Are we losing the battle against censorship?

Over the last week or so, A few not so positive issues arose.
Firstly, Some of you may have noticed some sites received this warning for no apparent reason.

This appeared to be mostly an issue with Google Chrome but also appeared to affect similar sites when viewed with Mozilla Firefox. According to Torrent Freak, These issues have been resolved for the time being.
You can read more here.

Then just the other day, The RIAA forced Cloudflare, a very common cloud based service for improving sites reliability, including Tek Syndicate, to terminate any service with a site with a domain name that includes Grooveshark in their name. More info can be found here.

Lastly, Nintendo is also in the news again, And its not for the death of Sataoru Iwata. Nintendo is known for taking down anything that impacts their brand in any way. It wasn't long ago when Nintendo forced Google to close a number of small youtube channels for playing Nintendo titles or having content of trailers in their videos, Even Total Biscuit was hit with a takedown notice. This time They have taken down a popular Game Boy emulator that used JavaScript to allow you to play a list of pre-loaded games in your browser. While this was illegal in the eyes of the law, Nintendo doesn't provide a way for new users to experience many of these old games. You can read more about this issue here.

So, What you your thoughts? Are we losing the battle or are we just experiencing a hiccup on the road of progress?

1 Like

Quite dumb of them. Clearly just pandering to copyright holders
But, I kinda get that warning but it isn't really censoring. You can just hit details then proceed anyway... and if you look at the updates on the article they already resolved the issue.

Its evident of what they are pushing for though. For the less experienced user, They dont know how to get passed it and in the eyes of google, that would be success.

I hope they say "screw it" and not censor anything like they did the last time.

I understand Google's position though. They are a business that exists to make money. This constant pestering by copyright holders and lawsuits, and the countless groups that think Google is the internet, cut into those profits. Easier just to do this.

Again though, according to the linked articles the issues are resolved. I also checked on my browser and its fine for now. Sucks that this is the way things are going but I get it.

Also, Nintendo are assholes but most people don't wanna believe it.

2 Likes

they cant stop those of us who really use those sites anyway, they can try, but theres always a way

Well that's what happens when France and the UK get all uppity about it. Then yes the copyright holders.

The title of this thread mislead me, but I'll give those comments in a moment.

As to what is actually going on in this thread, yes. Frankly, the average user is a drooling moron who wouldn't know to stand up for something even if they had the guts to. Nintendo fanboys are the worst of all and make the best example. Nintendo loves to shoot themselves in the foot by being a rabid copyright hound. You see all these other developers going "Hey, those YouTube guys... This is actually good for us. Free advertisement, free hype, free everything! Let's NOT sue them!" But Nintendo it's like "Noooo!!! That's eeeevviiiilll!" and so every year fewer people put up with their bullshit. Won't try to stream, won't even review. Totalbiscuit, Angry Joe, etc have mutually decided "fuck it." The only ones left I can think of are Boogie2988 and Game Theory, both of which have said many times they won't touch anything copyright with Nintendo because of the banhammer. It's not their products everybody hates, it's their attitude. Nintendo is living off the wallets of drooling fanboy, nothing more. Google? I agree with what's said above but, like Nintendo, it'll bite them in the ass if they keep at it.

My original comments for this thread was domestic censorship. In that regard, it's not even the government that you need to be worried about. It's your neighbor. People are so busy being upset and bitching at each other they are doing the job of the "evil, oppressive government" themselves.

2 Likes

Continuing the discussion from The Lounge:

1 Like

http://www.zdnet.com/article/every-email-you-opened-last-year-can-be-read-by-the-fbi-without-a-warrant/ I would say? Yup.

Cloudflare. The other day, about 48 hours ago I wasn't able to access teksyndicate forum (EDIT: for several hours). Was it down? Because I was being cut-off at Cloudflare. I pinged it. Traced it. Ended up at Cloudflare entry point. It could be Cloudflare, it could be my ISP.

Tel syndicate has been seeing random down time over the last month. From a few minutes to 8 hours.

But was it due to Clodflare, or just the ongoing work on the new forums?

Issue on the server end, not cloudflare

I heard a disturbing rumor lately about New Zealand passing an "anti hate speech law" that can have you sent to jail for posting offensive things online. Is there any truth to this? I didn't see anything online about it.

Sadly it's true. It was put in place to stop cyber bullying but it's so broad that it's fucking ridiculous

the battle on this forum is already lost

1 Like

Damn. That is really messed up. I was actually on vacation down there a month ago and you guys didn't seem to suffer from the 'SJW/Don't offend anyone's precious feelings' mental illness that's gone rampant here in the US. Everyone I ran into seemed to be pretty well grounded in reality and could deal with disagreements like an adult.

1 Like

I've always found the concept of hate speech to be a very intrusive one: The government is literally telling you what you should find offensive! A modern government should respect their citizens to decide for themselves what they believe to be acceptable. They deal with tender subjects by simply removing them from the public forum of conversation by protecting them with hate speech laws, killing all possible conversation for the sake of appearing politically correct and progressive, when in fact all they do is get rid of he headache that comes with a nuanced argument.