China’s Great Firewall deleted 350 million pieces of harmful information as part of that government’s 2010 campaign to clean up the Internet by shutting what it judged to be harmful sites. – Chinese government officials touted the success of its extensive system of
filtering and blocking Internet content in 2010, saying the Internet is
quot;cleaner than before. quot;
More than 350 million pages, or quot;pieces of harmful information, quot;
which includes text, pictures and videos…
A fundamental law of human nature is that people of every color, creed and nationality want to see boobies as much as possible. In their effort to control all aspects of life in their countries, governments with too much power often seek to limit people’s access to good old-fashioned boobage.
The decision by popular online marketplace Craigslist to remove the Adult Services section sparks a debate as to whether the company’s free speech rights are under fire. – Following pressure from state governments and conservative and religious
groups, the popular online marketplace Craigslist placed a black quot;Censored quot;
bar over the section previously labeled quot;Adult Services, quot; sparking a
heated debated online and in the media as to whether the co…
You may not be entirely surprised to hear this, but we’ve just heard that a beta Q&A service has been blocked in China. Google’s “Q&A†service was specifically designed and intended for Chinese users. The way it works is similar to other many other Q&A sites on the internet – users can post a question [...]
Great news for users of Google in China. Eric Schmidt, big boss of Google, has reported that Google may be granted a renewed license to operate in the country.
The news comes as a surprise to many, as previously the Chinese government had been redirecting Chinese Google users to an alternative search engine site based in [...]
As Google and China continue to disagree over censorship through China’s Firewall the humble photocopier becomes the next security concern for the People’s Republic of China.
Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wants the U.S. and European governments to nudge China to cease its censorship of the Internet because it restricts free trade. The Internet sector is vital to Google’s hopes for international expansion. China boasts more than 400 million Web users and Baidu is the leading search engine in mainland China. Censorship in the form of the Great Firewall of China has been a long-standing complaint about China from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other companies looking to extend their tendrils in Asia. – Google wants the U.S. and European governments to nudge
China to cease its censorship of the Internet, the search engine’s lead lawyer
told the Associated Press in Brussels.
David
Drummond, chief legal officer and senior vice president of corporate
development at Google, June 9 said that China…
News Analysis: Web censorship is giving the Chinese government a black eye. Time and again, it has said that its practices are due to its desire to work in the best interest of the country. But it needs to learn a thing or two about Web censorship before it even considers continuing its strategy. – The Chinese government issued a quot;white paper quot; this week
to highlight its stance on Web censorship. The country discussed why it blocks
Websites and why it will continue to block sites that include content it
deems is aimed at quot;subverting state power, undermining national unity,
…
By David Chazan
BBC News, Paris
A 27-year-old rapper from Normandy, nicknamed by some the "French Eminem", is at the centre of a political storm over censorship in France.
OrelSan has seen 10 of his concerts cancelled recently after the former Socialist presidential candidate, Segolene Royal, and other politicians complained that his lyrics encouraged violence against women.
"If you censor this, you could end up censoring many respected authors"
Stephane Davet
Le Monde
Ms Royal even threatened to withdraw the public subsidy from one prestigious festival, Les Francofolies in La Rochelle, in her capacity as head of Poitou-Charentes regional council.
The organisers dropped OrelSan, whose real name is Aurelien Cotentin, from the bill shortly afterwards, complaining that Ms Royal had "positioned herself as a master-blackmailer".
The move led the governing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) of President Nicolas Sarkozy to accuse Ms Royal of attacking freedom of expression, and of "intolerable" interference.
‘Fiction’
Ms Royal and other critics were particularly outraged over a song by the 26-year-old called Sale Pute, roughly translated as "Dirty Bitch", which is about a man who wants to break the bones of his unfaithful girlfriend.
"I hate you, I want you to die a slow death. I want you to become pregnant and lose the baby," he chants in one verse. "You are just a pig who should go straight to the slaughter house."
But OrelSan says the song, which he no longer performs in public, was never meant to be taken seriously.
"This song tells the story of a man who sees his girlfriend cheating, comes back home, drinks and writes her an e-mail in which he insults her," he says.
"But it’s a fiction. It’s nothing real. I didn’t write it about my ex-girlfriend or anything so you can’t really take the song personally. I play a role in it, that’s all."
"It’s like a book or a film about a murderer or a criminal," he adds.
Historical parallel
OrelSan’s new album, Perdu d’Avance, has been removed from public libraries in Paris because of concern over what feminist and women’s groups say are his sexist, homophobic and violent lyrics.
But the French Culture Minister, Frederic Mitterrand, nephew of the late President Francois Mitterrand, says OrelSan, like other artists, should be free to express himself and that his concerts should not have been cancelled.
Mr Mitterrand drew a parallel between the rapper and the 19th Century French poet, Arthur Rimbaud.
"Rimbaud wrote much more violent things that went on to become classics," he said.
However, Ms Royal said the rapper’s work was offensive to women and that the issue was not censorship.
Women’s groups argue that the law should be as tough on sexism as it is on racism.
Regional councillor Michelle Loup says OrelSan’s songs "are full of hatred and violence against women".
"If he wants to do that, OK, but we consider that public money shouldn’t finance it," she adds.
Ms Loup and other local politicians have led a lobbying effort to persuade local authorities to drop him from festivals which they are helping to finance.
Disaffected youth
But many commentators agree with the government that this comes dangerously close to censorship.
"Art doesn’t have to be politically correct," says Stephane Davet, a music journalist on the newspaper Le Monde. "If you censor this, you could end up censoring many respected authors."
"They want us to be exactly like them"
French youth
Mr Davet says politicians should try to tune into what rappers have to say about disaffected young people.
He points out that rappers were predicting riots in French suburbs long before they happened in 2005.
OrelSan, he says, "gives a very interesting description, a pretty dark description of a generation of frustrated, white trash kids, born with a PlayStation in their hands, spending their time on the internet, looking for sex websites, and one should listen to that instead of saying, we should censor him".
At the Gare de Lyon railway station in Paris, I came across groups of teenagers practising dance moves as if the station concourse were a studio or a gym.
Not surprisingly, they supported OrelSan, although several of them told me that they did not like their younger brothers and sisters to listen to rap songs with violent lyrics.
They said politicians did not try to understand their generation.
"They want us to be exactly like them," one youth told me. "They don’t try to help us and they want to take away our personality."
That is also a predicament recognised by OrelSan himself. In one of his less controversial songs, he raps: "Old folk don’t understand what’s going on in the heads of the young."
David Chazan’s report can be heard on BBC Radio 4′s PM programme from 1700 BST on 29 July.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
AT T says it has lifted a block it put on part of the notorious 4chan.org bulletin board. AT T says the block was a security move in response to a denial-of-service attack against one of its customers, but the incident has touched a nerve among those concerned about net neutrality and censorship.
– AT amp;T blocked portions of the 4chan.org bulletin board July 25 and 26 in
response to denial-of-service attacks against an AT amp;T customer,
touching off a debate on censorship and network neutrality.
In response to criticism, AT amp;T stressed that it moved against 4chan.org
because of the…
The TEDGlobal conference began its second day with views of the internet as a fragile network running on the kindness of strangers and as a force for spin and repression
The second day of the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford began with contrasting optimistic and pessimistic views of the internet.
Internet: The fragile but functional network of people
Jonathan Zittrain, who recently wrote the cautionary book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, decided to paint an optimistic view of the internet and its future.
Discussing the creators of the internet, he said that they built the foundation for this global network despite facing a huge difficulty:
[They had no money to build it] but they had an amazing freedom. They didn’t have to make any money from it. The internet has no business plan. There is no firm responsible for building it.
In many ways, the internet should not work. As late as 1992, IBM said that it wasn’t possible to build a corporate network using internet protocol.
Zittrain said the mascot of the internet is the bumble bee. It shouldn’t be able to fly, but a recently government-funded programme discovered how bees fly: They flap their wings really fast.
The internet works on a process that Zittrain compared to passing a beer to a person in a mosh pit. “This system relies on kindness and trust. This makes [the internet] rare and vulnerable.”
Wikipedia also shouldn’t work, according to Zittrain. “Wikipedia is an idea so profoundly stupid that even Jimbo [Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales] didn’t have it,” he said. Wikipedia was originally a way for editors of another project, Newpedia, to collaborate. But the backroom eventually took over the front room.
He showed how Wikipedians debate issues, and said that they are making their own law democratically. They decided to remove the real name of the boy who appeared in the Star War Kid YouTube video after his parents requested it.
“At all times Wikipedia is 45 minutes away from utter destruction. It’s a thin geeky line that keeps it going,” Zittrain said.
He believes that the lessons of how the internet works can applied to real world and also back to the technology of the internet itself.
I think that we can build architectures online so that such human requests are easier online. It represents human emotion, endeavour and impact. We can decide how we want to treat it.
Why iPods won’t topple dictators
From that optimistic view, Evgeny Morozov countered some of the cyber-utopian ideas that the internet, new media and technology were an unalloyed force for good and democracy.
Morozov, who is from Belarus, worked for an NGO using new media to promote democracy, but he found:
Dictatorships do not crumble so easily. Some get even more repressive.
He started studying how the internet could impede democracy. Cyber-utopians believe that with enough connectivity and devices that democracy will inevitably follow, he said. It was an assumption that underlies what he called “iPod liberalism” that everyone who owns an iPod must be a liberal.
If you believe ‘Drop iPods, not bombs’, the problem is that it confuses the intended versus actual uses of technology.
Governments are learning that censorship doesn’t work but spin does. They are actually encouraging people to share information online. Blogs, Twitter and Facebook actually allowed the Iranian authorities to gather open-source intelligence on networks of anti-government activists.
The KGB used to torture people for weeks to get that information.
Also, he said that while many assume that technology is a catalyst for change, it might also be an opiate for the masses. Governments can engage in meaningless exercises that allow their citizens to believe they have a voice when the exercise itself is meaningless or it gives a government a scapegoat – the public – if the policy fails.
For technology to really be an agent for change, he said we need to stop thinking about computers per capita and start thinking about empowering NGOs and other members of society.
Watch the opening five minutes of the film version of Alan Moore’s dystopian comic book. Plus, director Zack Snyder fights back at his critics and reveals how he almost cast Brad Pitt. Watchmen is out on DVD and Blu-ray on 27 July
It could have been so very different: Christian Bale as Dr Manhattan, the cyan superman of the Watchmen universe, Brad Pitt, perhaps, as Nite Owl, the liberal face of masked vigilantism. Who knows? Perhaps Angelina Jolie could have portrayed the slinky yet vulnerable Silk Spectre. Tom Cruise, in Collateral-style sociopath mode, might have made a passable Rorschach.
Zack Snyder is talking about an early conception of Watchmen, his adaptation of the seminal Alan Moore graphic novel, in which the various characters were to have been played by A-list Hollywoodlanders. The idea was to use the celebrity status of the actors to mirror the obsessive public scrutiny experienced by Watchmen’s “masks”, who exist in an alternate 1985 in which superheroes – of a sort – have been walking the streets for the past half century.
“It’s funny because early on we talked about doing a bigger, more sort of Ocean’s Eleven style cast,” says Snyder, on the phone from LA. “But the problem was that, as I was working on that concept, it was all about the irony of casting a movie like that, with big stars, so that the casting kind of commented on their roles.
“The truth is that it’s a difficult thing for actors to be that self aware. I think in the end it’s a perfect cast because they are those characters. I’m not sure it would have worked with, you know, Brad Pitt in the Nite Owl suit, or whatever. When you have people on screen that the audience doesn’t know so well, the characters have their own identity: it becomes its own thing.”
And that’s also what’s noticeable about Snyder’s version of Watchmen, out on DVD in the UK next week. It too has its own identity, one which transcends its roots in Moore’s original comic book. From the glorious, hyperreal montage that comprises the opening scene – as Bob Dylan’s Times They Are A-Changin’ serenades 50 years of alternative US history where masked vigilantes have changed the course of the 20th century – to the climactic denouement, rather different to Moore’s (pretty bonkers) ending, the film is resolutely Snyder’s own. Just as the original graphic novel represented a sea-change in comic book sensibilities, Snyder’s film bears little resemblance to any other comic book adaptation of recent times.
That may have been its downfall with the critics, who were not always kind, and it certainly didn’t help the movie’s box office, which failed to meet expectations of a giant, Dark Knight-style haul. Yet few could criticise Watchmen as the sort of hack job expected from a former commercials director with only two previous features under his belt (a remake of zombie classic Dawn of the Dead, and another comic book adaption, the notoriously gory 300). A significant minority labelled the movie a flawed work of genius.
“The thing I find fascinating about the whole way Watchmen was received is that 10% or less of the critics seemed to have actually read the graphic novel,” laughs Snyder. “I feel like a lot of them just went to Wikipedia. Because it really is not a movie, in a traditional sense. And if you try to analyse it in those terms – and not in terms of its relationship to pop culture – then you kind of miss the point.
“It’s a two-and-a-half hour R-rated movie, and there’s no precedent for that type of film becoming a huge blockbuster. What’s popular about The Dark Knight is that it’s a superhero movie at its core. When Batman puts on his costume, that’s badass: ‘Yeah Batman, go kick some ass’. Watchmen is an entirely different experience: it punishes the audience. It says: “Oh you like the Comedian? Oh, he’s a rapist, by the way.” From an intellectual standpoint that’s fun to do, but its offputting if you’re there to enjoy a movie that’s supposed to be a superhero movie.
“At the same time, I really wanted it to be marketed that way. I wanted people to think it’s going to be a standard superhero movie, and then they’re confronted by all these ideas. Because that’s what the graphic novel did to me when I read it. Someone said to me: ‘Hey you have to check out Watchmen, it’s really cool.’ And I read it, and I remember thinking: ‘OK, this is going to be a cool graphic novel, with superheroes.’ And then half way through – well less than half way – I found myself thinking: ‘What’s this? What’s happening here?’ And that was a cool experience for me, especially where I was in my graphic novel education. So I tried to bring that into the movie as much as I could.”
One area in which the film version surpasses the occasionally twee source material is in its all out action sequences, which are unrelentingly mucky and mesmeric, but surprisingly classy in their realisation. Snyder’s trademark slo-mo blends in nicely and there are no obvious, cringeworthy moments reminiscent of the classic “This is Sparta” sequence in 300. Along with the film-maker’s bloodthirstiness, it’s an aspect of his work that has seen Snyder criticised in some quarters. Is that something that bothers him?
“I wasn’t just going: ‘Oh we need more slo-mo here,’” he laughs. “I don’t have a sign or anything: ‘More slo-mo!’ I actually really restrained myself this time.
“It’s a little bit of grease – it kind of smooths everything out and makes everything look a little more graceful,” he adds. “The fun thing about Watchmen was to try and make those things that I love part of the movie, to make those techniques comment rather than just exist on their own as a cool device. I hope that’s what I did, because I felt like I was objective.”
One thing Snyder can be justly proud of is the performances he drew from the cast of Watchmen. Yet the director is happy to admit that the likes of Jackie Earle Haley, whose take on the morally absolute Rorschach brought him huge acclaim, and Billy Crudrup (Dr Manhattan), were so well-prepared, they did not require significant direction.
“I think Jackie did an amazing job,” says Snyder. “I can’t imagine anyone else being Rorschach. He cared so deeply about the part and about the character, that once he and I had had conversations about what he wanted to do, I was confident. It was kind of a case of that was taken care of. He’s a very challenging actor in the sense that he wants everything to be perfect. In a movie you have a number of takes and a schedule, but you often want one extra take. And then he would nail it.”
I suggest that Crudrup’s task, to inject life into the omnipotent Dr Manhattan despite the character being realised entirely via motion capture techniques, must have been particularly tough.
“With Billy I knew he was an amazing actor, but he really gave the animators everything they needed,” says Snyder. “They looked at his performance and just duplicated it. And it was awesome. Dr Manhattan is probably my favourite character, so it was difficult that it was a labour of love. You make your whole movie and then that performance is only revealed at the end of the process. I knew Billy had done it, but it was a case of: if they can get Billy in the movie then it’s going to be awesome.”
While his cast’s professionalism may have been a boon, Snyder’s task on Watchmen was not helped much by the looming ghost of Moore, who maintains something of a reputation as a surly Northampton hermit. The writer who transformed the 1980s comic book scene with graphic novels such as V For Vendetta and From Hell condemned the movie out of hand before it had even reached cinemas, claiming his original work was unfilmable. Did Snyder try to reach out to the former 2000AD man?
“When I came on board this movie he had already sworn us off,” says the film-maker. “I didn’t even get a chance to plead my case, to be honest. I have great respect for Alan and he had asked: ‘Please don’t try to approach me or talk to me or change anything about what I think.’ So really I just tried to respect that as much as I could. And the problem with that, was that it basically just meant: don’t ask. He’s clearly a genius, and I hope – I’m sure he doesn’t, but I hope – he understands; I was just trying to respect his wishes. He’s actually been amazingly cool about it recently.”
Yet this does not sound like the Alan Moore who, prior to its release, told a journalist from the LA Times that he had put a curse on Watchmen, adding: “I can tell you that I will also be spitting venom all over it for months to come.”
“Well not cool, but not like lashing out at us,” backtracks Snyder, chuckling. “I’m sure he’s still like: ‘I’ll kill that Snyder’, but maybe it’s a boring question now or no one’s asking him it.”
I tell him I have a sneaking suspicion that Moore might actually quite like the film, if he saw it. “I don’t know if he’s seen it, so I can only speculate,” he says, tactfully.
One suspects that part of Moore’s problem with the film was that his original book is not a linear work that lends itself to an orthodox movie plotline. It is a colourful scrapbook of different stories told through a variety of media: excerpts from the memoirs of former superheroes, cuttings from news articles, even an entirely separate but intertwined story in the shape of bloodthirsty pirate comic Tales From the Black Freighter. These all came together to form a vivid, post-modern take on comic book tropes that both celebrated and satirised the genre and its medium. The theatrical version, despite its epic running time, could never hope to equal that sort of depth and richness.
Fans are still hoping that the eventual “Ultimate” cut, which will follow a three-hour plus director’s cut onto DVD (the version about to be released is the theatrical version), will finally present Watchmen as it was meant to be seen, complete with regular segueing from the main story into the Black Freighter subplot, and the double-act between a comic-book obsessed young boy and a newsstand owner (both named Bernie), which are as important to Moore’s version as the main storyline.
“I made a deal with the studio that I would do The Black Freighter section [for a separately available DVD] as long as they gave me some money to shoot the ins and outs with the two Bernies at the news stand,” says Snyder. “With those two actors, we almost did a separate movie. They didn’t even know that we were making the whole Watchmen movie. As far as they know the whole thing takes place on a street corner. I think that [for] fans of the graphic novel, when they see the ultimate version, it will complete a bunch of the storylines.”
Of course, any critics who were confused by the original movie are going to really hate this version, but Snyder, again, doesn’t seem to be too bothered. This is a film-maker almost uniquely in touch with his audience: he doesn’t come from an arthouse background, but then neither do most of his viewers. He doesn’t particularly care whether he is lauded as a great director by the kind of critics who love to watch arthouse movies.
“I guess I like gore and action. I like genre,” he says. “I make the kind of movies that I would like to watch.”
Snyder doesn’t get nearly as much stick as another former commercials director who made the leap into film-making, the much-maligned McG. Does he feel there is an unfair stigmatism attached to those who launched their careers in commercial territory?
“I’m really proud of the work that I did in the ad world,” he says. “I really feel like it was an incredible visual school for me. I did 15 years of commercials, three a month, a lot of them in Europe. I’m a huge fan of arthouse and independent film-makers, but it’s hard to compare that with 15 years of me running film through a camera every day, so that the tools are second nature. You can say what you want about me as far as storytelling, but shot-making is a thing that I feel pretty comfortable doing.
“McG is a really nice guy but I think he’s made such an eclectic span of films that I can’t say that anyone really has a handle on what he’s about. I just make movies that I like, and that I want to see. I do think that commercial directors do get a bad rap. Everyone assumes they are just going to be very Hollywood and just want to crack out the blockbusters. Maybe it’s because I’ve made slightly odd films that I’ve gotten around that a little bit.”
Watchmen certainly makes for a pretty odd sort of superhero movie. But then the graphic novel was a pretty odd sort of comic book. Hollywood would no doubt have been pleased if the film had ended up being the Ocean’s Eleven of superhero movies that Snyder once considered. Instead, Watchmen turned out to be something far less generic, a lot less facile and, I suspect, rather more durable. Even Alan Moore might approve of that.
• Twitterer amoiist caught up in police blog probe
• Inquiry centres on murder ‘libel’ against officials
The hundreds following amoiist on Twitter were used to his stream of messages. But they ended abruptly with two terse updates early yesterday morning.
“i have been arrested by Mawei police, SOS” he wrote. Then shortly afterwards: “Pls help me, I grasp the phone during police sleep.”
His followers quickly passed on his plea to other Twitterers. But since then there has been silence from amoiist – also known as Peter Guo, or Guo Bofeng – who is apparently the latest internet user to be caught up in an inquiry that began with claims of defamation but which police now say involves “state secrecy issues”.
As many as seven bloggers have been detained over claims that a 25-year-old woman, Yan Xiaoling, had been gang-raped and murdered. It was further alleged that the man responsible was connected to local authorities in her city in Fujian province, southern China.
Officials dismissed the stories, which first surfaced in late June, and insisted Yan had suffered a haemorrhage caused by an ectopic pregnancy. They turned their attention to tracking down those they suspected were responsible for the stories.
According to Global Voices Online, Guo posted an interview with Yan’s mother in which she repeated the claims and accused local authorities of a cover-up.
An employee at Mawei police station told the Guardian: “These cases are in the process of investigation. We are not in charge of the case so we can’t tell you more. We will release information if there is progress.”
The case is testament both to the growing ability of Chinese citizens to share information through the internet, and to the restrictions on those who do.
In a recent, unpublished interview with the Guardian over the government’s Green Dam censorship programme, Guo said: “The significance of internet in China is huge. It can’t change the current situation in China right away, but it has deeply influenced China. Through the internet, Chinese society has become more and more diverse, and more importantly many people who are unaware of the truth have started to hear different voices.”
Guo, who described himself on Twitter as “a trouble maker in Amoy [Xiamen], living with character sales”, is reportedly a professional interpreter. His two calls for help were in English, although he generally uses Chinese.
He often blogs and tweets about news, current affairs and internet censorship, frequently with a satirical tinge, and has more than 1,500 Twitter followers. A message posted several hours before his pleas read: “Peter Guo, one of the twitterers in China, originally from the Fujian countryside, not a famous blogger; people called him amoiist, good character, young, handsome.”
Liu Xiaoyuan, who represents another detained blogger, You Jingyou, said lawyers had been told they could not meet their clients because the case involved “state secrets”.
Liu’s client wrote his power of attorney in advance because he feared he might be the next to be detained. Another man who was away when police visited his home yesterday told Liu he believed they planned to detain him.
The lawyer said: “I do not know why exactly [You] was detained. Whether it is because he wrote something or he spread something or planned something is still unknown. But from the police we know it was connected to the Yan Xiaoling case.”
He said bloggers had been held more frequently in the last two years. “I think it is because the internet’s power is getting bigger and bigger and the internet uncovers many issues so the authorities get more pressure.”
Another lawyer told the Xinkuaibao newspaper that if officials had been libelled they should sue the bloggers involved rather than launching a criminal case. “We can tell that the local officials haven’t caught up with the need for the development of open information and the internet. They have not adapted to it and feel it is a big deal if some bad information appears on the net.”
Twitter is blocked in China but many on the mainland still tweet through a variety of means.
Universal Pictures will release a slightly shorter and marginally less explicit cut of the 18-certificate Sacha Baron Cohen comedy on 24 July
As if one Bruno was not enough for UK cinemagoers, the studio behind Sacha Baron Cohen’s flouncing comedy creation is now poised to introduce another. Happily, reports suggest that the second Bruno will be less offensive, more mild of manner and marginally shorter. Where the original Bruno comes with a prohibitive 18 certificate, the second is rated a teen-friendly 15.
Universal Pictures is planning to unveil the alternative Bruno on 24 July as a means to mop up younger viewers. “We saw an opportunity to service the audience,” explained David Kosse, president of Universal Pictures International. “And it should also help the gross.” Kosse claims that this marks the first time that two versions of the same film are screened simultaneously in the UK.
Baron Cohen’s film has earned a reported £5m at UK cinemas since it opened last Friday – the second-biggest opening ever in Britain for an 18-certificate movie. However, there have been reports of hundreds of teenaged viewers being refused entry to cinemas, leading studio executives to conclude that there remains a large, untapped market for the picture.
The 15-certificate Bruno will run 1min 50sec shorter than the original version. Editors have trimmed several of the more sexually explicit moments, including a visit to a swingers’ party and a sequence in which the hero visits a medium and simulates oral and anal sex with a ghost. “A lot of that scene” has been edited out, says Kosse.
Government goes from criticising Orelsan to defending him – after rapper is dropped from event in Socialist Ségolène Royal’s region
He is known as the French Eminem: a middle-class teacher’s son from a dull town in lower Normandy who raps about the rural drug epidemic, boredom and the hopelessness of French provincial teenagers.
But ever since the political class expressed outrage at a song from Orelsan’s back catalogue in which he once sang about grotesque violence against a girlfriend who cheated on him, the 26-year-old rap star has become the centre of a national debate over censorship.
The row escalated today as politicians from all political parties waded in to express disgust that Orelsan – real name Aurelien Contentin – had been dropped from the lineup of one of France’s most important summer music festivals, the Francofolies at La Rochelle.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling centre-right UMP party, which earlier this year led criticism of Orelsan’s song, Sale Pute (Dirty Slut), has now issued a statement saying it was “intolerable” to censor an artist. The party rounded on the Socialist Ségolène Royal, head of the western region where the festival takes place, saying she was “attacking freedom of expression”.
Earlier this month, Royal told a local paper she was happy Orelsan’s appearance had been pulled and that she had written to the festival for “clarification” on his part in the lineup.
Jack Lang, the Socialist and former culture minister, warned of a culture of “moral censorship” in France. He said the move to axe Orelsan was symptomatic of broader attacks against freedom of expression by local councils of all political persuasions. Last month, Orelsan’s new album was pulled from all Paris’s municipal libraries, prompting the League for Human Rights to appeal to Paris’s Socialist head of culture to think again.
Orelsan today told French radio his removal from the Francofolies festival was “really abhorrent”. He stressed that he no longer sang Sale Pute on stage, having removed it from his website, and that those censoring him had not seen his act. He said he wanted a meeting with the new culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand.
Several other French singers made statements in his support. One of them, Cali, said the festival had totally discredited itself. In a letter made public by Orelsan’s record company, Cali said: “There will be a before and an after Orelsan. For my part, I’ll boycott all these muzzled places – with sadness but conviction.”
Government revokes over 200 radio licences and forces television channels to broadcast many of Chávez’s speeches
Venezuela’s government has revoked the licences of more than 200 radio stations and forced satellite and cable television to broadcast many of President Hugo Chávez’s speeches live.
The government said the new regulations would deepen the country’s socialist revolution and combat “media terrorism” by privately owned networks. Critics said they were an attack on free speech.
Terrestrial TV channels have long been obliged to interrupt regular programming to transmit Chávez’s speeches – they can last more than four hours – when he declares what is known as a “cadena”.
Even many of his supporters would switch to satellite and cable to continue watching baseball or soap operas but under the new regulations, which came into effect today, those channels must also switch to Chávez if more than 70% of their content is produced within Venezuela.
The measure will affect RCTV, a vocal critic of the president which relaunched as a subscription network after its public licence was not renewed in 2007. It supported a brief coup against the president in 2002.
The government also said it was shifting 154 FM and 86 AM radio stations into public hands to “democratise” the airwaves. “The use of the radio-electric spectrum is one of the few areas where the revolution has not been felt,” said Diosdado Cabello, head of the telecommunications agency. The stations, almost 40% of the country’s total, had not updated their registrations, said Cabello.
The government also banned networks owning more than stations to break up what it said were “media latifundios”, a reference to large, privately-owned estates. Venezuela’s radio chamber said the regulations attacked freedom of expression and violated the constitution.
Since coming to power a decade ago Chávez, a fiery leftist and gifted communicator, has greatly expanded the state’s media empire to challenge strident anti-government coverage in privately-owned media.
Government claims technology will curb access to pornography, but internet users say it blocks politically sensitive content and monitors behaviour
China’s controversial plan to install Green Dam internet filtering software on all computers will go ahead despite being postponement, a government official told state media today.
The official said it was only “a matter of time” until the software was installed.
The remarks – if they fully reflect official policy – will anger internet users, who mounted a vociferous campaign against the policy this week and hoped they had secured a victory against government censorship.
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced a delay in the implementation of the programme late on Tuesday, hours before it had been supposed to come into force.
Officials claim the technology will help to curb access to pornography, particularly by younger users.
Internet users say the image and keyword filter blocks pornographic, violent and politically sensitive content and monitors behaviour and fear it will be used to curb access to information and keep track of users.
Green Dam has also come under fire for exposing users to security breaches, with experts warning it could easily be hacked, and a US-based software firm is threatening to sue the Chinese developers for copyright infringement.
Solid Oak warned computer manufacturers they would become “knowing infringers” if they included Green Dam.
Industry bodies, the US government and others had also called on China to abandon the project.
Some experts believed that countervailing arguments within the government might have prevailed.
But an official, speaking anonymously, told China Daily: “The government will definitely carry on the directive on Green Dam. It’s just a matter of time.
“What will happen is that some PC manufacturers will have it included with their PC packages sooner than the others. But there is no definite deadline at the moment.”
The official said the delay was necessary because some computer manufacturers needed more time to prepare.
“They have already spent around millions of yuan. If they don’t install it, people will ask why they spent so much for nothing, so they have to brazen it out,” Liu Xiaoyuan, a lawyer who has opposed the software, said.
“At present, there are too many questions and challenges domestically and abroad, so MIIT is in a dilemma.
“I believe they will carry it out after they have technically improved it and clarified the intellectual property rights.
“[But] if they really want to protect young people from porn, they should deal with the source – pornographic websites.”
Ai Weiwei, a leading contemporary artist and outspoken blogger who had proposed an “internet boycott” to mark opposition to the policy, said he was surprised to hear ministry sources say it would definitely go ahead.
“It was stopped just one day before the policy should be carried out – after preparing for such a long time and facing so much opposition from the public as well as manufacturers,” he said.
There has been confusion about whether the policy required the installation of the software, or whether manufacturers simply had to bundle it with computers.
“If it is true that installation has become party of the policy again, officials are limiting citizens’ freedom to choose and freedom of expression,” Ai said. “This is a backward step.”
We think there’s more to be done on internet censorship – specifically, to point to the “grey areas” where we don’t know enough about what governments do. Do you know?
Our interactive map of internet censorship gives you some of the picture – but there’s still too much grey (or gray) for our liking: too many countries where we have “no data” about the sorts of censorship that (almost certainly) goes on.
So it’s over to you. What government-level censorship happens in countries such as New Zealand, or the western parts of South America? Is Scandinavia really a free-for-all?
And just as important, are there categories that we’ve missed off?
Remember, we’re looking for government action (which might involve twisting the arm of ISPs to make it look like “voluntary” action when it’s anything but). Let us know in the comments – or fill our our Google Form, below
Picturing the plight of the Uighurs
Considering China’s demands to silence my film about Uighurs, it’s no wonder so little is heard of their struggle
Last week I was told by Richard Moore, director of the Melbourne International Film Festival, that the Chinese government had demanded my film, The 10 Conditions of Love, be barred from screening. I was not surprised. The film is about Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled Uighur leader regarded by the Chinese government as a threat, someone who incites terrorism in its country.
Ironically, the one country that wants to silence my film gave it press I could never afford. Thankfully Moore stood up for my film’s right to be screened by politely hanging up on the rather persistent Chinese consular official.
I first learned about the Uighurs about seven years ago while having a beer with a friend of mine in Beijing. He told me about a student in his English conversation class who appeared more Iranian than Chinese. My friend asked the student where he was from and was amazed to learn of a thriving Muslim population living in the far western deserts of China. When the Uighur student noticed another Han Chinese student intently listening in, he told my friend to do his own research on his people as there was only so much he could say in public.
Soon after, my friend and I took a four-day train journey to the desert oases and mountain valleys of Xinjiang province. We had done our research and knew how the Chinese had annexed what was once an independent East Turkestan in 1949. We also understood how China saw the Uighurs’ demands for autonomous rule as a threat to its unity, labelling protesters as separatists and terrorists. Some Uighur responses were violent, leading to harsh military crackdowns and human rights atrocities in the region. The Chinese government justified its actions to the world as a homegrown battle in the global war on terror.
Passing ourselves off as tourists we were able to collect footage of a colourful and resilient people. They were Muslim, but the women did not all wear burkas and the men were known to drink alcohol. We met some Uighurs who invited us to a wedding, where we learned how to toast by rubbing shot glasses and dance with other men to show off our moves to the women before they joined in. The Uighurs loved a celebration and after witnessing their second-class status in their own country, we understood why.
Over the next few years I met Uighur exiles in New York in libraries, coffee shops and Turkish restaurants. They suspected me of being a spy for the Chinese, as so many other supposed journalists and filmmakers turned out to be. Why else would anyone be so interested in their plight? Eventually they trusted me enough to introduce me to Rebiya Kadeer, recently released after six years in prison for mailing Uighur newspaper clippings to her exiled husband in Washington DC.
I called Chinese embassies in the US and Australia to get their side of the story. The Chinese have done much in Xinjiang in terms of infrastructural and economic development. While they were happy to discuss these issues, the interview was over once I asked about Kadeer. Suddenly I was being interviewed: “Have you had contact with Ms Kadeer, who’s involved with your film and where is it being screened?” I can’t understand why they refuse to debate these issues in a public forum; this was an opportunity for them to put their side of the story on record.
Kadeer told me how she had overcome a lack of Chinese government support for Uighurs in education and economic development to become a wealthy entrepreneur. I followed Kadeer for three years, watching her at work raising awareness of the Uighurs’ struggle in China. Her daughter Ray feared her mother’s work would endanger her siblings still living in China. An exiled leader makes impossible decisions for her people at the cost of her family.
As Kadeer’s awareness campaign grew, her family situation worsened. Hers is an astonishing story that embodies the living history of a forgotten people as they struggle to demand basic human rights in China.
Considering the Chinese government’s recent demands to silence my film in Australia I am not surprised so little is heard of the Uighurs’ plight. But I have the privilege of living in a society that finds strength in dissenting opinions.