Update: This post has been updated with an official explanation from ComiXology on why the comic book containing images of gay sex was removed from its iOS app stores.

Yesterday, creator Brian K. Vaughan informed the world that issue #12 of his and Fiona Staples’ hit comic book series Saga was rejected by Apple due to explicit content and subsequently would not be available for sale within any of ComiXology’s iOS apps.

ComiXology responded to a fury of criticism from fans that blamed Apple for removing the comic book, when in fact it was ComiXology itself that decided to pull the book from its iOS in-app stores. The digital comic book startup said it interpreted Apple’s terms of service incorrectly, which led them to removing Saga #12.

The explicit content appears on the first page of the issue, in which character Prince Robot IV — who has a television screen for a head — is displaying an image of a man performing oral sex on another man. Also, the TV-headed guy is being held up by a dude who’s got peacock feathered wings and is screaming for a medic. Honestly, the image was so subtle that I read the book cover to cover twice before realizing where the gay sex scene pops up.

“This is a drag, especially because our book has featured what I would consider much more graphic imagery in the past, but there you go,” Vaughan wrote in a statement to fans. “Fiona and I could always edit the images in question, but everything we put into the book is there to advance our story, not (just) to shock or titillate, so we’re not changing shit.”

The book has since returned to ComiXology’s iOS stores.

Here’s the official statement from CEO David Steinberger about the ban:

In the last 24 hours there has been a lot of chatter about Apple banning Saga #12 from our Comics App on the Apple App Store due to depictions of gay sex. This is simply not true, and we’d like to clarify.

As a partner of Apple, we have an obligation to respect its policies for apps and the books offered in apps.  Based on our understanding of those policies, we believed that Saga #12 could not be made available in our app, and so we did not release it today.

We did not interpret the content in question as involving any particular sexual orientation, and frankly that would have been a completely irrelevant consideration under any circumstance.

Given this, it should be clear that Apple did not reject Saga #12.

After hearing from Apple this morning, we can say that our interpretation of its policies was mistaken. You’ll be glad to know that Saga #12 will be available on our App Store app soon.

We apologize to Saga creator Brian K. Vaughan and Image Comics for any confusion this may have caused.

A report in the New York Times this morning said regulators asked Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to take down “objectionable” material. Facebook and Twitter both cooperated by removing flagged posts relating to suicide and drug use, while YouTube filed a lawsuit claiming a video on how to make a fake wound with makeup was entertaining rather than harmful.

The law kicked into gear in November in an effort to control child pornography, instructions or propaganda for drug use, and material promoting suicide: three pervasive issues among Russia’s youth. It required Roskomnadzor, the state’s media monitoring agency, to maintain a list of banned content known as the “Single Register” and make sure nothing deemed dangerous is accessible online.

Russia does not want to flat out block popular, global sites like Facebook and YouTube, which would anger its citizens and reflect badly in the international community. So far, regulators have only taken down content that was legitimately harmful.

However, Internet censorship is a slippery and expensive slope. China is the flagship example of country aggressively regulating the Internet in order to quash dissension, but 40 countries around the world practice Internet filtering of some some form. India is also grappling with the fuzzy line of censorship following various violent outbreaks fueled by online activity.

The market for Russian Internet companies is growing fast. Internet penetration is high there, and it has strong base of technical talent. Russian startups are sealing large deals with venture capital firms to accommodate their growth. If Russia hopes to continue down the path towards a vibrant Internet economy, it must be careful to limit all restrictions to content that genuinely is harmful, rather than controversial or inflammatory.

As Google chairman Eric Schmidt wrote in a Times of India article, the choice is between an “open Internet that benefits all or a highly regulated one that inhibits innovation.”

Photo credit: saragoldsmith/Flickr

“Now is the moment for India to decide what kind of internet it wants for them: an open internet that benefits all or a highly regulated one that inhibits innovation,” he wrote.

Schmidt is currently traveling around Asia and published this article in response to efforts by India’s government to censor and control the internet. This is a hot button issue in India right now as conservative officials and politicians want to regulate (and quash) material that is deemed offensive and inflammatory. However, India is the world’s largest democracy. It is home to a younger generation that is less traditional than its forebears and an erupting technological community. that requires freedom to flourish.

“In 10 years, it will be almost impossible to describe to any child in India what life was like before the internet,” Schmidt wrote. “Only about two billion of the world’s seven billion people have an internet connection, and I believe the remaining five billion will get one in the next decade. Almost one billion of them will come online in India.”

India is one of the most vibrant emerging markets for tech development and startups, but it is also a society riddled with social unrest. The Indian government began cracking down on internet freedom in 2008 after the Mumbai bombings. It passed the Information Technology Act to expand censorship and monitoring capabilities and has put pressure on internet service provers and private companies to remove certain types of information, under threat of imprisonment.

Then in 2011, the New York Times reported that the Indian government asked companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo to “prescreen user content from India and to remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it goes online.” Flagged content ranges from personal postings that are deemed blasphemous, pornograpaphic, or encouraging immorality. The Department of Telecom also tried to block video torrent sites like Vimeo, The Priate Bay, and Torrentz.

Internet freedom came to the forefront again in August of 2012 as a result of tension in Assam, a northeastern state in India where there is conflict between Muslims and Hindus.  The Indian government ordered more than 300 specific URLs blocked from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Worpress, Wikipedia, and even the Times of India for allegedly promoting violence. Tempers were flaring as a result of hate message, misinformation, and online rumors which led to unrest and at least 300,000 people fleeing.

Schmidt’s article sought to show that the government should view the internet as a way to improve and develop the country, rather than threat to national security and morals. It can be used to disseminate knowledge and enhance education and dialogue, as well as to make the transportation system more efficient

“The most striking Indian internet innovations won’t come from big institutions or companies moving online, however,” he said. “They will come from Indians solving local problems. We know that India’s internet infrastructure allows Indian engineers to solve the problems of small businesses in other countries. If India plays its cards right, we’ll soon see Indian engineers and Indian small businesses tackling Indian problems first, then exporting the solutions that work best.”

Rather than using its resources to policing the web, the Indian government could “reap a huge dividend” from the internet’s growth and use it to address some of the pressing and persistent problems facing the country today.

Later this week, Schmidt will speak on the future of the internet at the Big Tent Activate Summit in New Delhi, an event held jointly by the Guardian, Google, and MediaGuru.

Photo credit: mattwi1s0n/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Updated at 1:10 p.m. PT with Apple’s response to the issue.

Apple is deleting emails sent from iCloud accounts containing the phrase “barely legal teen,” a sign the company is still strictly distancing itself from pornography and adult material.

The deleted emails issue, which Macworld first revealed, coordinates well with Apple’s history. Apple has removed and rejected several apps from the App Store because they were too pornographic, and it recently removed the 500px app because it was too easy to find adult images.

The phrase “barely legal” is often associated with pornography, but it doesn’t necessarily have be used in that context. For example, an Infoworld reader said he had “barely legal teen” inside a screenplay he had attached in an email and that it would not send.

I confirmed that iCloud is deleting emails such as this by sending an email to myself from an iCloud email account. Here’s what I sent to myself:

That email did not go through. But when I sent the same email without the phrase “barely legal,” it sent just fine.

The phrase “barely legal” does go through on iMessage and through regular email accounts that are sending from Apple devices. It appears to only affect people using an iCloud email account. There’s no telling what other questionable phrases have been blocked as well.

Apple’s iCloud terms and conditions appear to give Apple the authority to do what it wants with content sent from iCloud (emphasis ours):

You acknowledge that Apple is not responsible or liable in any way for any Content provided by others and has no duty to pre-screen such Content. However, Apple reserves the right at all times to determine whether Content is appropriate and in compliance with this Agreement, and may pre-screen, move, refuse, modify and/or remove Content at any time, without prior notice and in its sole discretion, if such Content is found to be in violation of this Agreement or is otherwise objectionable.

Apple told Macworld today that it is a spam filter issue, rather than a censorship issue.

“Occasionally, automated spam filters may incorrectly block legitimate email,” an Apple spokesperson said. “If the customer feels that a legitimate message is blocked, we encourage customers to report it to AppleCare.”

However, even if this is really the case, it’s disconcerting to know that any email with a questionable or spam-like phrase will never be sent from an iCloud email account. And you aren’t even notified that the email did not go through to its intended recipient.

Tim Cook photo via lemagit/Flickr

Just like the rest of the security community, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is worried about state-sponsored cyber attacks. The Wikipedia founder refuses to put up with censorship and is rallying for an open Internet that gives everyone free and unfettered access to information.

“The rise of state-sponsored attacks against companies is something we do worry about,” said Wales in an interview with VentureBeat. “Security is very important for us because if an authoritarian state wants to de-anonymize an account, that’s the type of attack we can expect.”

Wales said that, while Wikipedia hasn’t completely escaped being poked and probed by hackers on the Internet, it hasn’t been a huge target. Wikipedia doesn’t store credit card numbers or a lot of personally identifiable information. But Wales’ organization does hold information that countries, such as China, have been known to block. People contributing information about topics related to those countries could be interesting targets.

“I think in many cases our first job is to be as well-known as possible so that if you shut [us] down it’s a big deal,” he said.

As far as China goes, Wales said the Wikipedia relationship has been growing. China recently blocked Wikipedia’s website wholesale. Now, select pages are allowed through, which Wales attributes to conversations the organization has had with China.

But Wales promises that Wikipedia will never cooperate with censorship. He was disappointed when Google decided to enter China and made compromises in order to stay there because it believed that it could do more good being in China than staying out of the market completely.

“Wow, if Google will do this, someone really has to stand up and say that is not right,” said Wales during a presentation at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. “Thank goodness Google has come to their senses and pulled out of China, which I think is the right thing to do.”

He said he is impressed with a number of security technologies that support privacy and freedoms of speech. One of them is encryption, which Wales calls “a driver for human rights.” Encrypted messaging apps such as Wickr and Silent Circle are examples of this type of technology; they allow anyone to send messages and, in some cases, make encrypted calls that will never be saved on a sever.

Image via Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

The new law, Bloomberg says, will require people to provide their full names when ordering landlines, mobile phones, and Internet connections, and it will also mandate online services such as Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, to require real names when posting or tweeting or blogging.

“The Internet is a free and open stage,” an editorial in the People’s Daily said on Dec. 24. “But absolute freedom of the network does not exist … the virtual society and social reality are inseparable.”

The editorial paints the prime issue as one of public safety and well-being, adding that with the rule of law, “the network can be more civilized, more healthy, more secure” and enhanced with more “positive energy.” Others, however, are wondering if it isn’t critique of the government’s sex scandals and shoddy handling of disasters that is more the issue.

Whatever the case, the law is certainly going to further impair online freedom in a country that already isn’t shy about censoring and restricting online communications, as Google’s Eric Schmidt said earlier this year. Although some, including Sinocism China Newsletter author Bill Bishop, say there is already no Internet freedom in the country.

reality is there is already no anonymity online in china, ESP if you use a mobile device on services like weibo. Govt can already find you

—
Bill Bishop (@niubi) December 28, 2012

True or not, the reality is that in a country with more than 538 million Internet users and a billion mobile phone owners, implementing the new law will not be easy or quick.

Image credits: Aelius Aaron/ShutterStock, M. Dykstra/ShutterStock

Most of these requests, Google says, are to aid in criminal investigations, though the company says it “can’t always be sure that a request necessarily relates to a criminal investigation.”

Perusing the data on a slow Thanksgiving morning, I noticed that the leading country is not Brazil, which has been in an ongoing fight with Google over content relating to political campaigns. Nor is it one of the more repressive countries like Bahrain, which imprisons bloggers, or Iran, which filters the internet and wants to take its ball and go home, creating its own private internet.

And it’s not Russia, which has expressed a desire to censor the internet and remove porn, drugs, pro-suicide, and extremist content.

Rather, it’s the modern, free speech, Western democracies that mostly lead the charge. And the United States is first in line, accompanied by France, Germany, the UK, Italy, Spain, and Australia in the top ten:

One caveat about the U.S. numbers: they do include requests for information from foreign governments routed through the U.S. government. But Google does not break out the numbers for those requests, so it’s difficult to determine how much of the total they constitute.

As the numbers stand, the U.S. requests Google user data almost four times as much as the next country, India. And its requests are honored more than four times as often.

Google says it is very careful about how and when it complies with requests:

When we receive a request for user information, we review it carefully and only provide information within the scope and authority of the request. We may refuse to produce information or try to narrow the request in some cases … We take user privacy very seriously, and whenever we receive a request we make sure it meets both the letter and spirit of the law before complying. When possible and legal to do so, we notify affected users about requests for user data that may affect them.

But given the fact that there is not a lot of transparency in the transparency report about what kind of criminal investigations are included in Google’s numbers, it’s enough to make one think twice about what kind of information you store in the cloud.

Image credit: Google

Google’s troubles in China worsened again as the Chinese government blocked its major services on Friday.

The ban happened as the Community Party met to appoint its new leaders for the first time in a decade. Google said in a statement to CNN that it had checked its own technology and “there’s nothing wrong on our end.”

The ban shows that companies that espouse the free flow of information aren’t always welcome around the world, and they have to plan for the possibility that they might be shut down at any given moment. Google’s own stats showed a sharp decline in traffic from China, affecting everything from search to Gmail, Google’s email service. The Google Play mobile app store was also inaccessible from within China. Services returned in some parts of the country on Saturday, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The cause of the outage went unexplained. The Chinese Communist Party is in the midst of its 18th National Congress, an event that happens once every decade. GreatFire, a blog that collects data on China’s “great firewall,” said the fact that Google is blocked now isn’t coincidental and that the question is whether it will be unblocked after the event.

Google threatened to shut down its Chinese search site at Google.cn in January 2010, citing censorship and an extensive cyber attack. Then the company said it would stop censoring searches on Google.cn and would automatically redirect users in China to its Hong Kong Site. In June 2010, Google offered another compromise, restoring its Google.cn site with the option to redirect Chinese users to its non-censored site.

[Image credit: Travlang]

But Google is in Baku, Azerbijan today at the seventh annual Internet Governance Forum to make the case that a free and open internet is best for all. And with them is internet pioneer Vint Cerf.

(In case you’re wondering where Azerbaijan is, it’s east of Turkey, south of Russia, and right near all the “stans.”)

Source: Open Net Initiative

Counties the filter the internet for political purposes

The IGF is a United Nations organization. Among other things, its mandate includes fostering the security and stability of the internet, helping countries with internet governance, and finding solutions for “the issues arising from the use and misuse of the Internet.”

Over 40 countries currently censor the internet to varying degrees, as Google notes, so the company “is going to Azerbaijan to stand up for freedom and openness of the Internet.” Many of those countries, according to Google, are hoping to make those restrictions international, and are already trying via the International Telecommunications Union.

One of the conference’s sessions is titled Security, Openness and Privacy, and will include discussion on several key questions, including

• What impact can security and governance issues have on the Internet and human rights
• Freedom of expression and free flow of information: how do legal framework, regulations, and principles impact this?

Panelists on that session include a member of the US Department of State and an advisor to the Egyptian minister of communication and IT.

Vint Cerf will be speaking about freedom and openness at an event during IGF, at which the company will show a selection of “The Caucasus Triangle” – a documentary on youth media and democracy in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan:

Google acknowledges that laws and customs differ, and it has committed to obey local laws in areas it operates. The company is there, however, to add its voice to those who are advocating for openness and freedom: ”Our bottom line remains a strong preference for keeping the Net as open and free as possible.”

Image credit: Google Maps

Early this year, Twitter created the capability to block tweets and users by country, while still allowing Twitter users — err, customers — in other countries to see them. Now the 140-character social network has done so for the very first time, as MarketingLand reported.

Twitter’s top lawyer confirmed it, by tweet, of course:

We announced the ability to withhold content back in Jan. We're using it now for the first time re: a group deemed illegal in Germany.

—
Alex Macgillivray (@amac) October 18, 2012

Twitter had received a request to close the account from German police, and recorded it, as is Twitter policy, on the Chilling Effects anti-censorship website:

The enclosed letter gives you the information that the Ministry of the Interior of the State of Lower-Saxony in Germany has banned the organisation “Besseres Hannover.” It is disbanded, its assets are seized and all its accounts in social networks have to be closed immediately. The Public Prosecutor (State Attorney’s Office) has launched an investigation on suspicion of forming a criminal association.

It is the task of the Polizeidirektion Hannover (Hannover Police) to enforce the ban.

The organisation “Besseres Hannover” uses the Twitter account
besseres-hannover@hannoverticker

https://twitter.com/hannoverticker

I ask you to close this account immediately and not to open any substitute accounts for the organisation “Besseres Hannover”.

The blocked group is allegedly a neo-Nazi organization in Hannover, Germany, where for obvious historical reasons neo-Nazi organizations are illegal. Due to Twitter’s country-specific method of dealing with censorship, however, the account has not been closed.

The tweets and account are still available and visible from other countries … so the organization is now complaining, in English, about German censorship:

Look at this regime: They gossip viciously about china and russia but noone about them! freedom for #germany! #censorship #injustice #brd

—
besseres-hannover (@hannoverticker) October 18, 2012

While people in Germany theoretically cannot see this account, country reality bubbles are easy to pop.

Anyone can, with a very limited amount of technical knowledge and software fiddling, appear to come from just about anywhere else. Firefox, for instance, offers Geolocater, which allows you to spoof sites’ geo-location routines with just a few clicks. Or you can use a proxy server, or pay for services like the wonderfully-named Hide My Ass private VPN.

Generally, people use these for connecting to country-specific video content. But they could also be used to circumvent Twitter and Google country blockages.

Which, when the content is allegedly neo-Nazi hatred, is not a great thing. But I guess the price of freedom is the risk that some will be assholes.

photo credit: S@Z via photopin cc

A showdown this week between Reddit and Gawker shows what happens when one of the Internet’s old-line virtues — anonymity — gets sucked into a vortex of poor taste and trolling, then gets dragged over the pointy coral reef of public attention.

Reddit, of course, is one of the web’s biggest aggregators of links, but it’s also a vibrant and often prickly community. Gawker is a media-industry gossip blog whose usual fare tends to celebrity sightings and sex tapes.

But don’t look for any links to Gawker on Reddit right now. The only time you’re likely to see Gawker on Reddit these days is if it’s in reference to the self-imposed ban many Reddit users have placed on Gawker and on other websites owned by Gawker Media, including Gizmodo, io9, Kotaku, and Deadspin.

Recently, moderators in over 50 of Reddit’s sub-category sites (called subreddits) banded together to manually remove any link that points to a Gawker property. The reason for this was due to Gawker editor Adrien Chen’s plans to publish an in-depth article that revealed the identity of a popular Reddit user known as Violentacrez (pronounced “violent acres”), a move that many Reddit users felt would struck at their right to anonymity and free speech.

In fact, Violentacrez was a powerful personality on Reddit, one who helped the site as a moderator just as much as he outraged many of its users with the content he posted. The controversy highlights the dependence that community-driven sites like Reddit have on power users whose tastes and sense of decorum they have little control over.

Despite the threats from Reddit users, Chen published the article yesterday. It’s a long, in-depth, and balanced look at a man who Chen called “the Internet’s biggest troll,” a 49-year-old Texan whose recreational interests included posting pictures of teenage girls, baiting users with outrageous subreddits about pedophilia, racism, and necrophilia, and generally provoking outrage.

As far as I know, freedom of speech and privacy rights have remained largely intact, which you’d never know by reading the comments on many of the top Reddit posts in the past day or two — the politics subreddit in particular.

And with that kind of negative social pressure beating down — the same kind of pressure that helped black out the most popular sites on the web in protest of SOPA — a lesser person might have killed the story, or at the very least toned it down. Luckily that didn’t happen.

For Chen, it would have been very easy to write a damning article that not only revealed Michael Brutsch as Violentacrez, but also summarized his shady activity of posting photos of underage girls, trolling the community with racial/sexist/stereotypical activity, and generally being bad at concealing his identity. Instead, Chen wrote a 4,746-word feature article that humanized Brutsch as a dirty but complicated middle-aged man who became a force of online justice when he wasn’t at his day job.

The article also offered a great deal of original reporting, including the realization that Brutsch had actually been a guest on Geeks of Doom’s The Drill Down podcast, which I used to co-host with VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar and Andrew Sorcini. Sorcini was an online power user in his own right, under the moniker “MrBabyMan” on Digg. (Disclosure: In this particular episode, VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig was filling in for Devindra, but he didn’t speak during the interview.)

“Violentacrez has…certain fetishistic tastes, but as far as I know, he’s never done anything illegal,” Sorcini told me in a phone conversation yesterday. He’s the former top Digg user of all time, and has kept up with the community of other power users on Digg, even though none of them have any interest in the site anymore. He contacted Brutsch to do the podcast because he was curious about Reddit’s most active users.

“I did drill him on the controversy surrounding his popularity on Reddit, (and) I did get the sense that he had a moral compass,” Sorcini said, adding that the center of that moral compass wasn’t located in the same place as most people, who aren’t as concerned with concealing their identity.

This point actually made sense, and backed up Chen’s description of Brutsch as an ultra-connected Reddit troll, who had a surprising amount of power policing the site.

In particular, it was a quote from former Reddit employee Christopher Slowe that really opened my eyes to how Brutsch even ended up in this position. Back in 2008, Reddit was a different place. It had four employees and not a lot of money. The site was down every other day, and on top of all that, there were tons of people doing illegal things, like posting naked pictures of underage girls to its (now defunct) Jailbait subreddit.

“We just stayed out of there and let him do his thing and we knew at least he was getting rid of a lot of stuff that wasn’t particularly legal,” Slowe says in Chen’s article. “I know I didn’t want it to be my job.”

I’m sure Brutsch will undoubtedly experience lots of consequences. But that’s not the truly sobering piece of this entire situation for me.

As it stands, Reddit’s moderators decided to go proactive by voluntarily banning a website that went after their friend — mind you, not just the article that would have outed his identity, but everything that the site and its sister publications ever produce. They do this under the guise of protection, or a distorted sense of duty, or hell, just because they want to. And this would normally be fine, except that it speaks volumes about Reddit’s moderation police.

Reddit moderators that banned Gawker don’t really want freedom of speech, but they do want the appearance of it. They are exactly what they hate: A bunch of authoritative sociopaths convinced that limiting a few awful voices is necessary for the greater good of the community.

As for Sorcini’s contact with Brutsch, he said it’s been pretty minimal. The last time Sorcini chatted with him was six months ago.

“He’s unapologetic of his actions, but if you’re going to be that way, you have to accept the consequences,” Sorcini told me.

The last time Sorcini spoke with him, Brutsch was inquiring about ways he could transfer his popularity on Reddit to the much more visually stimulating social network Pinterest.

Artwork via nComment

China is notorious for its unreliable wifi, so it’s easy to forget that it’s a massive internet hub with 450 million people surfing the web.

With vast differences in broadband speeds across the country, China Web Report has compiled this useful infographic to help you get online. The Chinese tech blog said it had garnered a great deal of interest about the differences in Internet speeds, and the correlation to demographic, economic and social factors.

We recently reported that the rise of tablet computing may spell the death of the desktop PC, but in China, it’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of people are not surfing the web on their smartphones.

As you might guess, the fastest broadband is accessible in the urban sprawls like Shanghai and Beijing. Inland, there is virtually zero Internet access. The research also revealed that it’s tougher to surf the web during the evening and early morning hours. If you’re still struggling, you may want to consider switching your telecom provider to China Telecom, which boasts the fastest broadband speeds.

Of course, if you’re struggling to access basic web search (Google, Bing, and so on) or your favorite social networking sites, it may be that you’re simply cut-off. The Chinese government is extremely stringent with electronic communications; for years, it prevented Google searches of the English word “freedom.”

Read the full report here.

Infographic courtesy of China Web Report / Top Image via Flickr (jblyberg)

Google has added a list of domains operated by torrent site The Pirate Bay to its blacklist of terms that won’t show up in its “Instant” or “Autocomplete” search engine features.

Basically, any time you type in a search term, Google displays the possible results either as you type or by predicting what you’re about to search via suggestions. This isn’t true for a variety of dirty words (curse words or words to identify genitalia), and now the same is true for  thepiratebay.org, thepiratebay.se, and other domains used by the torrent site, according to TorrentFreak.

However, when I tried searching for the domains, I noticed that Google displayed no “Instant” search results until adding a period to thepiratebay. But Google Instant did eventually kick in without me having to hit enter. That said, I’ve reached out to Google for more information.

It’s worth noting that page results for The Pirate Bay are still indexed and thus still pop up whenever you hit enter. But regardless of if your search query is legitimate (like, if you actually wanted to learn about pirate bays throughout history … or something), Google isn’t going to provide any help. The same is true for other sites associated with piracy, including utorrent, BitTorrent, and RapidShare.

If true, the move would reaffirm Google’s stance against piracy and is just short of making it disappear from its search engine — something that most people would deem as censorship. And with Google trying to boost interest in its own Google Play digital media store, it’s also in the company’s best interest to curb piracy, too.

Covered face image via GrandeDuc/Shutterstock

[ update July 31 10:52 PST: Twitter has reinstated Guy Adams account ]

The assumption yesterday, unwritten but certainly thought, was that NBC had complained to Twitter. And that was bad enough, raising questions about freedom of speech and appropriate uses for Twitter, which has become a significant global communications utility, with 500 million registered users.

But today the Daily Telegraph revealed that actually, Twitter contacted NBC about the tweets, not vice versa. At least, according to a letter from NBC vice-president of communications Christopher McCloskey.

And that puts an entirely different complexion on things.

Up until now, Twitter has felt like something of a neutral party: If corporations or individuals complained about a tweet or an account, the company would investigate. And, if the terms of service had been violated or other violations found, Twitter would take action.

Source: John Koetsier

Guy Adams’ Twitter account: nothing to see here, move along folks

But it’s an entirely different matter to proactively be reviewing tweets and sending companies notifications about potential problems. Those are the actions of a publisher, not a communications utility. We’d expect to see that kind of move from a traditional movie or music industry organization, not our modern darling of geeky social news.

Bad form, Twitter. Seriously bad form.

It’s even worse when you consider that NBC and Twitter had a partnership to tell the story of London 2012 via tweets. That makes Twitter look like it has skin in this particular game … like the company was not a neutral party. Already some publications are stating quite openly that Twitter censored Adams because of the NBC partnership.

While that’s going too far based on the facts on-hand, one thing is for sure: This has really, really, really bad optics.

Suspending the journalist’s account was obviously — obviously! — a horrendously stupid idea. Anyone with even the smallest amount of media sense had to know that this would blow up. That Adams’ paper would publish about it. That the technology press would pick it up. That it would become a big story.

The smart way to deal with it was to not deal with it. The journalist in question, Guy Adams, would have continued to tweet, and most people would have continued to not notice.

But now it’s a big story, and Twitter has huge egg on its face.

Perhaps there’s a reason Twitter has lost multiple communications directors in record time.

Image credit: Nito/ShutterStock

Guy Adams is a writer for the UK news agency The Independent. He’s the paper’s L.A. correspondent, and while the biggest story in the UK is happening in London, he’s cooling his heels in Hollywood … unable to watch the Olympics live.

That was, apparently, bothersome, so he tweeted about it – quite intensively. And with attitude.

Some of it was fairly innocuous:

Matt Lauer would do well to shut up, wouldn’t he?

According to NBC’s commentary team, the Surrey countryside is full of “chateaus” #ffs!

But Adams’ biggest complaint was the now-legendary time delay between the actual opening ceremonies and NBC’s broadcast.

Say “up yours” to @nbcolympics and watch that opening ceremony here MT @edfcarrasco: we got what the people want: http://t.co/IB5epHmx

America’s left coast forced to watch Olympic ceremony on SIX HOUR time delay. Disgusting money-grabbing by @NBColympics http://t.co/bQxKCCdj

I have 1000 channels on my TV. Not one will be showing the Olympics opening ceremony live. Because NBC are utter, utter bastards.

Perhaps not all in great taste, and certainly inflamatory, but not enough to get his account shut down. Until this tweet:

The man responsible for NBC pretending the Olympics haven’t started yet is Gary Zenkel. Tell him what u think! Email: Gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com

At that, NBC complained to Twitter, and Twitter called it a violation of policy. This policy, in fact:

You may not publish or post other people’s private and confidential information, such as credit card numbers, street address or Social Security/National Identity numbers, without their express authorization and permission.

Adams has responded on his own newpaper’s website, saying that Gary Zenkel’s email address is NOT private, because Gary Zenkel‘s email address is both corporate and public, “accessible to anyone with access to Google.”

So it is private or is it public? And should Twitter have suspended the account? And, does the fact that Twitter and NBC are teaming up to present the Olympics, 140 characters at a time, have anything to do with the suspension?

Lots of questions.

But the biggest one is this: Should you really be using a service that can cancel your account and wipe out years of tweets for a single violation of rules you have probably never read?

But that’s precisely the question that Twitter execs should be hoping none of Twitter’s 500 million registered users will ask themselves.

They might have thought of that before suspending a journalist’s account.

Image credit: Petronilo G. Dangoy Jr./ShutterStock

As we reported earlier, the new legislation is a series of amendments to other bills that grant the Russian federal service for supervision of communications, IT, and mass media the power to remove websites from the Russian Internet 24 hours after notifying offending publishers.

While the bill’s language states that its focus on pornography, extremist websites, and sites promoting suicide, critics fear it will be used to stifle dissent. According to the Russian legal information society Rapsi, Alexander Morozov, the head of Moscow’s Center for Media Studies, is one of those who is worried.

“It is always argued that these laws are against extremism, child pornography, and so on, but this legislation will hit the opposition and freedom of political expression.”

Russian Wikipedia ran an SOPA-style blackout yesterday to no avail, and the Kremlin’s own human rights watchdog has complained.

Oddly, the bill has both broad political support, having been drafted by members of all four of Russia’s major political parties, and many opponents. It appears that the bill will be signed into law by President Valdimir Putin later this year, but opposition members of the Russian parliament said that the bill’s goal was to stifle dissent.

The broader danger to free speech is that by implementing the bill, the Russian government is giving itself a lever that it can now activate for an increasing range of reasons.

Image credit: Vladdito/ShutterStock

But there’s one real doozy in there that surprised me. That’s Schmidt’s statement that China is the only nation actively censoring the internet:

“China’s the only government that’s engaged in active, dynamic censorship. They’re not shy about it.”

What? I’ve been to China, and I speak regularly with American expats still working in China. China certain does censor the internet … but the only government? That’s news to me, and maybe to you too.

But it would also be a complete shock to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which recently released its 2012 list of most censored countries.

The top half of the list is a regular rogue’s gallery, a who’s-who of international bad boys. Heading the list? Eritrea, a small country in Africa that used to be part of Ethiopia. Then come North Korea, Syria, and Iran.

Following up the leaders are Equitorial Guinea, Uzbekistan, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and Belarus.

No China in the mix.

Well, at least not until you check the runners-up … those repressive-but-not-quite-as-evil countries to whom the Oscar did not go to.

China does feature prominently on the runners-up list, and in a specific blog post on China and censorship, the CPJ calls its communist party’s censorship notorious. But it’s not on the top 10 list this year, although China did make it to number six in 2010.

Wikipedia has more information on countries that censor online. Bahrain arrests bloggers and blocks websites at the ISP level. Belarus controls the internet within its borders via a single government-owned gateway. Burma puts you in jail for 15 years for unauthorized possession of that deadly weapon, the modem. Cuba uses IP blocking and keyword filtering. Iran filters the internet for porn, religion, and more and has said that it wants to create its own internal internet.

All told, no fewer than 18 countries are in Wikipedia’s “pervasive censorship” category.

Mr. Schmidt, we’d live in a better world than we do now if China stood alone in internet censorship. As the chairman of the world’s largest search engine, you should know that.

It is, after all, how I found a more complete list of censoring nations.

Image credit: Aelius Aaron/ShutterStock, M. Dykstra/ShutterStock

The bill, which is really a series of amendments to existing laws, was originally drafted in June, according to Ria Novosti, a Russian news agency, but will be presented to legislators this week, on July 6. If the amendments pass, Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal service for supervision of communications, IT, and mass media, will be in charge of the blacklist and will work through a non-profit organization to monitor compliance.

When a website is found to contain illegal content, the government agency will give the owner of the site 24 hours to remove it. Failing that removal, the site will be entered on the blacklist. In some cases, such as sites advocating violence, the courts may need to get involved.

Opposition has already arisen, comparing the Russian effort to China-style “great firewall” censorship.

As the Financial Times has reported, the country has already seen questionable cases of harassment and attempted censorship on .ru domains. Compromat.ru, which publishes stories on official corruption in Russia, was closed by a Moscow prosecutor, and moscow-post.ru, a news site, suffered a similar fate. Both websites subsequently relocated to .net or .com domains.

Even the Kremlin’s own human rights watchdog is complaining, saying that it is important to stop censorship on Russian language websites. And the Voice of Russia reported that Minister of Communications and Mass Media Nikolai Nikiforov does not “appreciate the bill in its current form.”

Regardless, the bill may be passed in first reading, says RAPSI, the Russian Legal Information Agency.

Image credit: ShutterStock

With six million tweets circulating per day, it’s no surprise that Twitter receives hundreds of requests from governments and copyright holders to remove content.

In the new report, we gain insight into three categories of requests from the first six months of 2012: government requests for user information, government requests to withhold content, and requests from copyright holders to remove infringing content.

Complaints concerning copyright infringement far outweighed requests for user information. Between Jan. 1 and June 30 of 2012, Twitter received 3,378 requests to remove copyrighted material and complied with roughly 600 of them.

And government officials are showing more interest in Twitter than ever before. The social media site received more requests in the first half of 2012 than it received throughout 2011. The rates of compliance are also shockingly high: In 2012, Twitter fulfilled more than 75 percent of these requests. Similarly to Google, the vast majority of user information requests are levied by agencies from within the United States.

Google offered props to Twitter this morning for its efforts to be more transparent. In an interview with VentureBeat, Christine Chen, a spokesperson from Google, said she hopes the move will inspire more Internet companies to follow suit. Notably, Facebook has yet to publish information about the nature of the requests it receives for user data.

“The more transparent that companies and governments are, the more meaningful the public debate can be about the free flow of information online,” said Chen.

Twitter bird image via Shutterstock; Transparency Report screenshots via Twitter 

According to the latest Google Transparency Report, content removal requests from American government agencies have more than doubled since the first half of 2011.

A total of 187 requests affecting 6,200 items were sent from U.S government agencies from July to December of 2011. Google says it complied with a little more than forty percent of them.

Similarly extreme numbers were reported with user data requests. Topping the list, U.S. agencies made over six thousand requests for Google user data, of which Google complied with 93 percent.

“It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect — Western democracies not typically associated with censorship” Google Senior Policy Analyst Dorothy Chou wrote in a blog post.

So the U.S. is not alone: Similarly democratic counties like the United Kingdom, Spain, and Germany have also inundated Google with takedown requests. In all, Google received more than a thousand requests, up from 907 during the first half of last year.

One of the best ones came from Canada, which sent Google a request to remove a YouTube video wherein a Canadian citizen is shown urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet. Unsurprisingly, Google declined the request.

With 194 requests, Brazil was also highly represented in the takedown request report, which Google partly attributes to the popularity of the social network Orkut in the country.

And if you are wondering how these numbers stack up to those from countries like China and Iran, well, so does Google. Unlike the U.S. and UK, if these countries want content taken down, they just take it down. As a result, China’s page in the report is entirely empty.

So, as potentially troubling as these new numbers are, it’s possible to find solace solely in the fact that they exist. That’s the beauty of transparency.

Image: Businessmen with umbrellas/Shutterstock 

A 30-second call using Skype in Ethiopia can land you a 15-year prison sentence, thanks to new legislation passed by the country’s government.

The new legislation will criminalize the use of all Voice Over IP (VoIP) services, such as Skype or Google Voice, from within the country, according to an Al Jazeera report. The legislation, which was voted into law last month with little notice from international media, seems to close a loophole that was allowing some of its citizens to communicate without being monitored by authorities.

The country’s sole communication infrastructure is operated by government-run telecom Ethio Teleco. The new legislation empowers the state-owned telecom to prohibit the use not only of VoIP services, but also of video chatting, social media, e-mail, and any other data transfer service capable of communicating information. So that encompass pretty much all communication except for speaking aloud and talking within your own mind.

The law also gives the government the right to inspect any imported voice communication equipment as well as the power to ban any inbound packages that don’t have prior permission from the state, according to the Al Jazeera report.

Anyone in the country who uses an illegal phone service will face up to 15 years in jail and heavy fines. Making a phone call over the Internet is punishable by 3 to 8 years in prison plus fines. Ethio Teleco also recently installed a  system for blocking access to the Tor network that users browse anonymously and access blocked websites, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Ethiopian authorities claim the drastic measures called for under the new law are necessary to protect against security threats. However, African Review notes that observers are saying the law is instead aimed at limiting freedom of expression and the flow of information between the nation’s 85 million people.

Via TechCrunch

If someone were to layout all the important organizations, factions, companies, and components of the war on online piracy into a comprehensive battle map, it would look like the infographic below.

The “map” is basically visualized as a region of space with a sun-like “content” circle placed directly in the center, with shells of DRM and DMCA wrapped around it. Beyond that, the infographic, which was created by visual data startup Visual.ly, has several layers that each identify a portion of the ecosystem driving the war on piracy. There are waves of file restrictions and take-down notices as well as various “zones” of copyright violators. Each zone has an appropriate mix of organizations, as you can see below. (I found the “Safe Harbor” zone to be the most interesting, personally.)

And while I could explain each portion in detail, it’s probably best to just give it a closer look.

“We wanted to do something on online piracy but the data is, by its nature, elusive,” Visual.ly Creative Director Jess Bachman told VentureBeat. The startup’s main focus isits data visualization service that allows people to create visually appealing infographics, which can then tell a story using the otherwise bland data from various APIs as well as publicly available information.

Visual.ly also provides its users with a platform to share cool infographics from around the web. Occasionally, the company even produces its own original infographics, such as the recently published Battlespace of Online Piracy.

In regards to Visual.ly’s inspiration for Battlespace, Bachman added:

“Activity outside the legal system is hard to track. The other issue is that online piracy is a very convoluted and connected topic. There are so many players, platforms  and processes, that it’s hard to know where to begin when talking about it. So we thought a relationship diagram would be a good way to orient the uninitiated to online piracy. Additionally, a comprehensive relationship diagram can pay service to all parties involved.  While most news media focus on the MPAA and RIAA, there are other powerful lobbying groups like the BSA and ESA.  Similarly, we often think content gets on the Piratebay and then onto people’s hard drives, but there are other steps and parties involved like release groups and seeders.  When trying to get a handle on a complicated issue, perspective is paramount.  That is what this graphic provides.

Let us know what you think of the infographic in the comment section. (Click image to enlarge.)

The Chinese equivalent of Twitter has just issued a “code of conduct” for its users in an attempt to put a stop to political criticism, rumors, and the spread of social unrest.

Weibo.com, an online property run by Sina Corp, is a microblogging platform not unlike Twitter. It allows information — well, some information — to spread rapidly through brief messages and images.

And like Twitter, it’s peppered with the same mundanity, the same inspirational cliches, the same celebrity-related chatter. But it also brings its fair share of political and social commentary, not unlike the Arab Spring and Occupy movements’ presence on Twitter.

Now, however, users will be expected to keep their missives squeaky clean by the government’s standards and to not post about politically sensitive topics, up to and including the very names of disgraced Party members or any criticism of the country’s constitution.

Weibo users’ conduct will be enforced with a points system (yep, they just gamified censorship) wherein you lose points for posting rumors or criticisms and earn points for, say, verifying your own identity. If you get down to zero points, your Weibo account gets terminated.

The timing of this decision is interesting. The Communist Party in China will be holding its 18th Congress in the fall; congresses are held about once every five years. The 18th Congress is set to bring about a huge leadership change, and so far, it’s going far from smoothly. The road to this fall’s political shift has been paved with oustings, rumors, infighting, political persecution, and all manner of drama. There have even been speculations that the Congress may be postponed this year.

Add a microblogging service to all that, and you have what some would consider to be a perfect storm for social media and social change. But not in the PRC, and not on Weibo or any other Sina property.

Unfortunately, this is just the continuation of a longstanding trend. Late last year, Sina execs pledged their support to government censorship programs.

And in early 2011, Weibo began blocking messages about the Arab Spring uprisings. A search for “Egypt” on the service would return a message stating, “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results are not shown.”

The new code of conduct was announced earlier this month and went into effect today.

Google is rolling out a new section of its Transparency Report today that provides detailed information about copyright infringement removal requests.

“We believe that openness is crucial for the future of the Internet. When something gets in the way of the free flow of information, we believe there should be transparency around what that block might be,” Google stated in a recent blog post announcing the new section of the report.

The company first launched the Transparency Report about two years ago, which primarily focused on the number of URL or content removal requests  — as well as requests for personal data of an individual — made by governments across the world.

The new section of the report details the companies and organizations that are asking Google to remove content or de-index a URL from search results on the basis of copyright infringement. In the past month, the report indicates that 1,246,854 URLs have been targeted for removal from over 24,000 domains. The top sites being listed are shady sounding domains, such as Filestube.com, 4shared.com, zippyshare.com, etc.

So, who exactly is requesting these removals? The report indicates that over 1,200 copyright owners have asked for removals (either directly, or from an organization representing them). Here’s he shocking part though.

While companies/organizations like NBCUniversal, Lionsgate, the RIAA, and BPI (the British version of RIAA) are all at the top of the list for copyright infringement URL takedown requests, none of them come close to the top company — Microsoft, with a total of 552,252 requests.

Google also says the number of requests has been increasing rapidly, and that its not unusual for the company to receive more than 250,000 requests each week. That’s more than what copyright owners asked it to remove in all of 2009.

“Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don’t want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws. So we’ve always responded to copyright removal requests that meet the standards set out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),” Google states. “At the same time, we want to be transparent about the process so that users and researchers alike understand what kinds of materials have been removed from our search results and why.”

The company said it will eventually provide information about content removal requests, such as those made through its video site YouTube.

In terms of how Google goes about these copyright infringement requests is pretty reasonable at least on YouTube. Once contacted by a copyright holder, it removes the content in question and contacts the user responsible. That user can then appeal the infringement claim, and if Google hasn’t heard back from the copyright holder after a two weeks, its restored.

With its search results, it’s not as easy, but Google said it’s working hard to better identify the legitimate requests and discard all the others.

Copyright stamp photo via filmfoto /Shutterstock

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and several other government officials will soon begin discussions with Internet Service Providers to create service plans that entirely block pornography, according to The Telegraph.

The government’s decision to look into widespread porn blocking comes from wanting to “protect” children whose parents are either too lazy or not savvy enough to block it themselves. The Telegraph report claims that three-quarters of children in the U.K. have access to the Internet without parental supervision and that about 800,000 can view adult content if they please.

If the most conservative factions of the U.K. government have their way, ISPs would offer a default plan that blocks all porn and if you do want adult content, you would have to opt-in. The Prime Minister reportedly does not want to impose that strict of a system but instead would prefer an “active choice” where you choose whether you get adult content or not when you sign up for a plan.

Conservative Member of Parliament Claire Perry said she is pushing for the “opt-in” system. “If British Internet Service Providers introduced ‘opt-in’, we would be the first country in the world to have such a system,” Perry told The Telegraph. “We led the world on blocking child abuse imagery. We’ve done it before. We can do it again. And what a wonderful legacy to give to our children. The time for hand-wringing is past and the time for common sense solutions is here. We have got to act.”

In the U.K., one-quarter of online searches are for pornography, so if porn was censored at a network level, those who make and distribute it could see traffic declines. We’re sure sites such as Sex.com and Snatchly, two new Pinterest clones that curate adult pictures across the web, will be watching closely.

Let us know in the comments if you think the U.K. government is pursuing this issue correctly or if it amounts to censorship.

Surprised man photo: olly/Shutterstock

The rising strength of the Pirate party in Europe’s strongest economy is a sign of new concerns among young, highly educated voters who are unhappy with the country’s two major parties – the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD) — who have dominated the political scene there much as the Republican and Democrats do in the United States.

The Green Party has long pushed a pacifist, anti-nuclear platform. “For many young people, the Greens have become an old party. The anti-nuclear theme just doesn’t lure voters like it used to,” said Manfred Guellner, director of Forsa, which conducted this latest poll.

The Pirate Party has been focused on hot button issues like ACTA, the SOPA of Europe. Copyright reform and internet freedom, especially as it relates to government censorship, have become major talking points for the Pirates. This has helped them capture the vote of many in the “informatics sector”, the German equivalent of our tech industry.

Image from Flickr user Sdknex

Update 4/10/2012: Iran has denied the report that it plans to cut itself off from the Internet, according to a more recent story in the International Business Times.

Iran plans to disconnect itself from the Internet and replace popular services like Google, Yahoo, and Hotmail with homegrown, Iranian services, according to a report in the International Business Times today.

The IBT writes that Reza Taghipour, the Iranian minister for Information and Communications Technology, announced the plans in a statement. According to the statement, the first phase of the project will begin in May, when the government will block access to Google, Hotmail, and Yahoo, replacing them with government services like “Iran Mail” and “Iran Search Engine.” Within five months, the country will effectively have lost all Internet access to the outside world, and Iranian residents will have access only to a government-controlled intranet.

The government is already accepting applications for Iran Web Mail accounts, which require you to enter a first and last name, postal address, and phone number. (Here’s an English version of that form via Google Translate.) We can guess that Iranians aren’t thrilled about the prospect of giving up Gmail for a state-sponsored (and presumably monitored) alternative.

Taghipour said the Internet “promotes crime, disunity, unhealthy moral content, and atheism” and that the government plans to eliminate these net-based “scourges.” Ars Technica adds that the country is also concerned about digital espionage and sabotage, a possible reference to the Stuxnet worm that damaged Iranian nuclear facilities in 2011.

At the beginning of what would become known as the Arab Sprint, Egypt took the then-unprecedented step of cutting off all Internet access. It was a short-lived move, however, with access restored after five days. Other countries have temporarily shut down SMS text messaging or limited Internet access for regions or cities, the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders states. “Shutting down the Internet is a drastic solution that can create problems for the authorities and can hurt the economy. Slowing the Internet connection speed right down is more subtle but also effective as it makes it impossible to send or receive photos or videos. Iran is past master at this,” Reporters Without Borders adds.

This isn’t the first time that the country has curtailed Internet access. In February, Iran cut off access to all secure web (HTTPS) connections.

The country has also detained and sentenced to death the creator of a photo-sharing site, Saeed Malekpour, an Iranian citizen and resident of Canada. A website and Twitter campaign to release Saeed Malekpour has drawn international attention, but it has not been updated since March 11, so Saeed’s fate is not known.

That’s a discouraging thought, especially on a day when the creator of another photo-sharing site, in a far less repressive country, earned a reported $400 million for his efforts.

Barbed wire photo: grendelkahn/Flickr

The decision is based on a similar 2009 ruling against online smut that has not yet been enforced. Egyptian publication Egypt Today confirmed the news in a tweet, stating courts would be banning the websites as of now. Of course, the 140-character social network promptly lit up like a switchboard with angry people wanting their porn (or freedom from censorship, one of the two).

One Twitter user says, “Rejoice Egypt, a new black market for porn CDs is in the making.”

Another user jokingly (we think) offers to sell proxies to Egyptian porn-watchers, allowing them to access the scandalous material online anonymously. His going rate is $8 a proxy. You can follow the conversation on Twitter using the #EgyPornBan hash tag.

The Egyptian government has been accused of censoring the Internet before, most recently during the overthrow of former leader Hosni Mubarak. During that time, social media was cut off, making it difficult for protesters and demonstrators to coordinate over the Internet.

If we are sure of anything in this world, it’s Rule 34: If it exists, there’s porn of it. If the lawmakers are serious, they can’t stop at the Internet. They will have to censor books, paintings, music, college dorm posters, email, sex text messages (sexting), and just about every teenaged-boy’s brain. The Egyptian government will now have to figure out a way to determine what is actually porn and what is artistic expression or a private moment.

hat tip The Next Web; Fig leaf image via Shutterstock

Update: Microsoft confirmed that The Pirate Bay links were being blocked. We’ve added the company’s official statement at the bottom of the post.

Microsoft has apparently started blocking all links from torrent search site The Pirate Bay from being sent through its instant messaging service Windows Live Messenger, according to TorrentFreak.

As many people know, The Pirate Bay is the most popular destination for people who’d like to share media files — many of them illegally. And while many ISPs around the world have started explicitly preventing people from accessing the site, its unclear if Microsoft is doing the same.

When someone sends a link from The Pirate Bay through the native MSN Live Messenger app, a message appears that reads: “The link you tried to send was blocked because it was reported as unsafe.” The same is also true of third-party messenger services like Pigdin, according to the TorrentFreak report. While some torrent flies can indeed infect a person’s computer with malicious viruses, it’s highly unlikely that users would have reported The Pirate Bay as “unsafe”. That said, I don’t think Microsoft would blatantly censor particular websites on one service without doing the same on others (Bing, Hotmail, etc.).

It’s been well over five years since I’ve tried to communicate with anyone through Live Messenger.  However, if I was an active Live Messenger user, seeing messages like this pop up would make me stop dead in my tracks.

We’re reaching out to Microsoft for comment about the behavior and will update the post with any new information.

Update 3/26/2012 (12:30pm PST): Microsoft responded to VentureBeat with the statement pasted below. Essentially, the company confirmed that the links were being blocked, and attributed it to people actually reporting URLs from The Pirate Bay as malicious.

Via Microsoft spokesperson:

Windows Live Messenger is set up to help ensure customers receive IMs only from people whose IMs are welcome and has long had the capability to block certain content from being transmitted in an effort to protect our customers. Before anyone can send customers an IM, those customers must first agree to add the sender to their Contact list; this helps protect customers from unwanted IMs from strangers and from annoyances such as spam and spim (spam via IM).

In addition, we use SmartScreen technology to protect our customers from malicious and unwanted content including phishing, malware and spam. We block instant messages if they contain malicious or spam URLs based on intelligence algorithms, third-party sources, and/or user complaints. Pirate Bay URLs were flagged by one or more of these and were consequently blocked.

Pirate photo via Noam Armonn/ShutterStock

Image from Flickr user Uncle Catherine

Influential New York investor Fred Wilson was one of the earliest and loudest opponents of the anti-piracy bill SOPA. He worried that it would threaten sites he considered legitimate, like Reddit, or Tumblr, which is backed by his firm Union Square Ventures. But as CNET’s Greg Sandoval reports, Wilson said yesterday that he supports the idea of an independent body which would create a blacklist for known pirate sites.

“If we created an independent body that essentially created a black and white list,” Wilson told a crowd of media executives at the Paley Center in New York. “The black list are those sites we all know are bad news. We all know who the good guys are who are truly licensed and are operating legitimately. And we know who the bad guys are.” CNET reports that Wilson named Hulu, Netflix, Rdio, Spotify and Rhapsody among the good guys.

The tech industry and the entertainment industry have very different ideas of what a pirate site looks like. If they both had equal representation on this independent body, perhaps they could agree on the most obvious villains. Wilson suggested services like MegaUpload, Pirate Bay and the various BitTorrent sites as the kind of sites that would be on the blacklist. “Using technology, we train our youth to know that they’re doing something bad and how they could do something that’s good.”

But piracy is never that black and white. Tumblr, which Union Square Ventures invested in, certainly doesn’t fall under the category of “good guys who are truly licensed. (emphasis mine)” Instead, it’s a free-wheeling community where users often post copyrighted music and images. While you can argue that it falls under the DMCA safe harbor passed by Congress, and isn’t a pirate site looking to profit by distributing tons of illegal content, it is a home to many blogs that distribute links to full downloads of new albums.

As Wilson said at the conference:

“We gotta fix the system so that the content is available legally on the internet in a way that it is available for people to consume it. As convenient as turning on your TV and watching HBO, that’s how convenient it has to be. The content industry has not made this content convenient to access on the internet and as a result everybody, and I mean everybody, is a pirate. Okay so in the world where everybody is breaking the law, you gotta look at the law. Is it the right law?”