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Great Firewall of UK Blocks Game Patch Because of Substring Matches
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."
Same shit, different team.
Because apparently if children see breasts, vaginas and penises, the whole fabric of British society will collapse.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
In a word, control. It doesn't matter what flavour of politics you have, there are groups that want to control you, for your own good, of course. Some seek it to gain control as a dictator, but by far the most dangerous, are the ones that actually believe that their beliefs imposed upon society are for the betterment of society. Those are the ones who are stupid enough get their ambitions and capabilities mixed up.
The world will be destroyed with the best intentions at heart.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
There's really no evidence that this is the case. Just speculation. PC Pro actually did some journalism and found that the actual ISPs had received no complaints
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.
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.