the 'jailbreak' is only censored in the US, and European products from their local iTunes are left unscathed.

The German news magazine Focus has announced that it has altered the digital version of its current issue, screening the bared breasts of the female front cover model to avoid a possible run-in with Apple.

The action followed pressure from digital distributor Zinio, an iPad app, to adhere to Apple's censorial requirements regarding nudity. Apple had not actually made any complaints.

Zinio threatened to withhold the issue from the Internet, a Focus spokesman said. He said that censorship stemming from prudery did not comport with the magazine's concept of freedom of the press.

The cover story offered 22 tips on skin care, and the topless model displayed more skin than Zinio was comfortable with. However there is still an uncensored photograph of the model on page three.

The past few days have seen a lot of attention given to the neo Mary Whitehouse campaign for default censorship. It's important to remember that filtering systems are fallible - for example, they catch too much content, whether by accident or abuse.

Today we happened upon a fine example. Through our reporting website Blocked.org.uk, we established that the website of anti-violence advocates Conciliation Resources is blocked by mobile networks Orange, O2 and Vodafone by their child protection filters.

Here's what Conciliation Resources actually do:

supports people at the heart of conflicts who are striving to find solutions. We work with them to deepen our collective understanding of the conflict, bring together divided communities and create opportunities for them to resolve their differences peacefully.

I had a look around the site, and I couldn't find any pornography. Or any reason why it would be a bad idea for a young person to have access to the site.

Maybe its blocked simply because it frequently uses the word 'violence', eg in the strapline: Preventing violence, building peace.

This is clearly a mistake. But it demonstrates a key flaw with Internet filtering. It tends to block far too much content, both because the categories of blockable content are so vague and broad (see Orange's categories below) and because the systems doing the filtering make mistakes. And because the decisions are made on the cheap as there are so many websites to get through.

Orange Categories for blocking. See article from help.orange.co.uk

• Anonymizers: These sites allow you to browse the Internet and access content anonymously.

• Anorexia - Bulimia: Promoting and instigating eating disorders.

• Gambling: Access to online gambling such as casinos and any other online services that let you place bets.

• Chat: Where you chat in real time to people you don’t know.

• Bombs: Explaining how to prepare, make, build and use explosives and explosive devices.

• Dating: Websites for match-making where the user can meet other people - make friends, find a partner, etc.

• Forums: Where you’re invited to take part in discussions on predetermined topics with people you don’t know.

• Pornography: Websites with a pornographic or sexual content.

• Racism: Sites promoting racist behaviour based on culture, race, religion, ideology, etc.

• Sects: Websites on universally acknowledged sects. Within this category URLs are included on organizations that promote directly or indirectly: (i) group, animal or individual injuries, (ii) esoteric practices, (iii) content that sets a bad example for young children: that teaches or encourages children to perform harmful acts or imitate dangerous behaviour, (iv) content that creates feelings of fear, intimidation, horror, or psychological terror, (v) Incitement or depiction of harm against any individual or group based on gender, sexual orientation, ethnic, religious or national identity.

• Violence: Containing openly violent content and/or that promote violence or defend it.

Perhaps the blocking decisions could be made robust by allowing business and campaigns such as Conciliation Resources a straightforward process to sue for lost earnings and donations from incompetent censorship

Microsoft has announced further censorship of its phone-app store to remove software containing racy or sexual content.

The firm's Windows Phone Marketplace guidelines already ban content that a reasonable person would consider to be adult or borderline adult content.

However, the firm said that it had decided to enforce a more stringent interpretation of the rules. Microsoft's senior director for Windows Marketplace, Todd Brix said:

Specifically, we will be paying more attention to the icons, titles, and content of these apps and expect them to be more subtle and modest in the imagery and terms used.

This is about presenting the right content to the right customer and ensuring that apps meet our standards.

The firm suggested that developers could use silhouettes as a possible alternative to more risky images. It added that app writers who fell foul of its crackdown would be contacted over the next few days.

Indian security agencies have confirmed to Mail Today that the process to access the Blackberry Messenger (BBM) service would be up and running soon.

Official sources said they would intercept BBM messages in cases where they suspected that the devices were being used to perpetrate crimes.

Department of Telecommunications (DoT) secretary R. Chandrashekhar told Mail Today that the arrangements were being put in place and the process had begun for lawful interception of BBM services: Directions can be given to any service provider for interception of all BlackBerry services.

Here's how Big Brother will snoop on BBMs. The security agency concerned will first have to approach the Union Home Ministry and seek its permission to tap a particular BBM user's number. The agency will then send a request to a service provider to access the data of the number. This will be followed by the operator connecting to the agency's channel and divulging the user's communication details.

Asked about the BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES), which gives a smartphone user access to a corporate intranet, Chandrashekhar said: We have found a satisfactory way forward. A plan of action has been chalked out for all BlackBerry services (including BES) and there is concurrence on how it will be executed. The matter was discussed with the home ministry and other security agencies, and the method has been finalised. He said: It's not that access to enterprise service is not available. But the process is cumbersome. In order to access BES, the government agencies have to tap into service providers that store emails in decrypted (readable) format before they are encrypted and pushed to the recipient's device. The government believes BES is not of very high importance to intelligence and security agencies, but has asked service providers to share a list of all servers (approximately 5,000 in India).

RIM reprehensively are refusing to comment on the snooping capability. You'd think that they would let their subscribers know about where they stand with governments being able to intercept their communications.

shoewarsapp.com have confirmed that the Show Wars game has been withdrawn from sale in Saudi Arabia.

This decision was made following feedback that the female character's jumping sound effect was considered too sexual and may cause cultural offence.

A modified version of the app will be available in S.A., in April without this supposedly objectionable content.

The objective of the game is to navigate through the SW Department store at SALE time and spend as much on your credit card as possible.

The Geometric Porn website describes itself as:

Something abstract existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence. Visual geometry containing the non-explicit description of sexual organs or activity. Arising in the mind it intends to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.

GeometricPorn is a project by Luciano Foglia, a multidisciplinary visual artist. He has been working in the design industry for over ten years focusing on interactive design, code based animations and music. His personal time is spent exploring new ways of expression in music and art, working from his studio in London, Hackney Wick.

Geometric Porn App has been rejected by Apple censors as explained on the website:

Reasons for Rejection:

16.1: Apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected. We found that many audiences would find your app concept objectionable, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.

T-Mobile USA offers a feature to censor access to certain kinds of content. This is called Web Guard. Supposedly Web Guard is supposed to inhibit access to content that falls under the following categories: Alcohol, Mature Content, Violence, Drugs, Pornography, Weapons, Gambling, Suicide, Guns, Hate, Tobacco, Ammunition.

We were able to extract part of the list of censored content and discovered that sites that do not fall under these categories were also censored. This feature is enabled by default on all prepaid accounts and although it can be disabled by customers who wish to do so (if over 18 years of age), it is not clearly stated in the error page how to do so.

While most of the censored sites are legitimately categorized, there are certain ones that do not fall under the categories of the block. Here is a list of sites that we found to be censored, but that we don't believe belong to any of the banned categories.

...Read the full article

UK premium rate services (PRS) regulator PhonepayPlus has confirmed its budget for 2012/2013, following consultation with industry and approval from Ofcom.

It expects the total cost of PRS regulation in 2012/13, covering PhonepayPlus' core activity and the Registration Scheme, to be around GBP 4.09 million.

PhonepayPlus has announced the adjusted industry levy for 2012/13 together with a new Registration Scheme fee structure for the coming financial year.

Gavin McKiernan of the Parents Television Council (PTC) attended the Apple shareholder meeting to ask the company to recommit itself to Steve Jobs' pledge that Apple would not facilitate the distribution of adult-only material within its ecosystem.

Apple CEO Tim Cook pledged that Apple would continue the Steve Jobs' era policy.

McKiernan also asked for a commitment from the company to sponsor family-friendly TV programs with its ad buys. Over the past year, supposedly graphic episodes of Fox's Family Guy, and The Cleveland Show, and CBS' Two and a Half Men, among others, featured Apple advertisements, and Cook received the comments favorably.

The PTC said it was looking forward to continuing to work with Apple to build a strong relationship that will ultimately be family-friendly and serve Apple's bottom-line. The following are excerpts from McKiernan's delivered remarks:

First, I come before you today to praise Apple's commitment to curb the distribution of adult-oriented material within its ecosystem. To his credit, Steve Jobs was a leader and visionary not only in creating amazing products, but in recognizing his company's responsibility to help parents prevent children from accessing material that is inappropriate for them. In the post-Jobs era, is that a principle parents can count on Apple to continue?

Out of the same concern for children, I must also alert you of your advertising practices. Apple has remained a constant sponsor to problematic shows such as Family Guy, Two and a Half Men, American Dad, The Cleveland Show, and Vampire Diaries; shows that consistently feature violence, graphic sexual content and foul language. In the past year your advertising dollars have helped scenes such as Peter firing a machine gun at the Amish on Family Guy and Alan giving his son a penis pump on Two and a Half Men into the homes of impressionable young minds.

I am pleading with you on behalf of millions of Americans to bring the high standards you have for your Apple products to your advertising practices. I hope you will accept my invitation today to work with the Parents Television Council to find programming alternatives that will meet your media goals while maintaining the brand image that is so valuable to you and my fellow shareholders.

A couple of months ago, BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) told its developer base that it would soon be instituting age ratings in its BlackBerry App World software shop.

Those ratings, which have since been rolled out, and are broken down into four categories:

• General
• Teen: may not be suitable for children less than 13 years old
• Mature: may not be suitable for children less than 17 years old
• Adult.

The Teen 13 rating is a rating that correlates with many age ratings around the world.

The Mature 17 is pragmatic rating borrowed from the US video game world that allows the most into a rating without it getting banned by those who won't allow adult only content.

And its excellent to see that BlackBerry also have an adults only rating that seems to allow for the full range of sex and violence content.

This stance is in marked contrast to Apple's anti-porn in iTunes standpoint, which former CEO Steve Jobs cemented with the following quote from 2010:

We...believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone.

Through reports to the blocked.org.uk site, we have established that Orange UK are filtering access to La Quadrature Du Net's website on pre-paid mobile accounts.

La Quadrature Du Net is similar to ORG -- it is an advocacy group that seeks to defend citizen's fundamental rights on the Internet. They have been a leading voice in the growing movement to oppose the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, behind which so much momentum is gathering. They have provided detailed analyses alongside practical suggestions about how to help with the political effort to oppose the treaty.

Searching for LQDN's website on Orange pre-pay handsets leads to a warning that Orange Safeguard has classified this page as only suitable for people over the age of 18. LQDN's site does not contain any such material. But it still falls within the parameter of adult-related material.

That La Quadrature Du Net is blocked under such a policy highlights the need for change. The problem of over-blocking is being exacerbated by a lack of transparency (so that it's not clear what is blocked and to whom) and the problems users experience trying to opt-out.

We're gathering more evidence of the scale of the over-blocking problem through blocked.org.uk site, and you can help by reporting inappropriate blocks you find. We're currently in the process of meeting the mobile operators and the Mobile Broadband Group to tell them our concerns and outline how we think the problems can be addressed. More efficient measures need to be implemented in order to allow parents to implement tools to try to manage their children's Internet use whilst ensuring that adults are not subject to unnecessary censorship.

Report blocked websites at blocked.org.uk

Apple is censoring rap music and other explicit tracks downloaded using its iTunes Match service by replacing them with the clean versions of the same songs.

According to a report in Cult of Mac, confirmed in tests by Mashable, songs uploaded to the service with explicit lyrics are automatically replaced by the clean version of the song.

iTunes Match is an optional service that costs $25 a year. It matches songs in your iTunes library with high-quality versions on Apple's servers, and lets you play and download your choice of those songs to your iPhone, iPod or iPad.

In Mashable's test, a ripped copy of Jay-Z's The Black Album (with explicit lyrics) was uploaded to iTunes Match, where it was promptly replaced by the clean version. Cult of Mac found the problem affected songs by Jay-Z, Kanye West and Ice Cube.

The problem does not seem to affect music that was actually bought on iTunes.

According to 9to5Mac, a reader contacted Eddy Cue, Apple's Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services, about this issue, and received a response from one of his engineers. The email acknowledged the existence of the problem, and said Apple was working on a fix.

Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps a record of where you go -- and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised.

The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program.

For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple's iOS 4 update to the phone's operating system, released in June 2010.

Apple has made it possible for almost anybody -- a jealous spouse, a private detective -- with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you've been, said Pete Warden, one of the researchers.

Although mobile networks already record phones' locations, it is only available to the police and other recognised organisations following a court order under the Regulation of Investigatory Power Act.

Warden and Allan have set up a web page which answers questions about the file, and created a simple downloadable application to let Apple users check for themselves what location data the phone is retaining.

The Guardian has confirmed that 3G-enabled devices including the iPad also retain the data and copy it to the owner's computer.

Open Rights Group and Tor have established that UK mobile networks such as Vodafone, O2 and 3 are blocking UK users' access to Tor's primary website (meaning the  Tor Project website, rather than connections to the Tor network) on pre-paid contractless accounts.

Tor helps people stay anonymous online. Some examples of how it has been used include those trying to avoid oppressive state censorship in places such as Iran, through to abuse victims in the UK.

There is a blog post by Jacob Appelbaum with more technical details about the blocking on UK mobile networks over at the Tor blog.

Searching for torproject.org reveals that it is blocked because it falls into the category of anonymiser. (Orange also say that they block content that falls into the anonymiser category - but it does not seem that Tor is blocked on Orange.) It's unlikely that mobile operators are targeting Tor, and more likely that anonymisation tools generally are blocked.

It was initially established that Tor was blocked initially through the new tool blocked.org.uk. openrightsgroup.org are asking for help in monitoring how blocking on mobile networks works by reporting when you come across incorrectly applied blocks.

Open Rights Group will be meeting with mobile operators over the next few weeks to talk about making sure that they can both help parents manage their children's mobile Internet use and avoid clumsy implemented blocking. Some are better at aspects of this than others (Orange provide an overview of the categories they block, for example.) But none implement a transparent and clear policy that puts users in charge.

Open Rights Group (ORG) are researching into the accuracy of the website blocking employed by mobile phone companies. The group wrote in its newsletter:

Last month, we asked ORG supporters to help us find sites that were being blocked by the default Adult filter on their mobile phones. Lots of you replied and asked to get involved. And thanks to that extraordinary team - we've launched a tool to report what sites are being blocked and by whom.

We are getting regular reports and testing blocks on every mobile network. We're seeing just how bad mobile blocking is, and how bad the networks are at dealing with complaints. Forums and joke sites get banned. So do churches. Some MPs want to extend default adult censorship to Internet at home as well: but we are already seeing how bad it is on mobile networks. ORG has already been invited to talk to O2 about their systems, as a result of this campaign.

Report blocked websites at blocked.org.uk

Meanwhile thank to a reader who wrote to MelonFarmers:

Just to let you know; the mobile network Three are blocking access to your site through their 3G networks - The site works fine on Wi-Fi, but on 3G you get asked to contact Three to get a pin to unblock the site, as they have it listed as an Adult content site.

They charge 99p to allow access to adult sites (And it's not straightforward, takes a while to find the right place to do it.). 

They have also blocked Movie-Censorship.com, same reason as above.