derivative work

матрациFacebook has deleted “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!”, a user-created page, and apologized to the Pakistani government which had blocked Facebook. A Pakistani minister said Facebook had assured them that “nothing of this sort will happen in the future”. Yeah, good luck with that. And fuck you, Facebook. How about not knuckling under to paternalistic theocratic [...]

Jenna Freedman posted an outrageous story about a medical database: Popline has made the word “abortion” a stopword, meaning you can’t search on the term; the database ignores the word as it ignores words like “the”. Why? Popline responded that “We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided [...]

* Judge White withdrew his order requiring the shutdown of wikileaks.org. See also 3/1 bits blog. (NYT 3/1) * The music industry has yet to pay artists any of the money it has received in settlements and lawsuits; the artists are pissed. NY Post 2/27) * The owners of the game scrabble are pissed off [...]

Pharyngula said it well: “Turkish ass shuts down a slice of the Internet” (well, as far as Turkey is concerned, anyway). Muslim creationist was unhappy with some critical blog commentary so he got a judge to block the entire domain. Best comment from Pharyngula thread: Wonder Twin powers activate. Form of A Google Bomb

A victory for free speech in the ongoing war against silly efforts for Congress-critters to score political points. (Preliminary injunction against COPA, aka CDA II, aka son of CDA)

One might think it would sometimes be in the best interests of a corporation to take the high road, but McDonald’s has chosen to go for the glory. McD’s slapped a cease and desist letter on an art gallery selling “Cokespoon #2″ — a gold-plated versions of a 1980s vintage McD’s coffee stirrer that was [...]

(It’s the anthem for fccfu.com … and, relatedly, you all know about Eric Idle’s ‘The FCC Song’, right?)

part of a longer post i’m developing on military bloggers, but this to start: another military blogger silenced: discussing all the king’s horses blog and CBFTW [blog]

I’m almost always infuriated when I hear about publicly licensed networks and stations refusing to air political ads. The latest: A media critique ad that aims to bring attention to the Darfur genocide. Be A Witness. Link from Ann Bartow @ sivacracy 8/25

Not content with their shared top-ten ranking in teen births, Louisiana State Rep. A. G. Crowe (R-Slidell) wants Louisiana to join with Oklahoma and Alabama in segregating (or banning) gay books. Good for you, Rep. Crowe. You tackle those problems that Louisiana is facing (high cancer mortality rates, high teen pregnancy rate, low education rates, [...]

god what a great state i come from. on nov 2 they — unbelievable — actually retained the state constitutional language mandating segregation. now this: MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) – A lawmaker seeking to ban gay marriages also wants to prohibit state money from being spent on any materials or programs that “recognize” or “promote” homosexuality. [...]