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Stupid Censorship, Stupid Security
The
2003 Jefferson Muzzle
"winners" are out. This year's crop starts with John Ashcroft and the U.S. Congress, and works its way down through the school board that voted to put Harry Potter on the restricted shelf. Innovation in censorship deserves recognition, read and enjoy. And in other stupid news,
the winners of the
Stupid Security Competition
have been announced. I like that I'm being protected from tea. It makes me feel safe.
Slashdot should get an award for "innovation in censorship" for its moderation system that (usually) succeeds in blocking posts like the parent from being seen by most people.
was a porn filter in the library of the university of Essex. But they did it bad and the university homepage become filtered
Most Annoyingly Stupid Award
Wrong... It should be awarded to this guy, when explaining the security in Iraq.
</joke>
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Ned: And Harry Potter... and all his wizard friends... went STRAIGHT to hell for practicing witchcraft!
Todd: Yay!
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
It is interesting how many educational institutions get the award. Maybe they will finally learn something.
Is there some kind of a Moore's law for Censorship? Something like "For every disgusting act of censorship, in 12 to 18 months there will be one twice as disgusting?"
some other thoughts:
People who are easily offended deserve to be... a lot!
The real war against liberty for all.
Rev. Lovejoy: I've got to go and burn some Harry Potter books before children discover the joy of reading.
I like that I'm being protected from tea. It makes me feel safe.
Read the article. They stopped an airplane passenger because he was carrying a box of gunpowder tea. After some investigating and discussing, they decided he could, in fact, carry the tea, but they had to impound the box with the evil word "gunpowder". So, they transferred the tea to a plastic bag, after which the passenger proceded to the plane.
So, no, they're not protecting you. They let the gunpowder tea onboard, those incompetent fools! What next? Bazooka Joe gum?
I'm telling you, what we need is more restrictions. I'm glad these gentlemen got the recognition they so richly deserve.
stop calling every administrative attempt to restrict a display of objectional art to children censorship.
/'sen(t)-s&-ri[ng], 'sen(t)s-ri[ng]/
One entry found for censor.
Main Entry: 2censor
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): censored; censoring
Date: 1882
: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable
Main Entry: censorship
1 a : the institution, system, or practice of censoring b : the actions or practices of censors; especially : censorial control exercised repressively
Why would we stop calling the act of censoring "censorship"?
You can't take the sky from me...
A.C. for obvious reasons.
In 2001 I was interning as a system/network administrator for a publishing house (hint: textbooks). It was (alas) a mostly NT shop for the typists, editors, etc. "grunt workers." The graphics and design teams were mostly using Macs. We had an NT box with 5 30 gig drives serving as a file server.
One of the C-level pointy hairs must have logged into the file server one day and realized that most of the space was used up. He sent a memo to our department (Technical Operations) saying how he found a large number of TIF, EPS, and PSD files on the drives taking up "inordinate amounts" of space and that they need to be deleted immediately. I kid you not. Dunno whether he thought they were horrific pirate music files or what, but they were taking up space so by god they needed to go.
My manager printed out a copy of the memo, handed it to me, smiling, and said "write a batch file to do what he wants." I did. Ten minutes later, the fileserver had about 80 gigs more storage space.
All of us on the floor laughed our asses off most of the day.
The night shift spent most of their time restoring backups (fortunately most of the artsy folks had their own backups as well) cursing us for carring out the order.
The C-level never contacted TechOps again.
Another possible option is Gentoo Linux. Gentoo makes it easy to circumvent censorship by compiling directly from the source, so that the programs you run are optimized for the platform they run upon. It's very difficult to censor, say, a movie, if the DVD player that's playing it has support for MMX and was compiled using -funroll-loops.
photographers would go out of their way to include them in a shot.
Only because the polititians were tits to begin with.
> It wasn't because he wanted to cover up the
> statues, it was to provide a better backdrop for
> the cameras.
What a great idea! I'm sure he wanted only to ensure that the press had better access to him. I can see future moves by Ashcroft:
1. Deletion of the Bill of Rights: it doesn't take away anyone's rights; it's to enable better clarification of the rights they have. "Too many people couldn't remember all the rights anyway. This will help people because all they have to know is that I'll remind them of the rights they have."
2. Allowing secret court proceedings to gain a search warrent to force a public library to divulge the reading list of its patrons and forbid the library from informing said patrons of any particular instance. The only reason for this is so the F.B.I. can let us know if our books are overdue. And if libraries told their patrons it may unnecessarily worry their "pretty little heads"
Wow, so he is from the government and he really is here to help!
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Yeah, that appears to be one of the differences between you and Mason Williams.