WebProNews

Tag: awesometimes

  • Iran Filter Backfires, Blocks Khamenei’s Fatwa on Antifiltering

    The Irani government’s aggressive mission to censor internet access within the country took a turn toward irony yesterday when it filtered out a message from Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The censored message? Khamenei’s fatwa against the use of antifiltering tools in Iran.

    Radio Free Europe reports that Khamenei’s fatwa was blocked from Iranian websites a mere 30 hours after it was published. Apparently even using the word “antifiltering” is sensitive enough to trigger Iran’s automated censoring system.

    The irony of the whole situation spools together even more, though, because a member from a news agency wrote to Khamenei’s office stating that some professionals, such as journalists, may need to use antifiltering tools in order to visit blocked websites that need to be viewed. Mehr asked what the religious decree would be in that specific case, to which Khamenei replied, “In general, the use of antifiltering software is subject to the laws and regulations of the Islamic republic, and it is not permissible to violate the law.”

    Merely mentioning the religious ruling on antifiltering filtered out Khamenei’s statement. In order for Mehr or anybody else to actually read Khameni’s statement on antifiltering tools, as RFE points out, the Ayatollah’s followers would have to use antifiltering software to access it.

    Amazing.

    Iran’s spent the better part of the past year (and more) muzzling access to a free internet, going so far as to build its own national internet that will include only government-approved content. Now, the authorities’ vigorous effort to censor and control the dissemination of information in the country appears to be cannibalizing the government.

    [Via Ars Technica.]

  • London Is Great at $#!)?@$$^%* Twitter Swearing

    Swearing, like 85% cacao dark chocolate and kalamata olives and people who always interrupt you, is an acquired taste. It’s enough put you off with your first experience to really write the entire notion off of the thing entirely yet, with some applied determination and the right person(s) supporting you, swearing can be elevated into an ethereal art that elevates you into an elite class of people who have transcended the middling tribulations of normal life and arrived into a new afternoon of linguistic enlightenment.

    If you’re a Twitter user, you have without doubt encountered some swear words. In fact, some Twitterers have seemingly boldly taken up the challenge of seeing how many creative uses of swear words can be craftily deployed within the 140-character restriction.

    Ed Manley, a researcher at University College London, has noticed the propensity of Twitter users in London who enjoy the difficult art of cussing and, more, cussing on Twitter. He took Twitter’s data and scoured the data for some of the most colorful purple language he could find in his fair city to find out which borrough swears the most on the micro-blogging site. The results reveal that Enfield has the highest percentage of swears in tweets with 3.16% of so to them, I tip my @#%*I hat. He goes into more detail, including a hypothesis about trends of cussing in London, over at the accompanying post on his blog.

    Manley, in his effortless genius, actually made a Google Maps layer to display the percentage of swearing per tweet per borrough. Have a look-see.


    Click here to see the full size map

    Now if only somebody could produce a similar map of different cities and neighborhoods in the United States with Google Maps API, I will do a couple of jumping jacks.