Farangland News

The BBC is taking measures against the unauthorized use of its iPlayer service by actively blocking UK VPN services. The measures aim to prevent foreigners from accessing iPlayer without permission, but they're also blocking many legitimate UK citizens from surfing the Internet securely.

While the service is intended for UK viewers, who have to pay a mandatory TV license, it's also commonly used overseas. Recent research suggests that 60 million people outside the UK access iPlayer through VPNs and other circumvention tools.

Traditionally the BBC hasn't taken any measures to prevent unauthorized use, but this changed very recently. Over the past several days TF has received several reports from VPN users who can no longer access iPlayer from UK-based VPN servers. Blocked viewers see the message:

BBC iPlayer TV programmes are available to play in the UK only.

This effectively stops foreigners and expats from accessing the service, but it also affects license paying UK citizens who use a VPN to browse the Internet securely. They will now have to disconnect their VPN if they want to access iPlayer.

Several VPN users are not happy with the change and have voiced their complaints. The issue is also causing concern among VPN providers, which are looking for options to circumvent the blockade.

A UN report titled, Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls has been published by members of the Working Group on Broadband and Gender with editorial inputs by teams from UN Women, UNDP and ITU.

It is very manipulative report, starting by discussing internationally reprehensible online behaviour such as making death threats. It then defines these as 'cyber violence' and establishes that such behaviour should not be allowed on the internet, presumably assuming concurrence by readers.

Then it pulls a fast one by defining a long list of other things as a 'a form of cyber violence', many of which are nothing to do with violence, but are just a wish list of things that feminists do not like. This list includes the adult consensual sex trade and inevitably, your bog standard porn. The authors claim:

Research reveals that 88.2% of top rated porn scenes contain aggressive acts and 94% of the time the act is directed towards a woman

Hence porn should be banned as 'cyber violence against women'.

Update: Cybersexism? Yet another feminist panic

2nd October 2015. See article from spiked-online.com by Ella Whelan

The UN's report on cybersexism is shrill and illiberal.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released Privacy Badger 1.0, a browser extension that blocks some of the sneakiest trackers that try to spy on your Web browsing habits.

More than a quarter of a million users have already installed the alpha and beta releases of Privacy Badger. The new Privacy Badger 1.0 includes blocking of certain kinds of super-cookies and browser fingerprinting -- the latest ways that some parts of the online tracking industry try to follow Internet users from site to site.

EFF Staff Technologist Cooper Quintin, lead developer of Privacy Badger said:

It's likely you are being tracked by advertisers and other third parties online. You can see some of it when it's happening, such as ads that follow you around the Web that seem to reflect your past browsing history. Those echoes from your past mean you are being tracked, and the records of your online activity are distributed to other third parties -- all without your knowledge, control, or consent. But Privacy Badger 1.0 will spot many of the trackers following you without your permission, and will block them or screen out the cookies that do their dirty work.

Privacy Badger 1.0 works in tandem with the new Do Not Track (DNT) policy, announced earlier this week by EFF and a coalition of Internet companies. Users can set the DNT flag -- in their browser settings or by installing Privacy Badger -- to signal that they want to opt-out of online tracking. Privacy Badger won't block third-party services that promise to honor all DNT requests.

EFF Chief Computer Scientist Peter Eckersley, leader of the DNT project said:

With DNT and Privacy Badger 1.0, Internet users have important new tools to make their desires about online tracking known to the websites they visit and to enforce those desires by blocking stealthy online tracking and the exploitation of their reading history. It's time to put users back in control and stop surreptitious, intrusive Internet data collection. Installing Privacy Badger 1.0 helps build a leaner, cleaner, privacy-friendly Web.

Download Firefox/Chrome browser add on from eff.org

US retailer Target has refused to stop selling an ironic T-shirt which alludes to women as trophies with a spokesperson explaining that women of all ages love the controversial item.

A few PC bullies have been flooding social media with threats to boycott the store via the inevitable Change.org petition. User Amanda R. from Milwaukee, Wisconsin started the petition last month for Target to Stop Selling Sexist "Trophy" Shirt That Demeans Women , claiming that the shirt's message encourages rape culture. The petition has been signed by about 11,500 people and moans:

The word trophy should not refer to any person, man or woman, because we are not THINGS - we are human beings. Labeling any person as a "Trophy" is demeaning their humanity and objectifying them as a tangible object that can be bought, used, and disposed of.

Target have responded in statement to USA Today:

It is never our intention to offend anyone and we always appreciate receiving feedback from our guests, The shirt you're describing is part of a collection of engagement and wedding shirts that are available in our women's and plus size departments.

The collection also included shirts that say "Team Bride", "Mrs" and "Bride". These shirts are intended as a fun wink and we have received an overwhelmingly positive response from our guests.

Immigration laws leave an estimated 33,000 people unable to remain with spouses in Britain as they do not earn enough to satisfy visa requirements.

The rules were introduced on 9 July 2012, and every year dozens of couples who have been separated from their partners and children gather outside the Home Office to protest a law which means around 47% of Britons do not earn enough to fall in love with a foreigner.

Don Flynn, of Migrant Rights Network, which hosted the demo along with BritCits, an organisation for affected couples, said the British economy had suffered because of the law:

The government claimed it would save £650m, but research from Middlesex University found that if, as expected, most of these spouses would have found employment, that would have made a contribution of over £850m.

There was a common thread among those who came to protest on Thursday, regardless of their background. All said that everyone they met thought the law was wrong.

Among those protesting were family members with children living abroad, unable to return because of visa laws.

Nigel Johnson brought his 11-year-old stepson Jeff to the protest from north Devon, with the youngster proudly wearing his British public school uniform. Nigel's wife Burphan, Jeff's mother, is still in Bangkok. J ohnson said:

We don't even intend to stay here long term, but we've scraped every penny together from the extended family to give this boy a proper British education. In just two years, with English as his second language, he's top of his class. But of course, he misses cuddles from his mum.

I've cut grass, I've cleaned holiday cottages, I've worked six jobs to get my income over the threshold and still we are being turned down.

The legal fight against the law is now in its final throes. In 2013, the high court found the threshold of £18,600 was too high, with Mr Justice Blake calling the law unjustified but it was overturned by the court of appeal and the case is now at the supreme court, due to sit this September. That same month will also see a report from children's commissioner Anne Longfield examining the effects of the law on children separated from a parent.

But many of the couples at Thursday's protest who had successfully managed to settle in the UK said they had used a legal technicality known as the Surinder Singh route, after the landmark case. It paved the way for Britons to work abroad in another European Economic Area country before bringing a non-European spouse to the UK, so EEA law on spouses, which is more generous, can take precedent.

Mrs Pineda-Andrews said the system had coloured her view of Britain. I experienced so much bigotry, to be with the person I love. She smiled as she held up her passport, with the British visa inside. We are still fighting because we want change, I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. Well, maybe on Theresa May.

Japan has repealed an old law banning dancing after midnight. But of course politicians can't entirely let go of their control freakery and have retained the ban in low-light venues.

Japan's parliament voted to relax the laws, which date from 1948. The laws were introduced during the US occupation amid supposed concerns that the relatively liberal social attitudes of the Americans were corrupting Japan's youth. It was also an attempt to curb prostitution.

In recent times enforcement of the law had declined, but after decades of turning a blind eye to the clubs, police unilaterally decided to resurrect the law following the 2010 death of a 22-year-old student after a fight in an Osaka club.

Hit by a wave of raids by police who claimed they wanted to prevent an excessively hedonistic atmosphere at clubs, most of the city's venues were shut down for licensing violations, pulling the plug on Osaka's thriving dance scene.

This ban on midnight dancing drew fierce criticism from dance and music industry figures who said the government should promote Japan's growing, vibrant dance culture.

Under the new law, which is expected to take effect by June next year, dancing after midnight will be allowed if the club has a light level of at least 10 lux. This light level is approximately equivalent to what a movie theatre looks like with the lights on.

Samsung is warning customers about discussing personal information in front of their smart television set.

The warning applies to TV viewers who control their Samsung Smart TV using its voice activation feature.

Such TV sets listen to some of what is said in front of them and may share details they hear with Samsung or third parties, it said.

Privacy campaigners said the technology smacked of the telescreens, in George Orwell's 1984, which spied on citizens. Presumably the 'third parties' receiving the data are the likes of GCHQ and the NSA.

Samsung's privacy policy explains that the TV set will be listening to people in the same room to try to spot when commands or queries are issued via the remote. It goes on to say:

If your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.

Soon after, an activist for the EFF circulated the policy statement on Twitter comparing it to George Orwell's description of the telescreens in his novel 1984 that listen to what people say in their homes.

Samsung explained further in response to the international interest:

If a consumer consents and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search. At that time, the voice data is sent to a server, which searches for the requested content then returns the desired content to the TV.

Samsung claimed that it did not retain voice data or sell the audio being captured. But this does not really deny the possibility that the data is passed on to GCHQ.

Update: Samsung rewrites its privacy policy to remove the ominous sounding '3rd Party'

11th February 2015. See article from theregister.co.uk

Samsung hasn't actually changed how its TVs' voice recognition works but it has just changed the language of its privacy policy to help clarify how the voice-recognition works. Samsung no longer warns customers about the perils of speaking too freely in front of their televisions. Here's what it says now:

To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some interactive voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service provider (currently, Nuance Communications, Inc.) that converts your interactive voice commands to text and to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you.

The new language appears to indicate that Samsung is only sharing the audio data it captures with a speech recognition provider and not with more sinister partners, such as GCHQ and the NSA.

Update: Microsoft and Apple Too

14th February 2015. See article from dailymail.co.uk

Millions of Britons are being spied on in their homes by Microsoft's voice-activated Xbox game consoles, Apple smartphones and other hi-tech gadgets.

Kinect-controlled Xboxes listen to everything around them, silently waiting for commands such as Xbox turn on or instructions to load up computer games.

Apple also records what people say when they press a button on their iPhones and issue a command to its voice activation service Siri, but the firm says the data is anonymised, but this can usually be unpicked with information such as GPS location. According to a source, Apple hangs on to the information for up to two years.

Microsoft's Kinect gadgets are so sophisticated and pervasive that Britain's telecommunications security agency, GCHQ, is even said to have considered using them to monitor families.

Like most gadgets that use voice recognition, Xboxes controlled by Kinect record what people say then translate that information into text commands so that the device knows what to do. Simple commands such as Xbox turn on are recorded and processed on the spot, but more complicated instructions are sent to powerful remote servers for translation.

Microsoft said its customers can stop Kinect listening by unplugging it.

There's been a bit of an online backlash in China over censors cutting all cleavage from scenes in a popular TV drama about China's only female emperor.

The drama, The Empress of China , also known as the Saga of Wu Zetian was pulled from the schedules of commercial satellite station Hunan TV for technical reasons late last month, Xinhua reported.

When it returned a few days later, the show, starring the famous Chinese actress Fan Bingbing in the title role of Wu Zetian had been conspicuously edited.

Scenes of female characters, with cleavage showing dressed in period costume, had been cropped out, leaving only close-ups of their heads.

The Global Times insisted that a system of control was necessary. it wrote in a propaganda piece:

The reality is that censorship exists in many countries and it is unlikely to be reversed in China.

Changes to The Empress of China sparked fury among mainland internet users, who argued that censors had gone too far. An online survey released by the Sina Weibo microblogging service on Monday found that nearly 95% of respondents disapproved of the censorship of The Empress of China.

Some mainland bloggers, who renamed the drama The Saga of Wu's Squeezed Breasts , mocked the decision by censors. They circulated a series of edited pictures on social media, showing people how to highlight the head and hide the breasts when it comes to other characters.

The Global Times newspaper noted the defiance in an editorial:

While the censorship was largely done out of moral concerns, the resulting public outcry should serve as a warning for the future. While it is powerful, censorship lacks authority. In this sense, when using censorship, more considerations should be given to public opinion to garner support and avoid similar incidents.