Today's Assignment

[andrewducker]

See this link:
http://lj.rossia.org/users/torquemada/
Copy it.
Post it in a comment on this post.
Notice that it's not possible.
Wonder what else is forbidden by the LJ censorship module.

Comments

[trav28.livejournal.com]

what the hell?

[nmg.livejournal.com]

test

[nmg.livejournal.com]

URL encoding works to evade the censorship module, it seems.

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

What's it objecting to in that one?

[girl-onthego.livejournal.com]

I don't undersatnd. WHat is it?

[ipslore.livejournal.com]

http://lj.rossia.org/users/torquemada/

[ipslore.livejournal.com]

Huh. Well, that works. Kinda.

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

Before you go spreading more FUD: It's not "censorship" (it can't be censorship unless a government is doing it), and it has nothing to do with content. When a couple hundred thousand comments get posted with a single URL, bringing the site to a crawl, wouldn't you agree that a provider has a right to block any comment with that text?

[matgb]

Is this another of the botnet attack holdovers?

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Never stopped Slashdot or Digg!

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

It can be censorship if someone other than a government is doing it.

If a teacher showing a film skips past something he doesn't want his class to see, he is censoring it.

A newspaper editor can happily censor things.

I could post an image in a censored way.

[pisica.livejournal.com]

There's a difference between 'I will not allow this to be shown in MY class/newspaper etc. [but other classes/newspapers can choose differently' and 'if anyone at all shows this in a class/newspaper they will be arrested/hanged etc.' I believe censorship is only the latter, though I seem to be in a minority on that. But there is certainly a difference between these two concepts, and I'm not sure that everyone who screams 'censorship!' understands that.

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Google gives a bunch of definitions...

http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Acensorship

But to continue your classroom example, if a teacher was removing passages from a book (for their own reasons) before allowing the pupils to read a copy of it, would the teacher be engaged in censorship or not? And if not, what's your better description of what they were doing?

[andrewducker]

Nothing in any definition of censorship I've seen indicates it can only be carried out by governments. Certainly it's _worse_ when governments do it, but anyone can censor something.

And I totally believe it's within LJ's rights to block any content they don't want to carry. I have no objection to that. I merely worry that I don't know what else they're blocking.