This bill was supposed to fight sex trafficking. But it's driving women back to a riskier, pre-internet world of sex work. By Emily McCombs.

Domain fronting helps apps evade censorship, but hackers use it to obfuscate where their malware comes from. By Zack Whittaker.

China’s push to cleanse its internet of unsavory elements appears to have claimed an unlikely victim, with thousands of videos of children’s cartoon program “Peppa Pig” reportedly culled from a video app. Douyin, an online video platform owned by technology firm Beijing Bytedance Technology Co., removed all trace of the British TV show, the state-run China Daily reported on Tuesday. The app had previously carried more than 30,000 videos related to Peppa Pig, according to state media.

As Techdirt has pointed out a number of times, attacking the huge free online repository of academic papers, Sci-Hub, is wrong from a number of viewpoints. It's wrong because Sci-Hub is not a site aiming to profit from the labor of others, but is...

A court in Moscow has approved a request from the Russian media regulator to block the Telegram messaging app immediately. The media regulator sought to block the app because the firm had refused to hand over encryption keys used to scramble messages. Security officials say they need to monitor potential terrorists. But the company said the way the service was built meant it had no access to customers' encryption keys.

Sci-Hub, often referred to as the "Pirate Bay of Science," remains a thorn in the side of academic publishers. After obtaining an injunction against the site last year, the American Chemical Society went back to court for an update, which now gives it the authority to seize newly registered domain names as well. But will that end the domain whac-a-mole?

Craigslist has shut down its renowned “personals” section, which once featured ads titled “Hot days” and “Looking to fool around tonight”. Porn performers are complaining that Google Drive is no longer allowing them to share erotic videos with private clients. Microsoft has announced new rules banning “offensive language” from conversations on Skype and Xbox. And Reddit has closed sex industry discussion groups entitled “Escorts”, “Hookers”, and “SugarDaddy”.

To pressure the websites that sex workers frequent, Congress just carved a hole in Section 230, which has governed the internet for 22 years. By Elizabeth Nolan Brown.

In Passing SESTA/FOSTA, Lawmakers Failed to Separate Their Good Intentions from Bad Law. By Elliot Harmon, EFF.

Get ready for your head to explode. In the middle of TEDxBrussels talk on March 5 that focused on censorship, a male event organizer walked onto the stage and physically dragged the female presenter off. And the kicker? The theme of the entire TEDx event was Brave New World — as in, yes, the Aldous Huxley book about a dystopian future wherein an all-powerful state controls the lives of its citizens. And it only gets worse from there. According to the TEDxBrussels website, the presenter, artist Deborah De Robertis, was in the middle of a piece addressing past censorship of her artwork.

Earlier this week China announced it would be ending term limits for its president. That means President Xi Jinping, who was limited to two five-year terms like nearly all of his predecessors, can rule indefinitely. The change sparked a backlash online, with criticism flooding local Weibo and WeChat platforms.

Beijing is pushing past its digital borders to influence and control what people say online, as it enjoys growing sway in the technology world.

Throughout the Trump administration’s first year in office, the Environmental Protection Agency has been quietly scrubbing mentions of climate change and tweaking related language on its website – an effort critics have decried as scientific censorship. The EPA is far from the only federal agency to get a Trump-era work over. But monitoring organizations say it has suffered the most extensive revisions over the past year.

The story of how an internet infrastructure company get locked into a free-speech dispute starts in the cubicles of SoMa and the brothels of Istanbul.

In September of last year, we noted that Facebook representatives were meeting with the Israeli government to determine which Facebook accounts of Palestinians should be deleted on the ground that they constituted “incitement.” The meetings — called for and presided over by one of the most extremist and authoritarian Israeli officials, pro-settlement Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked — came after Israel threatened Facebook that its failure to voluntarily comply with Israeli deletion orders would result in the enactment of laws requiring Facebook to do so, upon pain of being severely fined or even blocked in the country.

SESTA and FOSTA Are Cut from the Same Cloth. Both Would Be Disastrous for Online Communities. By Elliot Harmon.

Arriving behind the anti-Trump “resistance” and the Russia-gate “scandal” is a troubling readiness to silence dissent in the U.S., shutting down information that challenges Official Narratives, writes Robert Parry.

Eric Schmidt says that Google will “engineer” specific algorithms to make RT and Sputnik less prominent on the search engine’s news feeds.

Celebrated criminal barrister who defended Christine Keeler, George Blake and Howard Marks, and played a key role in the Lady Chatterley trial. By Geoffrey Robertson.