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<pubDate>Fri, 7 Dec 2012 08:31:34 PST</pubDate>
<title>The SHOCKING Photos That Violated Facebook's Policies!</title>
<dc:creator>Nina Paley</dc:creator>
<link>http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121206/15484521270/shocking-photos-that-violated-facebooks-policies.shtml</link>
<guid>http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121206/15484521270/shocking-photos-that-violated-facebooks-policies.shtml</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ <em><strong>Update:</strong> The account is now unblocked, with this message from Facebook:
<blockquote>I'm so sorry for the inconvenience caused, there was a temporary misconfiguration in our photo review systems which caused a very small subset of users to be incorrectly enrolled in one of our checkpoints. There was no issue with your original photo, we have a combination of automated and human-review systems dedicated to keeping people safe, and a bug caused one of these systems to incorrectly enroll a small number of users into checkpoints.
<br /><br />
We have since remedied the issue, and remediated all affected accounts. Please let me know if you or others are still experiencing any difficulties.</blockquote></em>
<p>Yesterday I posted this adorable photo on Facebook:</p>
<center>
<a href="http://imgur.com/MpWcD"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/MpWcD.jpg" width=400 /></a>
</center>
<p>Being a cute picture of a cute cat, it got a lot of "likes" and comments. A few hours later I followed up with this photo (accompanying text in the caption):</p>
<center>
<a href="http://imgur.com/ItqLR"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/ItqLR.jpg" width=400 /></a>
<p>
<i><font size=-1>Another photo of Nut and me. Here you can see in more detail how Nut presses her face as hard as she can into mine. She does this all night, by the way. If I move my face away, she rearranges herself to grip the back of my head as tightly as possible. If I'm face-down on the pillow, she slides her paws under into my eye sockets and mashes her head into my ear. It's very cute but I don't think I could stand it every night.</font></i></p>
</center>
<p>Shortly thereafter,&nbsp;FB wouldn't let me view my feed, instead giving me this message:</p>
<blockquote><i><p>"We noticed you may be posting photos that violate our Community Standards. Help make Facebook better by cleaning up your photos and removing friends that post nudity or other things that violate our standards."</p></i></blockquote>
<p>Then it took me directly to all my photos and said,</p>
<blockquote><i><p>"To keep your account active, please remove any photos that contain nudity or sexually inappropriate content. Check the box next to each photo you need to remove."</p></i></blockquote>
<p>I didn't have a single dirty photo to check, so I checked none and then clicked the box that said, "I have checked all my photos that violate Facebook&#8217;s policies." For that, I was rewarded with this:</p>
<blockquote><i><p>"Because you uploaded photos that violate our policies, you won't be able to upload photos for&nbsp;<strong>3 days</strong>.</p>
<p>"If you have other photos on the site that violate our policies, be sure to remove them immediately or you could be blocked for longer. After this block is lifted, please make sure any photos you upload follow&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/policies" target="blank">Facebook&#8217;s Policies</a>."</p></i></blockquote>
<p>Followed by another checkbox that says,</p>
<blockquote><i><p>"I understand Facebook's policies and I won't upload any photos that violate these policies."</p></i></blockquote>
<p>But I haven't checked that box yet, because I really <em>don't</em> understand Facebook's policies. At all. Maybe Franz Kafka could explain them to me. Can you?</p>
<p><b>UPDATE:</b> several hours later, I still can&#8217;t see my FB home page/news feed. This is what I continue to get instead:
<center>
<a href="http://imgur.com/12MI2"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/12MI2.jpg" width=560 /></a>
</center></p><br /><br /><a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121206/15484521270/shocking-photos-that-violated-facebooks-policies.shtml">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121206/15484521270/shocking-photos-that-violated-facebooks-policies.shtml#comments">Comments</a> | <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121206/15484521270/shocking-photos-that-violated-facebooks-policies.shtml?op=sharethis">Email This Story</a><br />
 ]]></description>
<slash:department>avert-yer-eyes!</slash:department>
<wfw:commentRss>http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20121206/15484521270</wfw:commentRss>
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<pubDate>Mon, 3 Dec 2012 14:58:00 PST</pubDate>
<title>How Did Syria Turn Off The Internet... And What Other Countries Can Just Hit The Off Switch Like That?</title>
<dc:creator>Mike Masnick</dc:creator>
<link>http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121202/23121321205/how-did-syria-turn-off-internet-what-other-countries-can-just-hit-off-switch-like-that.shtml</link>
<guid>http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121202/23121321205/how-did-syria-turn-off-internet-what-other-countries-can-just-hit-off-switch-like-that.shtml</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ After the internet was almost entirely <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121129/11414821175/syria-cut-off-internet-again.shtml">cut off</a> in Syria last week, it <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/01/syria-internet-access-restored-blackout" target="_blank">came back over the weekend</a>, and people are still puzzling through exactly what happened.  The government keeps trying to blame others, such as attacks by those fighting against government forces.  However, an <a href="http://blog.cloudflare.com/how-syria-turned-off-the-internet" target="_blank">analysis by Cloudflare</a> has made it clear that it's almost certain that the government was behind the shut down:
<blockquote><i>
To begin, all connectivity to Syria, not just some regions, has been cut. The exclusive provider of Internet access in Syria is the state-run Syrian Telecommunications Establishment. Their network AS number is AS29386. The following network providers typically provide connectivity from Syria to the rest of the Internet: PCCW and Turk Telekom as the primary providers with Telecom Italia and TATA for additional capacity. When the outage happened, the BGP routes to Syrian IP space were all simultaneously withdrawn from all of Syria's upstream providers. The effect of this is that networks were unable to route traffic to Syrian IP space, effectively cutting the country off the Internet.
<br /><br />
Syria has 4 physical cables that connect it to the rest of the Internet. Three are undersea cables that land in the city of Tartous, Syria. The fourth is an over-land cable through Turkey. <b>In order for a whole-country outage, all four of these cables would have had to been cut simultaneously. That is unlikely to have happened.</b>
</i></blockquote>
Furthermore, they note that the shutdown was quite systematic, suggesting "this was done through updates in router configurations, not through a physical failure or cable cut."
<br /><br />
Meanwhile, the folks at Renesys look into <a href="http://www.renesys.com/blog/2012/11/could-it-happen-in-your-countr.shtml" target="_blank">just how difficult it is to cut a country off from the internet</a>, and whether other countries are at risk of the same sort of thing.  Basically, it comes down to how decentralized the internet is in various countries -- and in many countries there isn't much decentralization.  As Renesys notes, some countries have just one or two telcos who handle all internet traffic to and from the world.  Those countries are easy to cut off.  Renesys helpfully provides a map:
<center>
<a href="http://imgur.com/cX56r"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/cX56r.png" width=560 /></a>
</center>
They then go into more details.  Here are the two bullet points on the more at risk countries.  If you want to learn about the somewhat more safe countries, click on over and read their full post (which has a much bigger discussion on all of this, which I highly recommend):
<ul><i>
<li><strong>If you have only 1 or 2 companies at your international frontier,</strong> we classify your country as being at severe risk of Internet disconnection.   Those 61 countries include places like Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkmenistan, Libya, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Myanmar, and Yemen.  <br />
</li><li><p>
<strong>If you have fewer than 10 service providers at your international frontier,</strong> your country is probably exposed to some significant risk of Internet disconnection.    Ten providers also seems to be the threshold below which one finds significant additional risks from infrastructure sharing &#8212; there may be a single cable, or a single physical-layer provider who actually owns most of the infrastructure on which the various providers offer their services.  In this category, we place 72 countries, including Oman, Benin, Botswana, Rwanda, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, Armenia, and Iran.   Disconnection wouldn't be trivial, but it wouldn't be all that difficult.   Egypt falls into this category as well; it took the Mubarak government several days to hunt down and kill the last connections, but in the end, the blackout succeeded.</p></li></i>
</ul>
As the internet is increasingly a global phenomenon, this kind of stuff matters <i>a lot</i>.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121202/23121321205/how-did-syria-turn-off-internet-what-other-countries-can-just-hit-off-switch-like-that.shtml">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121202/23121321205/how-did-syria-turn-off-internet-what-other-countries-can-just-hit-off-switch-like-that.shtml#comments">Comments</a> | <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121202/23121321205/how-did-syria-turn-off-internet-what-other-countries-can-just-hit-off-switch-like-that.shtml?op=sharethis">Email This Story</a><br />
 ]]></description>
<slash:department>government-cut-off</slash:department>
<wfw:commentRss>http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20121202/23121321205</wfw:commentRss>
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<pubDate>Wed, 2 Jul 2008 11:12:15 PDT</pubDate>
<title>Japanese ISPs Decide That Criminal Confessions Should Be Blocked Online</title>
<dc:creator>Mike Masnick</dc:creator>
<link>http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080702/1047051574.shtml</link>
<guid>http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080702/1047051574.shtml</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ With various <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080610/0117061360.shtml">governments</a> pushing for <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080610/1549591365.shtml">laws</a> that require ISPs to block "objectionable" content, it's not hard to come up with scenarios where that will backfire.  Of course, who needs to come up with fictional scenarios when reality will serve up examples on its own.  Over in Japan, some mentally disturbed individual used the web to detail how he planned to stab a bunch of people.  After he carried out the stabbings, rather than focusing on how such sites can be useful in <i>stopping</i> homicidal maniacs <i>before</i> they kill, the Japanese are focusing on <a href="http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/02/japan-censors-sites-stabbings" target="_new">figuring out how they can block such content as "objectionable"</a> so that people can't see it.  Is common sense dead?  How could it possibly make sense to try to <i>hide</i> the fact that someone is confessing to the crimes they plan to commit before they commit them?<br /><br /><a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080702/1047051574.shtml">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080702/1047051574.shtml#comments">Comments</a> | <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080702/1047051574.shtml?op=sharethis">Email This Story</a><br />
 ]]></description>
<slash:department>common-sense-is-dead</slash:department>
<wfw:commentRss>http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20080702/1047051574</wfw:commentRss>
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<pubDate>Thu, 3 Apr 2008 00:22:47 PDT</pubDate>
<title>Google.com Inaccessible From The UK?</title>
<dc:creator>Mike Masnick</dc:creator>
<link>http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080402/190554732.shtml</link>
<guid>http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080402/190554732.shtml</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ I'm a bit surprised by this, but apparently <a href="http://www.internetbusiness.co.uk/02042008/googlecom-still-blocked-from-the-uk/" target="_new">google.com has been inaccessible from the UK for a week</a>.  I'm sure our many UK readers will chime in shortly to confirm or deny this, but apparently there's been a technical problem.  Google.co.uk has been accessible this whole time, but the original .com address doesn't resolve.  Two things seem odd about this: the fact that it's lasted a week and that this hasn't garnered very much news.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080402/190554732.shtml">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080402/190554732.shtml#comments">Comments</a> | <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080402/190554732.shtml?op=sharethis">Email This Story</a><br />
 ]]></description>
<slash:department>first-i've-heard-of-it</slash:department>
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