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Russia Proposes Banning Foul Language On the Internet
eldavojohn writes "In a country where it's illegal to insult a government official, State Duma Deputy Yelena Mizulina has proposed an amendment to ban swearing on social networks, bulletin boards and all websites. The website would be blocked if the offending material had not been removed within 24 hours. The name of the law this would be added to? "On the protection of children from information harmful to their health and development." Mizulina's title in regards to this legislation? Chairwoman of the Committee on Family, Women and Children (No joke!). Of course, Yelena Mizulina is no stranger to unwarranted censorship as she was behind the law banning gay propaganda to minors and invoked laws to try to silence critics on twitter. The article also notes, 'United Russia deputy Vitaly Milonov put forward a similar initiative on 25 July. He proposed to tighten control over social networks and allow people to dating sites through their passports.'"
In Soviet Russia, foul language bans you!
How is that not the present?
Be careful before joking on the Internet. In the US that is enough to send you to jail.
Go F**k Yourself. And, after that, Go s**k your own d**k
I think you might need to get some of the crap out of your keyboard. Your "U", "I" and "C" keys seem to be outputting asterisks for some reason.
I can see the future of the internet. There will always be somebody in authority wanting to ban something.
It will also be nothing but teletubbies. Plus, you get an award for logging in.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
That's just because his password contains u, c, and i.
- we just use bad words as ordinary speech (My russkie matom ne rugaemsya - my matom razgovarivaem).
And all this curse-banning circus has the only purpose that isn't exposed: To promote Internet filters that will be (and are) used for any purpose THEY like. No wonder that I2P NetDB contains more Russian nodes than any other country's.
Anonymous Cowards proclaiming their freedom to swear and not even daring to spell out "fuck" properly. Cunts.
News sites should quit doing this, Russia is a land mass and can not ban anything, the asshats in the State Duma otoh might come up with crap like this.
'USA thinks it should invade North Korea'
See how that works, propagandist news style that is 99% lie.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
How would Russians communicate without cursing?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
"The website would be blocked if the offending material had not been removed within 24 hours. "
Snowden better get his shit straight soon. He's not going to be able to reach anything but fuzzy kitten websites within a couple weeks and even then... one bad translation of "Pussy" and there goes lolcats.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
So, let's pretend for a moment that banning foul language isn't completely ridiculous, but a worthy goal from Russian government. There's still a practical problem... how?
First of all, the censorsh... (oops, "child protection") department will need to monitor consistently all sites in the Russosphere, and maybe some in the Anglosphere. Some of those won't reside in Russian Federation, and RF's gov asking the responsible countries' govs for info about the criminal swearing scum will at least result in a "lolshto" (lol, what?) from the other govs.
Second, does Mizulina really think this is feasible? How? Censors? Well, good luck, they would need all Russian tech-savvy population for that... (exactly the ones they want to control).
Filters? Hell, it's hard to make those for Latin-based languages, but almost impossible for Cyrillic-based ones! Let's say you ban a swear word in Russian (I would use examples, but /. filters all Cyrillic letters). They would need to filter the word itself, anny misspell (intentional or not), different transliterations to Latin, Volapük encoding (a leetspeak-like transliteration using Latin letters that resemble Cyrillic ones), plus, any tactics the internet use regardless of language to avoid filters (like writing pr0n, FML, phuck...).
To show the infeasibility of that, I used a three-letters swearing, khuj ("dick") as example. Just on top of my mind, I got twelve variations - you can bet any Russian native can bring a dozen more. (Here: http://pastebin.com/bcH2bg2S ).
Third and last: if they do manage to make a comprehensible list of swear words with all the variations, just imagine the amount of false positives on an international scale - like Russian gov annoying Brazilian one because someone wrote "curva" in a fucking blog! (just "curve" in Portuguese, but an acceptable transliteration for kurva ["whore"] in Russian).
Frankly... I'm not worried with this censorship being implemented at all, but rather, the intentions behind it.
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All this internet censorship of foul language, gratuitous sex and graphic violence (possibly all at the same time) is really just HBO's latest scheme to stop people torrenting Game of Thrones...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
If you ban all curse words then people will simply invent new curse words and, most likely, words that you can't ban. Or words that if they ban them have hilarious side effects. Like, say, Putin.
Go putin yourself. You're such a putin. Your mother is such a putin.
Anonymous Cowards proclaiming their freedom to swear and not even daring to spell out "fuck" properly. Cunts.
But that's how they spell it in their country. D*mned arrogant *mericans! Don't even have the letter "*" in their alphabet!
At least he didn't spell out l*wy*r.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Sorry but men that protect their childen are systematically incarcerated here. Especially if the criminals are from Chechnya (remember Tsarnaev).
I am my 15 year old son's friend. We share common interests (computers, video games, technology, etc.) and so we get along great. But his computer is in the basement right next to mine and it's going to be that way until he moves out. It has worked well, and while I did have parental control software on it when he was younger, I removed all of it and gave him admin access a couple years ago. Raise them right, give them some freedom, but supervise, and it all works out. Can he access porn when I'm not around? Sure. But at 15 1/2 I'm not too worried about it.
At 15 1/2, I'd be worried if he didn't try to access porn...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
We nearly had it far worse than this. In 1996, a law was passed called the Communications Decent Act. Initial drafts made any ISP where a packet of someone writing "fuck" criminally liable for the traffic (it made all ISPs considered as content makers, thus they "owned" any traffic coming from their peerings). The final draft made it a Federal crime of 2-10 years to use profanity.
The law never saw a day of enforcement. It was soon struck down by a lower court, then killed forever by a 7-2 verdict by SCOTUS.
So, it did happen here in a worse way than any of this ever even dreamed.
Hasn't this been tried about a million times before, with the same result every single time? That's where 7334 came from, after all, to get around word filters. Are they going to ban euphemisms, abbreviations, innuendo, and implications as well? Didn't work before, won't work this time. They may as well just ban the internet entirely.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I don't curse. Ever. (Yes, I know I'm a freak of nature.) However, even *I* see this as a horrible thing. Why if people curse it's their responsibility. I'm also the parent of young kids and the fact that people curse online is the least of my concerns when my kids go online. (Higher up on the list are people who would try to scam them or harm them in some way.)
Once Russia bans curse words, I predict a rise in "alternative" curse words. Instead of saying "the F word", they could say Frell. Instead of "the S word", they could say Scrap. Kind of like how the producers of MASH weren't allowed to use the word "virgin" in one episode so, in their next episode, they had someone say he was from the "Virgin Islands." People will rebel and find ways around the system. Then either the system will need to expand to include all possible words that could be used as curse words (pretty much the entire dictionary) or it will become so ineffective as to be useless for its intended purpose.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
An oldie, yet very apropos, from Artemy Lebedev of the OLED keyboard fame.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.