TheTechErra.com Podcast - Episode 12 Censorship, Patents, SiriN1ght, GTA 3 for iOS Android1577
By: Barbara Poplits
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TheTechErra.com Podcast - Episode 12 Censorship, Patents, SiriN1ght, GTA 3 for iOS & Android1577 - Video
By Jean-Paul Marthoz
All around the planet, authoritarian rulers and their officials hold forth about the "responsibility of the press."
Most of the time, their preaching and talk of the need for codes of conduct or ethical guidelines serve to clip the wings of independent journalists and tame the press. Their invocation of lofty notions of patriotism, honor, reputation, and respect for authority are meant to deter investigations and exposs of their abuses of power or ill-acquired wealth.
Ethics are also brandished when the press covers sensitive subjects, such as religion, nationalism, or ethnicity. Under the pretext of protecting minorities against hate speech, or of preventing incitement to violence, governments often strive to censor stories that are in the public interest and should be told.
In authoritarian countries, calls for journalists to exercise a sense of responsibility or decency are mostly code for censorship. In Egypt, after the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood-led government in July 2013, the new military-backed rulers immediately announced their intention to create a journalistic code of ethics and made its adoption a condition for lifting existing censorship.
In Ecuador, President Rafael Correa has been indulging in media bashing for years, calling journalists unethical, trash-talking, or liars. After his landslide re-election in February 2013, he warned, as reported by CPJ correspondent John Otis, that one thing that has to be fixed is the press, which totally lacks ethics and scruples. Correa has since fixed the press through a new communications law that severely restricts press freedom by establishing government regulation of editorial content and giving the authorities power to impose arbitrary sanctions on the press.
In June 2013, the Sri Lankan government tried to impose a new code of media ethics in order, according to Keheliya Rambukwella, the minister of mass media and information, to create a salutary media culture. Although the protests of national and international journalists associations forced the government to backtrack, some observers fear that the code might resurface. The media code was part of a sustained campaign to control the media and curtail dissent, Brad Adams, the Asia director for Human Rights Watch, told CPJ. Its vagueness would likely have led to greater self-censorship to avoid government retaliation. The code prohibited criticisms affecting foreign relations and content that promotes anti-national attitudes. It also forbade material against the integrity of the Executive, Judiciary and Legislature and warned against the publication of content that offends against expectations of the public morality of the country or tend to lower the standards of public taste and morality.
In Burundi, The discussions around the drafting of the new Press Law, which was promulgated in June 2013, constantly referred to the alleged ethical breaches of the press, Marie-Soleil Frre, a Brussels University researcher and author, told CPJ. Members of the ruling party repeated ad nauseam that journalists are biased, unfair, and indulge in defamation, lies and insults.
Authoritarian governments also have a way of playing up alleged ethical breaches when it fits their interests in order to discredit troublesome journalists and even to downplay physical assaults on reporters at work.
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Would-Be Repressors Brandish 'Ethics' as Justification ...
Microsoft denied censoring Chinese-language search results across the globe, but the group behind the accusation stood firm.
We can emphatically confirm that they are not, Microsofts senior director of Bing search engine Stefan Weitz said in a blog post addressing talk of political censorship.
Bing search results outside of China are not subject to and are not modified in any way based on Chinese law.
The US-based technology titan blamed the impression of censorship on a Chinese removal notification accidentally shown to people using a Bing Peoples Republic of China version outside of that country.
The message was displayed for Bing results suppressed for non-political reasons, such as barred images of abuse or spam, and had nothing to do with Chinese censors, according to Microsoft.
- Microsoft claim simply not true -
Cyber-censorship monitoring group Greatfire.org rejected the denial in an online post titled No error here: Microsoft deploying Chinese censorship on a global scale.
Microsofts assertion that search results are not altered outside of China are simply not true, Greatfire said in a point-by-point rebuttal to the companys explanation.
Greatfire referred to tests reportedly done by The Guardian newspaper, which did a Bing search on a Chinese government official embroiled in a corruption scandal and saw no Western news reports on the first results page.
A Google search in Chinese on the same name turned up an array of news stories, as did a similar Bing search in English, according to Greatfire.
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Site Last Updated 3:18 pm, Thursday
By Charles Recknagel, RFE/RL
When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took power in Iran 35 years ago on February 11, Iran's filmmakers had good reason to worry. The strict code of censorship ushered in by the Islamic Revolution convinced many that creativity and film were no longer compatible in Iran.
Yet today, despite the continuing strict censorship rules governing them, Iran's artistic films -- as opposed to the country's commercial-release films -- are universally acclaimed as among the most innovative and important participants in international film festivals.
The filmmakers' ability to overcome the suffocation of censorship, while still working under it, is one of the rare successes in the daily struggle ordinary Iranians wage to have greater personal freedom under an authoritarian regime. At the same time, the battle against censorship has had a great influence in forging the look and style of Iranian art films, which have earned a place of distinction in the eyes of film lovers worldwide.
Many authoritarian governments impose strict political restrictions on artists. But the Islamic republic's censorship code is unusually strict because it includes social restrictions as well. The social restrictions particularly limit how relationships between men and women -- one of the most fundamental subjects of the arts -- can be depicted.
The red lines forbid almost all physical gestures of romantic love, limit the kinds of issues that can be discussed, and bar women from singing or dancing on screen. They also require actresses to wear the hijab -- clothing that masks the figure and covers the hair -- for indoor as well as outdoor scenes, even though in reality Iranian women generally dress at home as they wish and don't cover their hair.
Jamsheed Akrami, a professor of film at William Paterson University in New Jersey, says that the censorship code is so burdensome that the first talent any serious filmmaker must possess is the ability to get around it.
"Whenever you are under strict restrictions, you try to find out ways of getting around them to still communicate your messages. To the credit of the Iranian filmmakers, they have become very adept at skirting the censorship codes," Akrami says. "In fact, as an Iranian filmmaker your most prized possession is your ability to undermine the censorship codes and find ways of getting around them. Your artistic gift is like a secondary requirement."
The Art Of Allusion
One way to get around censorship is to allude to subjects rather than address them directly. Akrami -- whose own recent documentary "A Cinema of Discontent" explores how Iranian directors such as Jafar Panahi (maker of "The Circle," an independent film banned from public screening in Iran ), Bahman Ghobadi (maker of "No One Knows About Persian Cats," an underground film never screened in Iran ), and the Oscar-winning Asghar Farhadi operate under censorship -- says the art of allusion has become the hallmark of Iran's art cinema.
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Islamic Revolution Can't Upstage Iranian Cinema
Microsoft has been accused of censoring Bings Chinese-language search results for people in the US, in the same way that it does for those based in China, according to activists.
The claims were made by The Guardian newspaper, which said that several activist blogs had reported seeing very different results on Bing for queries made in Chinese, as opposed to those made in English. Searching for controversial terms such as Dalai Lama, June 4 protests and Falun Gong, among others, throws up pages for organizations and groups that are allied with the Chinese government, whilst similar searches in English are very different, and much less pro-China.
The Guardian reports:
Searches first conducted by anti-censorship campaigners at FreeWeibo, a tool that allows uncensored search of Chinese blogs, found that Bing returns radically different results in the US for English and Chinese language searches on a series of controversial terms.
A Chinese language search for the Dalai Lama () on Bing is lead by a link to information on a documentary compiled by CCTV, Chinas state-owned broadcaster. This is followed by two entries from Baidu Baike, Chinas heavily censored Wikipedia rival run by the search engine Baidu. The results are similar on Yahoo, whose search is powered by Bing.
The Guardian carried out a similar experiment on Google Search, and found that controversial terms returned similar results in both languages.
Not surprisingly, Microsoft was quick to deny that Bings been censoring its search results, saying that the discrepancies were due to an error in its system:
Weve conducted an investigation of the claims raised by Greatfire.org., said Stefan Weitz, Senior Director Bing, in a statement to Business Insider:
First, Bing does not apply Chinas legal requirements to searches conducted outside of China. Due to an error in our system, we triggered an incorrect results removal notification for some searches noted in the report but the results themselves are and were unaltered outside of China.
Microsoft is a signatory to the Global Network Initiative, which is an effort by a multi-stakeholder group of companies, civil society organizations (including human rights and press freedom groups), investors and academics to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy on the Internet. As part of our commitment to GNI, Microsoft follows a strict set of internal procedures for how we respond to specific demands from governments requiring us to block access to content. We apply these principles carefully and thoughtfully to our Bing version for the Peoples Republic of China.
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Bings Chinese-language censorship balls-up is huge PR disaster