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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."

4 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: 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.