Wikimedia chief Jimmy Wales is being buffeted hither and thither as he tries to cope with a former Wikipedia worker's charge that Wikipedia is rife with child pornography.
The flustered Wales seems to have tried to duck by "stepping down" as chief editor but then denied that his empire was in chaos as angry Wiki editors rejected calls for censorship.
Fox News reported that the former Wiki man, Larry Sanger, was asking the FBI to investigate his charge that many Wikipedia sites showed minors in sex acts and that these pages were being viewed by school children.
For all the outrage over censorship, I can tell you that Wiki has used various gimmicks to censor my stuff off Wikipedia and that letters to Wales went unanswered. My stuff had nothing to do with pornography or what some deem as obscene language.
For background, your best bet is to use your search engine.
UPI won praise for striking a "blow against news censorship and media manipulation for reporting poll results that showed half of Americans favored supporting Confederate History Month.
Georgia Heritage Council's J.A. Davis was the source of the praise.
Disturbingly, however, the poll found that a third of Americans -- predominantly in the West -- wanted to prohibit display of the Confederate flag and other symbols. The poll was conducted by the Canadian pollster Angus Reid.
China's 'great firewall' should be the topic of discussion by the UN's World Trade Organization, according to European Union Vice President Neelie Kroes, speaking in Shanghai. Kroes, who heads the EU's digital policy committee, said EU Trade Commissioner Karel DeGucht is in discussions about how the EU should respond to China's worsening net filtering.
Arstechnica and Agence France-Presse covered this story.
The American Psychology Association has deleted web pages concerning new methods of extracting information from captives during "emhanced interrogations," says California psychologist Jeffrey Kaye. He says that though the APA seems to be obeying the will of its membership in steering clear of CIA interrogations, the APA has a history of deception on ethics matters.
I am still awaiting my first email from NIST's cyber security division, having signed up several days ago. Perhaps the agency's public emailings are only intermittent.
President Obama signed the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act, which requires the State Dept. to scrutinize news media restrictions and treatment of journalists when compiling its annual human rights survey of countries around the world. I am fairly confident that the act exempts the U.S. from such study.
Anyway, Obama refused to take questions from the press during the signing ceremony.
Even if you are among the small minority who can disable not only cookies, but supercookies, a web site may be able to form a portrait of you anyway, because of features of popular browsers.
That could mean that if you are researching a story, someone may pick up on it and take action to thwart you without your knowledge.
The Electronic Frontiers Foundation ran an experiment in which it was able to obtain a unique portrait of visitors using such browsers as Internet Explorer and Firefox nearly 94% of the time.
Countermeasures discussed by EFF are:
# Disable Javascript, which is a "powerful defense." Unfortunately, many functions require it.
# Use TorButton. The drawback is that that slows everything down.
# Improve private browser modes, which tends to "smooth out" identifying characteristics.
For more detail, go to panopticlick.eff.org
No comments:
Post a Comment