Great Firewall of UK Blocks Game Patch Because of Substring Matches 270
Sockatume writes "Remember the fun of spurious substring matches, AKA the Scunthorpe problem? The UK's advanced 'intelligent' internet filters do. Supposedly the country's great new filtering regime has been blocking a patch for League of Legends because some of the filenames within it include the substring 'sex.' Add one to the list of embarrassing failures for the nation's new mosaic of opt-out censorship systems, which have proven themselves incapable of distinguishing between abusive sites and sites for abuse victims, or sites for pornography versus sites for sexual and gender minorities."
Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Same shit, different team.
Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because apparently if children see breasts, vaginas and penises, the whole fabric of British society will collapse.
Reminds me of... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Say the word "nipple" to the average yank in games chat, gets usually a warning by yanky moderators... Even tho "ingame content is unrated".
Apparently Yanks don't have nipples.
One thing for sure, they sure don't have balls.. Other wise they would stand up and defend their constitution, but no they so far take it laying down for the past decade yet spout on forums about "one more straw and we will huff and puff... and eat more fries"
Wrong name? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, "Great Firewall of UK" is clumsy and doesn't doesn't make much sense in context. Perhaps we should call it "Hadrian's Firewall"?
Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is unfair to paint all the "yanks" as ball-less.
Some of them still have their intact.
For example: Edward Snowden. That guy did what he had to do in order to dislodge enough information from the secretive (and apparently illegal) activities within the American government, and then revealed the information to the world.
Censorship is tyranny by definition. (Score:5, Insightful)
When ever you have people making decisions for the "greater good", they end up making those decisions for their own greater good. So it doesn't matter in the long run what they are censoring, the act of Law in doing so is the objective. The fact that it is not doing what was intended doesn't matter, it just means the censorship must be "refined", and the filters need to be "fixed".
Liberty would mean removal of the filters and government intervention from an act of free will, i.e. looking at sexual content on line for example, and an act of responsibility from people, i.e. monitoring their children's internet access. This will never do for Big Government tyrants, because this would imply that people actually have their own freedoms that are not "given" to them by the government, and their free will and responsibility is more important than the governments ability to intervene.
Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why in the world the UK, with a supposedly "ELECTED" and "DEMOCRATIC" government, want to follow China in erecting their "Great Firewall" ??
Why the "supposedly"? Do you have evidence that the UK's election results were not legitimate?
The British government is enacting this censorship policy with the full support of millions and millions of people who don't post on Slashdot.
I certainly don't support the filtering, but the fact that it's opt-out makes it VERY different from China's firewall.
Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The world will be destroyed with the best intentions at heart.
Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Censorship is easy (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a good thing that there's no way to advertise a porn site with obvious keywords like Porn or Sex. In Britain, users should only be able to see safe sites featuring things like tasty Cream Pies and beautiful Pearl Necklaces and innocent Rimming sites to teach kids how to enjoy decorative rims. It's easy to filter out the bad stuff by looking for the obvious bad words.
Hysteria from the Guardian (Score:5, Insightful)
So the Guardian is doing the Daily Mail thing of nabbing articles from reddit, and accepting them at face value without any actual research. No wonder traditional newspapers are dying.
Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Democracy is orthogonal to communism. One is a type of government, while the other a type of economy. You can have a democratic communist country, just as you can have a totalitarian capitalist economy. The fact that we have had so many totalitarian "communist" countries is simply because waving a "communist" flag is a great way to attract the downtrodden masses to support your overthrow of the current regime.
In no sane sense can China actually be considered communist, even ignoring the capitalistic reforms they've been experimenting with. From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs, right? That's not particularly compatible with a group of elites that are radically wealthier than the general populace. From wikipedia
Communism (from Latin communis – common, universal) is a classless, moneyless,[1][2] and stateless social order structured upon common ownership of the means of production
Ergo, if you have a ruling class it's not communism.
In fact arguably the single core tenant of communism is communal ownership of the means of production - and the only way government ownership is compatible with that ideal is if the people own the government. And so far democracy is the only model that even attempts that, for all that it usually fails badly in its efforts. Therefore, a strong democracy is a necessary precursor for communism.
Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... (Score:2, Insightful)
In the UK the Internet is being censored on a massive scale, they have to ask the government for permission to look at porn, and you can be arrested for insulting Islam or saying something racist. Don't pretend that the US even remotely close to the same.
It's all over the Western society, including what is happening right here, in /.
Don't believe me ?
Try posting a comment which is anti-Liberal and/or anti-Islamic and watch for yourself how your comment would end up be modded into the oblivion.
Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The British populace voted to allow minorities to dictate policy when they rejected AV.
AV wasn't the be all and end all, it didn't create proportional representation, but it did at least force MPs to have to cater to at least half of their constituents wish to some degree.
That's far better than the status quo our country voted to retain, whereby as little as what, 20% of the population for a constituency, i.e. the Daily Mail readers can be enough in some constituencies to dictate the voice of the entire constituency.
Oh and really, the coalition is the most representative government in decades anyway, a compromise government with 49% of the popular vote is still a far higher proportion than the proportion of combined support of any other ruling party in decades by a margin of as much as about 15%. Contrary to popular belief, the Lib Dems have neutered Tory policy (i.e. blocking the Interception Modernisation Programme, bringing tuition fees from the £12,000 the Tories wanted to £9,000, blocking removal of the highest tax rate) etc.
So yes, our populace has got exactly what it voted for. We still got exactly what we elected through a horribly broken system of un-representation that our populace agree to continue.