Posts Tagged by censorship
Ding Dong! The Witch is dead – wrongfully censored?
| April 17, 2013 | Posted by Ellys Sugarman under national |
As I’m sure you are all aware the Iron Lady (Margaret Thatcher) has passed away, following a stroke in her suite in the Ritz on the 8th of April. Well the news spread like wildfire – once again showing the effectiveness of social media for spreading information though it were a virus. Of course the reaction was immediate, some were celebrating others mourned and many more people just took the piss. The song ‘Ding Dong! The Witch is dead’ became stuck in many people’s heads and while celebrating Thatcher’s death made me uncomfortable, I admit I was singing it. Only a few hours after her death it was announced that she would be getting a state funeral. The uproar was instant and… more
Tom Daley’s Twitter abuse: policing Twitter undermines freedom of speech
| August 1, 2012 | Posted by Jeremy Dobson under culture, national |
When Tim Berners-Lee appeared at the sublime Olympics opening ceremony, one salient phrase (referring to the web) circled around the 70,000 seats: “THIS IS FOR EVERYONE.” That means the Twitter “trolls” and cretins too. On July 30th, when Olympic diver Tom Daley marginally missed out on a medal, one such cretin under the Twitter name @Rileyy_69 decided to rile Daley with the hateful message: “You let your dad down i hope you know that.” A disgusting thing to say from a terrible person; but, if we are serious about protecting free speech, he does have the right to say it. Freedom of speech is an absolute right; it can’t be tossed aside or diluted when somebody says something nasty. Politicians often… more
TSR on tech: your weekly news summary
| July 15, 2012 | Posted by Elliot Davies under TSR on tech |
Welcome back to TSR on tech! This week we’ve got all sorts of exciting news, from the sudden sale of Digg right through to a nuclear-powered underwater deep-sea Chinese mining station. Quite seriously. Plus there’s everything in between: funding for GitHub, funding from Bing, patent settlements, activity from Anonymous, announcements about the next two major operating systems, and much more. Read on! Business Digg, the social news site that was once valued at $175mn and was seen as one of the main drivers of internet traffic, has been sold to Betaworks, a technology development company, for just $500,000 plus equity. The site fell from favour after a series of missteps in the way it engaged its community, and since its… more
Where’s the humanity?
| February 11, 2012 | Posted by James Harle under international |
Two-year-old Wang Yue died on October 21st last year. The toddler wandered out of a market, and CCTV footage shows her being struck by a van, then subsequently run over by a second van, all while a succession of 18 passers-by ignore her. The event sparked controversy worldwide as people looked at China and asked: where is the humanity? A week later, a young boy was run over by a lorry driver in Luzhou, western China. The lorry driver stopped, and proceeded to reverse over the child, in order to avoid paying his medical bills by killing him outright. Some people have claimed that Wang Yue’s death was equally precipitated by financial motives: that the passers-by were, in some cases, afraid to help her… more
SOPA and PROTECT IP
| December 23, 2011 | Posted by Elliot Davies under international, technology |
Imagine a world in which a government has the power to cut off access to foreign websites with a snap of its fingers. Imagine a world where a private company can use the country’s warped legal system to blockade a website’s finances without due process or any chance for objection. Imagine a world where the internet, envisioned as a free and global communications network, lies broken because politics, greed and naivety came first. Sound like a dystopia? Perhaps it sounds like an extended version of modern day China, Iran or Malaysia. It might come as a surprise, then, to hear that the Congress of the United States of America is considering legislation which would allow all of the above – and it’s… more
