Hong Kong: Oiwan Lam update

Rebecca MacKinnon (see biography) provides a useful roundup of the latest and ongoing manoeuvre at internet censorship in Hong Kong: Oiwan update: BBC interview, HK Govt double-standards & Flickr petition

Well worth a read and some links that are mighty profitable to follow. Including this one to Hong Kong's Family Planning Association. Be warned, it's totally surreal (Flash required, no pun intended): famplan

As concerns the Yahoo!-owned photo website Flickr, the situation is a tad confusing . . .

According to Flickr, people uploading photos to the site can (if they wish) moderate who can view content using the following three filters:

Safe - Content suitable for a global, public audience
Moderate - If you're not sure whether your content is suitable for a global, public audience but you think that it doesn't need to be restricted per se, this category is for you
Restricted - This is content you probably wouldn't show to your mum, and definitely shouldn't be seen by kids

Fair enough.

However,

If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off.

Only able to view "safe content"? Local terms of service? WTF?

Bah-humbug! By way of scientific enquiry, Mister Bijou did a Flickr search with "nude" as tag. Evidently, a lot of people do not set any filter on their own content: et voilà!

[Oh, by the way, linking to those photos may be illegal, based on a recent court case in Hong Kong]

Whatever. Even so, it is troubling that Flickr has decided that content on their website which their users deemed moderate or restricted is definitely off-limits hereabouts, even if you sign in: moderate/restricted

On 11 May 2007, Oiwan Lam posted an essay on one of Hong Kong's predominantly Chinese-language, community-oriented forums: InMediaHK.

Lam's essay about the state of censorship in Hong Kong included a photograph (left).

The photo was hot-linked from one of the world's biggest user-generated websites for photos: Flickr.

A week after Lam posted her essay and the photograph, she received a phone call from someone at Hong Kong's Television and Entertainment Authority advising her that it had received "one and only one" complaint and the photo was problematic.

Lam chose to maintain the photo and essay, See here: InMediaHK

Meanwhile, until mid-June, that photo was freely accessible at Flickr. In mid-June, Flickr began limiting access to certain tagged photos for web surfers in four regions: Germany, Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong. Why those four? Who knows. Photo: joerrorr at flickr

Fast forward to end of June. Oiwan Lam has now been informed her essay has been classified on a preliminary basis as "Category II: Indecent" by the Hong Kong Obscene Articles Tribunal. The maximum penalty is HK$400,000 and 12 months in jail.

What"s going on? The Obscene Articles Tribunal is harassing citizens -- an interview with Oiwan Lam, by Ip Iam-chong. (1 July 2007: InMediaHK

English translation of Oiwan Lam interview, courtesy of Roland Soong at EastSouthWestNorth

Who’s attacking marxist.org?

China's capitalist roaders are suspected of trying to block access to Marxist texts: NYT (registration-free link)

Marxist.org: attack log
Marxist.org: mirror site (UK)

There's heaps more, but this is some of what's in their archives . . .
Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle
Christopher Hill: The English Revolution 1640
Lu Xun: The True Story of Ah-Q
Karl Marx & Frederick Engels: Communist Manifesto

New York Times officially censored

Yesterday, 22 December 2006, the New York Times ran an op-ed. Nothing unusual there, the NYT runs at least one op-ed in each edition.

However. this op-ed was 'redacted', that's to say parts of it were blacked out by the CIA's Publication Review Board.


This was after the "White House intervened in the normal prepublication review process and demanded substantial deletions."

Op-ed contributors Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann explain why in What We Wanted to Tell You About Iran: NYT

That link also leads to the redacted version, and citations of what is missing.

Raw Story has pieced together what it thinks is missing and why it is so awkward for the current occupant of the White House: Raw Story

Thanks for the heads up, ESWN