SonicSpike shares a report from The Hill: YouTube has removed a video from its platform that shows Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) stating on the Senate floor the name of a person who conservative media have suggested is the whistleblower whose complaint triggered the impeachment inquiry of President Trump. The company, home to millions of hours of video content, said in a statement on Thursday that "videos, comments, and other forms of content that mention the leaked whistleblower's name" violate its community guidelines and will be removed from the site. "We've removed hundreds of videos and over ten thousand comments that contained the name. Video uploaders have the option to edit their videos to exclude the name and reupload," Ivy Choi, a spokesperson, said in the statement, which was first reported by Politico.

The video clip removed by YouTube comes from the Senate impeachment trial, when Paul mentioned a name that has circulated in conservative media as the whistleblower. Paul did so after Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts declined to read a question he submitted including that person's name. Paul says he does not know if the name he said on the Senate floor is the whistleblower's or not, but he said it was wrong for his speech to be censored. "It is a chilling and disturbing day in America when giant web companies such as YouTube decide to censure speech," he said in a statement. "Now, even protected speech, such as that of a senator on the Senate floor, can be blocked from getting to the American people. This is dangerous and politically biased. Nowhere in my speech did I accuse anyone of being a whistleblower, nor do I know the whistleblower's identity." Important to note: Federal whistleblowers are protected from retaliation by the Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA). "This law protects federal employees who disclose illegal or improper government activities," notes Study.com. "Generally, this means the government can't fire, demote, suspend, threaten, harass, or discriminate against a whistleblower."

On January 16th, Facebook users received an error message when posting in Jinghpaw, a language spoken by Myanmar's ethnic Kachin and written with a Roman alphabet. From a report: "We couldn't post this. Tap for more info," the message said. When clicking, a second appeared: "Your request couldn't be processed. There was a problem with this request. We're working on getting it fixed as soon as we can." A Facebook representative told The Verge that the issue was caused by "a bug in our language infrastructure," and coincided with the launch, the same day, of an updated language identification model supporting ten new languages, including Jinghpaw. The representative said Facebook fixed the issue within hours of receiving reports on January 17th. But while the disabling of Jinghpaw was not an active move of censorship, it alerted many Kachin people that Facebook had the capability to identify their language, an alarming thought for the embattled minority group. That realization has evoked a visceral reaction from the Kachin, and brought forth new calls for the company to be more transparent about its technology and the ways it will be used.

Netflix has taken down just nine pieces of content around the world in response to written government requests since it was founded 23 years ago, the company revealed for the first time. From a report: In its first-ever report on what it calls Environmental Social Governance, Netflix says it has already received one takedown request this year from the government of Singapore to remove "The Last Hangover," a Brazilian comedy. To date, Netflix has received three written requests from the government of Singapore covering five pieces of content, and one each from New Zealand, Vietnam, Germany, and Saudi Arabia. All have been since 2015. Netflix says it will only take down content if it receives a written request from the government seeking the censorship.

CaptainDork spotted CNN's update about best-selling author Stephen King: "I'm quitting Facebook," the author said on Twitter Friday. "Not comfortable with the flood of false information that's allowed in its political advertising, nor am I confident in its ability to protect its users' privacy...."

His Facebook profile has since been deleted. King encouraged his fans to follow him on Twitter. But meanwhile... Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Sunday slammed Twitter and Google for the rise in trolling networks and scams via fake bots on both the platforms.... "The crypto scam level on Twitter is reaching new levels. This is not cool," Musk reacted to a follower's tweet. "Report as soon as you see it. Troll/bot networks on Twitter are a *dire* problem for adversely affecting public discourse and ripping people off," he continued.

He also criticised Google for allowing scammers to flourish. "Trolls/bots just need to be deemphasized relative to probable real people who aren't being paid to push an agenda or scam. Google still shows bs/scam pages, they're just several clicks away," Musk stressed.
And elsewhere, criticisms of Facebook and Google continued: in a new interview, venture capitalist and tech critic Roger McNamee specifically singled out Facebook and Google for their roles in spreading disinformation... "[T]hey're the reason we can't fix climate change," McNamee, author of the book "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe," said this week on the [Yahoo Finance show] Final Round. "They're the reason why we have an epidemic of measles due to the anti-vaxers. They're the reason why white supremacy and gun violence are on the rise because they empower the most disaffected people in society, and they give them a disproportionate political voice....

"If we want to do something about climate change or gun violence or white supremacy or anti-vaxers, we're going to have to fix Facebook and Google."

Over the course of a year, Apple took down 805 apps in mainland China by its own account. From a report: In Apple's latest transparency report accounting for the first half of 2019, the iPhone maker said it removed 288 apps from China's iOS App Store for both legal and policy violations. The Apple Transparency Report goes out twice a year and details requests received from government agencies and private parties worldwide. The report lists government requests to access information on accounts and devices, but the last two reports also include the number of apps Apple removed that period. When it comes to why those apps are removed, though, Apple is tight-lipped. The reports cite two reasons for app removals: Platform violations, which covers gambling apps (gambling is illegal in China), and legal violations, which according to Apple usually means apps with pornography (also illegal in China) and other illegal content.

[...] The total number of apps missing from the App Store because of government censorship is hard to know. GreatFire has used its tool applecensorship.com to identify 2,678 apps that aren't available inside the mainland China App Store. But this number doesn't paint the full picture. Records of missing apps are only generated when people search for them on the website. And there's no information on whether apps were taken down because of a government request, a decision from Apple or the app makers' choice. Many of the apps recorded were never listed on the mainland China App Store. But the list does provide some insight, like the fact that the 149 unavailable news apps is more than in any other country. "We know that app store removals are happening more often in China," said GreatFire's Karen Reilly. "We know that many of these apps are news sources. We know that many of these apps are VPNs and other software that everyday people use to protect their privacy."

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press: Attorneys general in 20 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging a federal regulation that could allow blueprints for making guns on 3D printers to be posted on the internet.

New York Attorney General Tish James, who helped lead the coalition of state attorneys general, argued that posting the blueprints would allow anyone to go online and use the downloadable files to create unregistered and untraceable assault-style weapons that could be difficult to detect... Proponents have argued there is a constitutional right to publish the material, but critics counter that making the blueprints readily accessible online could lead to an increase in gun violence and put weapons in the hands of criminals who are legally prohibited from owning them... For years, law enforcement officials have been trying to draw attention to the dangers posed by the so-called ghost guns, which contain no registration numbers that could be used to trace them.

An anonymous reader shares a report: People are panicking. When a new disease is discovered, it's undeniably hard to identify and inform the public about it quickly. Yet China is making the problem harder to solve, even though it should have learned from the SARS outbreak in 2003, when the government admitted to underreporting cases in the initial stages. Nearly 800 people died in that epidemic, which saw desperate people emptying shops for Chinese herbal medicines and vinegar that would turn out to be ineffective. That frenzy was driven by the lack of accurate information and rumors because of a vacuum in top-down communication. The idea of wei wen, or maintaining stability in China's political system made "conceal as many as possible and keep it at the local level" a natural immediate response to a crisis like this.

That approach to information might work on other kinds of issues, but not when it comes to a potential epidemic. Trying to control information in that case becomes a kind of shackle in the face of something that can progress and change swiftly beyond one's control. Of course, there is one thing that's different than 17 years ago: WeChat. A tool connecting more than a billion users in China should be one the government can use to help keep the public up-to-date, and to debunk false information. Yet it too has become a hotbed for both rumors and information suppression amid China's broader regime of online censorship honed over the past decade. Already, a focus of social media discussion about the current virus crisis has been on how hard it's been to get correct information, and whether officials were slow to respond in the early stages, at least in Wuhan. While some international public health experts have commended China's information sharing as superior to 2003 in the face of a quickly evolving situation, others have expressed doubt that the country is being as transparent as it should be.

Reuters reports that a group of "prominent internet pioneers" now has a plan to block the $1.1 billion sale of the .org internet domain registry to Ethos Capital.

The group has created their own nonprofit cooperative to offer an alternative: "There needs to be a place on the internet that represents the public interest, where educational sites, humanitarian sites, and organizations like Wikipedia can provide a broader public benefit," said Katherine Maher, the CEO of Wikipedia parent Wikimedia Foundation, who signed on to be a director of the new nonprofit.

The crowd-sourced research tool Wikipedia is the most visited of the 10 million .org sites registered worldwide...

Hundreds of nonprofits have already objected to the transaction, worried that Ethos will raise registration and renewal prices, cut back on infrastructure and security spending, or make deals to sell sensitive data or allow censorship or surveillance... "What offended me about the Ethos Capital deal and the way it unfolded is that it seems to have completely betrayed this concept of stewardship," said Andrew McLaughlin, who oversaw the transfer of internet governance from the U.S. Commerce Department to ICANN, completed in 2016.

Maher and others said the idea of the new cooperative is not to offer a competing financial bid for .org, which brings in roughly $100 million in revenue from domain sales. Instead, they hope that the unusual new entity, formally a California Consumer Cooperative Corporation, can manage the domain for security and stability and make sure it does not become a tool for censorship. The advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which previously organized a protest over the .org sale that drew in organizations including the YMCA of the United States, Greenpeace, and Consumer Reports, is also supporting the cooperative.

"It's highly inappropriate for it to be turned over to a commercial venture at all, much less one that's going to need to recover $1 billion," said EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn.

hackingbear shares a report from The Verge: TikTok released its first transparency report yesterday, showing which countries have submitted requests for content removal as well as access to user data. China is notably absent from the report -- the video sharing app, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, claims it did not receive a single takedown request from Communist Party of China in the first half of 2019.

TikTok's report shows that U.S. law enforcement agencies have been working with TikTok to gain access to user data and take down content that violates U.S. laws. In the past year, TikTok received 79 requests for user data from U.S. law enforcement agencies, along with six requests for content takedowns. The company complied with 86 percent of the user data requests, and restricted or blocked seven accounts related to the content takedown requests. "TikTok is committed to assisting law enforcement in appropriate circumstances while at the same time respecting the privacy and rights of our users," Eric Ebenstein, TikTok's head of public policy, wrote in a blog post. The U.S. submitted the second highest number of overall requests, beat out only by India, which submitted 107 requests for user data and 11 requests for content takedowns. The report notes that China may not be in the report because TikTok doesn't operate there. The Chinese version of the app, which runs as a separate organization, is called Douyin.

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: CNN reports that government shutdowns of the internet are becoming the new normal: An ongoing internet blackout in Indian-controlled Kashmir is now the longest ever in a democracy -- at more than 135 days -- according to Access Now, an advocacy group that tracks internet freedom. Only the autocratic governments of China and junta-era Myanmar have cut off access for longer... Kashmiris have been without internet access for so long that WhatsApp has reportedly begun deleting their accounts for inaction... India's increased internet censorship has been greeted with delight in China, however, where state-run media pointed to it as an endorsement of Beijing's own authoritarian approach. The People's Daily said this week that India's example showed "shutting down the internet in a state of emergency should be standard practice for sovereign countries...."

African states have also embraced the tactic, with Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Ethiopia all cutting off internet access in an attempt to rein in anti-government protests. This is in line with a general pattern of increased online censorship. It's partly due to the spread of more sophisticated technology that makes it easier, and cheaper, to monitor and filter traffic online. It's also influenced by a shifting perception of internet censorship, which once used to be seen as something of a losing battle. China's Great Firewall, however, has proved beyond doubt that not only can the internet be controlled, but that doing so can help prop up the regime and prevent opposition movements from getting off the ground...

Shutdowns give police a freer hand to reign in unrest without the type of hyper-scrutiny on social media that has become common in highly-connected societies, and enable the government to ensure that its message is the only one heard on a particular topic. In 2018, there were 196 internet shutdowns globally -- mainly in Asia, Africa and the Middle East -- according to Access Now. In the first half of this year alone, there were 128, and 2019 looks to be the worst year on record. According to Freedom House, a Washington-based NGO, almost half of the world's population lives in a country "where authorities disconnected internet or mobile networks, often for political reasons."

dryriver writes: The 2010s were not necessarily the greatest decade to live through. AAA computer games were not only DRM'd and internet tethered to death but became increasingly formulaic and pay-to-win driven, and poor quality console ports pissed off PC gamers. Forced software subscriptions for major software products you could previously buy became a thing. Personal privacy went out the window in ways too numerous to list, with lawmakers failing on many levels to regulate the tech, data-mining and internet advertising companies in any meaningful way. Severe security vulnerabilities were found in hundreds of different tech products, from Intel CPUs to baby monitors and internet-connected doorbells. Thousands of tech products shipped with microphones, cameras, and internet connectivity integration that couldn't be switched off with an actual hardware switch. Many electronics products became harder or impossible to repair yourself. Printed manuals coming with tech products became almost non-existent. Hackers, scammers, ransomwarers and identity thieves caused more mayhem than ever before. Troll farms, click farms and fake news factories damaged the integrity of the internet as an information source. Tech companies and media companies became afraid of pissing off the Chinese government.

Windows turned into a big piece of spyware. Intel couldn't be bothered to innovate until AMD Ryzen came along. Nvidia somehow took a full decade to make really basic realtime raytracing happen, even though smaller GPU maker Imagination had done it years earlier with a fraction of the budget, and in a mobile GPU to boot. Top-of-the-line smartphones became seriously expensive. Censorship and shadow banning on the once-more-open internet became a thing. Easily-triggered people trying to muzzle other people on social media became a thing. The quality of popular music and music videos went steadily downhill. Star Wars went to shit after Disney bought it, as did the Star Trek films. And mainstream cinema turned into an endless VFX-heavy comic book movies, remakes/reboots and horror movies fest. In many ways, television was the biggest winner of the 2010s, with many new TV shows with film-like production values being made. The second winner may be computer hardware that delivered more storage/memory/performance per dollar than ever before.

To the question: What, dear Slashdotters, will the 2020s bring us? Will things get better in tech and other things relevant to nerds, or will they get worse?

Iran's authorities have restricted mobile internet access in several provinces, an Iranian news agency reported on Wednesday, a day before new protests were expected to kick off following calls for demonstrations on social media. Reuters: Social media posts, along with some relatives of people killed in unrest last month, have called for renewed protests and for ceremonies to commemorate the dead to be held on Thursday. State media, meanwhile, said intelligence ministry agents had seized a cache of 126 mostly U.S.-made guns smuggled to the central city of Isfahan from abroad. The protests were initially sparked in November by hikes in gasoline prices but demonstrators quickly expanded their demands to cover calls for more political freedom and other issues. The government, which launched the bloodiest crackdown on demonstrators in the 40-year history of the Islamic Republic, blamed foreign enemies for stoking tensions.

Russia has temporarily shut off many of its citizens' access to the global internet today in a test of its controversial RuNet program, according to an internal government document. From a report: RuNet aims to boost the government's ability to better control internal digital traffic, launch cyber and information attacks against other nations, and track and censor dissidents. The test will evaluate "the possibility of intercepting subscriber traffic and revealing information about the subscriber, blocking communication services," according to a Dec. 5 document produced by Russia's Ministry of Digital Development, Communications, and Mass Media. The document said the test was originally slated to take place on Dec. 19 but had been rescheduled for Dec. 23.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In November, Iran's government announced a price hike on oil, leading to mass protests in Tehran. To quell the spreading unrest, the Iranian government effectively shut down the internet. After a week of Iranian security forces cracking down on protesters, including an estimated death toll between 140 and 208, internet access was gradually restored around the country. Judging by statements made by President Hassan Rouhani, the internet shutdowns could be a harbinger of more censorship in 2020 and beyond. Iran's intranet, known as the National Information Network, will be expanded so "people will not need foreign [networks] to meet their needs," President Rouhani said to Iran's parliament on Sunday, according to Radio Farda. The decree to bolster the NIN comes from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, Rouhani said. Developing a more robust intranet would allow the Iranian government to cut access to the internet, and Iranians off from the rest of the world, without the economic self-impairment that internet cutoffs cause. An intranet would allow the Iranian government to select what sites and content Iranians can see, as opposed to the blunt and costly tool of a total shutdown.

From a report: Keybase started off as co-founder and developer Max Krohn's "hobby project" -- a way for people to share PGP keys with a simple username-based lookup. Then Chris Coyne (who also was cofounder of OkCupid and SparkNotes) got involved and along came $10.8 million in funding from a group of investors led by Andreesen Horowitz. And then things got increasingly more complicated. Keybase aims to make public-key encryption accessible to everyone, for everything from messaging to file sharing to throwing a few crypto-coins someone's way. But because of that level of accessibility, Keybase faces a very OkCupid kind of problem: after drawing in people interested in easy public-key crypto-based communications and then drawing in blockchain lovers with its partnership with (and funding from) Stellar.org, Keybase has also drawn in spammers and scammers. And that has brought a host of alerts and messages that have made what was once a fairly clear communications channel into one clogged with unwanted alerts, messages, and other unpleasantry -- raising a chorus of complaints in Keybase's open chat channel. It turns out there's a reason spell check keeps wanting to tell me that Keybase should be spelled "debase."

Keybase's leadership is promising to do something to fix the spam problem -- or at least make it easier to report and block abusers. In a blog post, Krohn and Coynes wrote, "To be clear, the current spam volume isn't dire, YET. Keybase still works great. But we should act quickly." But the measures promised by Keybase won't completely eliminate the issue. And Keybase execs have no interest in getting involved with additional steps that they see as censorship. "Keybase is a private company and we do retain our rights to kick people out," the co-founders said in the blog post. "That hammer will not be used because someone is mostly disliked, as long as they're playing nicely on Keybase."

A group of filmmakers have sued the State Department for making visa applicants hand over details about their social media accounts. "The lawsuit argues that the requirement unconstitutionally discourages applicants from speaking online -- and, conversely, discourages people who post political speech from trying to enter the U.S.," reports The Verge. From the report: This lawsuit, filed by the Doc Society and the International Documentary Association, challenges the decision on First Amendment grounds. It calls the registration system "the cornerstone of a far reaching digital surveillance regime" that makes would-be visitors provide "effectively a live database of their personal, creative, and political activities online" -- which the government can monitor at any time, long after the application process has been completed. Applicants must even disclose accounts that they use pseudonymously, and if U.S. authorities fail to keep that information secure, it could potentially endanger people who are trying to avoid censorship from a repressive foreign government.

The plaintiffs in this lawsuit say that some non-U.S. members have begun deleting social media content or stopped expressing themselves online because they're afraid it will complicate their ability to enter the U.S. Others have decided to stop working in the country because they don't want to reveal their social media accounts. "The Registration Requirement enables the government to compile a database of millions of people's speech and associations, which it can cross-reference to glean more information about any given visa applicant," warns the suit. And "the government's indefinite retention of information collected through the Registration Requirement further exacerbates the requirement's chilling effect because it facilitates surveillance into the future."

"DC Comics has yanked a poster for a new Batman title from its social media accounts after the image drew criticism from Chinese commenters who said it appeared to support the ongoing pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong," reports Variety: The artwork depicts Batman throwing a Molotov cocktail against a backdrop of hot-pink words spelling out the new comic book's tagline, "the future is young." It was posted on DC Comics' Twitter and Instagram accounts; both platforms are blocked in mainland China... [T]he poster came under fire from Chinese internet users who contended that it contained coded messages in support of Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests. They said that the Molotov cocktail alluded to young Hong Kong protesters' more violent tactics, that the "dark knight's" choice of black attire referred to the black-clad Hong Kong protesters, and that the "golden child" of the book's title was a veiled reference to the color yellow, which was taken up by previous pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong five years ago...

DC Comics has since removed the poster from its social media. A Beijing-based representative of Warner Bros. declined to comment on the move. China is a critical market for Warner Bros., which owns DC Entertainment and DC Comics, its publishing subsidiary....

DC Comics' Instagram has been flooded with criticism from people who support the Hong Kong protests or are angry that the company appears to have given in to Chinese political pressure. "So now Batman loves money more than justice?" asked one commenter.

Another wrote: "Apparently China rules the world now. The future is young? No, the future is censorship."
Ironically, the Daily Wire notes that technically, the figure on the front cover might not even be Batman.

"It's actually Batwoman."

Chinese regulators have announced new rules governing video and audio content online, including a ban on the publishing and distribution of "fake news" created with technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality. From a report: Any use of AI or virtual reality also needs to be clearly marked in a prominent manner and failure to follow the rules could be considered a criminal offense, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said on its website. The rules, effective Jan. 1, were published publicly on its website on Friday after being issued to online video and audio service providers last week. In particular, the CAC highlighted potential problems caused by deepfake technology, which uses AI to create hyper-realistic videos where a person appears to say or do something they did not. Deepfake technology could "endanger national security, disrupt social stability, disrupt social order and infringe upon the legitimate rights and interests of others," according to a transcript of a press briefing published on the CAC's website.

"Iran, one of the countries most strongly identified with the rise cyber terrorism and malicious hacking, appears now to be using an iron fist to turn on its own," reports TechCrunch: The country has reportedly shut down nearly all internet access in the country in retaliation to escalating protests that were originally ignited by a rise in fuel prices, according to readings taken by NetBlocks, a non-governmental organization that monitors cybersecurity and internet governance around the world...

The protests arose in response to a decision by the state to raise the price of gas in the country by 50%. As this AP article points out, Iran has some of the cheapest gas in the world -- in part because it has one of the world's biggest crude oil reserves -- and so residents in the country see cheap gas as a "birthright." Many use their cars not just to get around themselves but to provide informal taxi services to others, so -- regardless your opinion on whether using fossil fuels is something to be defended or not -- hiking up the prices cuts right to ordinary people's daily lives, and has served as the spark for protest in the country over bigger frustrations with the government and economy, as Iran continues to struggle under the weight of U.S. sanctions.

Clamping down on internet access as a way of trying to contain not just protesters' communication with each other, but also the outside world, is not an unprecedented move; it is part and parcel of how un-democratic regimes control their people and situations. Alarmingly, its use seems to be growing. Pakistan in September cut off internet access in specific regions response to protests over conflicts with India. And Russia -- which has now approved a bill to be able to shut down internet access should it decide to -- is now going to start running a series of drills to ensure its blocks work when they are being used in live responses.
On Twitter, NetBlocks reported yesterday that realtime network data "shows connectivity at 7% of ordinary levels after twelve hours of progressive network disconnections."

Speaking of YouTube and moderation, the Google-owned video service is rolling out updated terms of service on December 10th, and a new line acts as a reminder that the company doesn't have to keep any video up that it doesn't want to. From a report: "YouTube is under no obligation to host or serve content," the new terms of service policy reads. It's another way of saying that just because YouTube is a relatively open platform, it doesn't mean that the company is required to keep videos up. YouTube has faced criticism from all sides over its video removal process. Some critics argue that YouTube could do more to take down videos that butt up against the company's rules but don't outright violate them; others argue that YouTube ought to be a fully open platform and shouldn't control what remains up and what doesn't. Executives have long defended the platform as a champion of free speech, but have started to clamp down on the type of videos allowed to circulate.