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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."

2 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 !