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Great Firewall of UK Blocks Game Patch Because of Substring Matches

Posted by Soulskill on from the that'sextremely-stupid dept.

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."

5 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I do not understand. I just can not understand.

    China is a communist country, a country in which the regime is NOT elected.

    They have their "Great Firewall" in place in order to protect their totalitarian regime.

    Why in the world the UK, with a supposedly "ELECTED" and "DEMOCRATIC" government, want to follow China in erecting their "Great Firewall" ??

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    1. Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What US has is not a "firewall" per se, but the effect would, at the end of the day, be similar.

      By tapping into everybody's phone, email and whatnot, the US government is sending out a message to all (including the hundreds of millions of the American citizens) that they better be careful of what they wrote/talk (or even think), or they will be subject to very very close scrutiny.

      Thus, what available in the USA is akin to "censorship via intimidation".

      --
      Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    2. Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... by pavon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Secondly it's entirely voluntary. It's not even "opt-out". You have to make an actual choice whether to enable it or not during setup.

      Not for long: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

    3. Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... by Immerman · · Score: 3, Interesting

      By that logic every government that collects taxes is totalitarian, and you've rendered all further discussion pointless. And you don't need invasive knowledge to get a good first-approximation of communism - very few people have needs outside the norm, excepting medical care. Socialize medicine, education, transportation,etc., and divide the remainder of the Net Domestic Product equally among everyone. Hell, want to quickly impose psuedo-communism a little capitalistic motivation? Just tax everyone 90%, and then distribute the tax revenue equally. On average nothing would change, but most people would be far better off.

      Nobody said anything about taking money from anyone - in fact in an ideal communist economy there would be no money to take. Need food, go get some. Need health care, go get some. Don't want to work to support the system, expect to be in some way excised from society.

      It's that last one that gets me, and why I think socialism is more promising as it allows for more personal freedom in a self-regulating manner. I happen to think society is infected by hideously wasteful memes and choose to work far less than the norm, because I don't actually need all the extra cruft to be happy, and working to earn it detracts dramatically from the time in which I can enjoy my life without providing any consummate benefits. That becomes problematic in economic systems where everything is shared equally.

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      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    4. Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... by Immerman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Um, the Soviet union probably isn't he best example for anything related to communism - it's practically the poster child for someone cynically waving the communist flag in order to seize power.

      As for the rest, I don't see that it necessarily follows. Nothing about communism says it has to be the government doing things, it could as easily be people pursuing their own projects with the proceeds being shared around. Coming from a capitalistic model you could effectively tax all personal income at 100% and then distribute it equally. Obviously we'd need to come up with something a bit less corruptible than modern corporate charters for less-than-government-level collaboration, but I think that's probably doable. It wouldn't quite be "real" communism, but it would be a lot closer than anything yet attempted.

      Still, I suspect socialism is a better system in most regards, at least until such time as automation largely eliminates the need for human labor.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.