China blocks private search engine DuckDuckGo

[dlevere]

https://gigaom.com/2014/09/22/china-...ne-duckduckgo/

[47iscool]

Got to love the first amendment. Something not even Europe has, saying or doing certain things over there can get you prison time.

[Pyriel]

Saying or doing certain things can get you prison time here too. We just have a generalized right recorded in our Constitution with a bunch of exceptions set down elsewhere. European nations tend to have somewhat similar things codified in their constitutions or other legislation, but the exceptions vary pretty widely, and at the highest levels it sometimes amounts to a gentlemen's agreement where you can say whatever you want, but if you get to be too big a dick the government and the courts will revisit the matter. If you're talking about the European Union specifically, freedom of expression is down in their charter.

[dlevere]

I remember when I was in Turkey. If a coin fell out of your hand, and you stepped on it to keep it from getting away, you could go to jail for that, because Ataturk's visage was on the coin. And you don't want to be in a Turkish prison. Just watch Midnight Express.

[47iscool]

Maybe I should have been more specific with what I said.

In Europe, you can be arrested for even offending someone. Sadly, you'll get more prison time for that than someone who killed another person. I wonder how much the offenders in the Rotherham scandal will get. Probably not as much as a native born European who makes offensive comments towards the perpetrators.

Anyway, that's all from me. Don't want to get too political here.

[Pyriel]

The sex offenders or do you mean people who may have crossed the line into hate speech during protests and so forth?

The UK has a ridiculously byzantine set of rules and laws regarding freedom of expression, so I don't think anyone there can even guess. When you read through it, it's like they've tried to codify "keep it civil", so expressing displeasure is fine, but the minute something like a slur escapes from you, your future is uncertain.

[bungholio]

I could see them hating tracking free privacy while searching. But at the same time it gets a bit annoying that when you go to google or wherever, they get your IP address and all kinds of things to track you. Some of it is useful, like typing in the name of a Walmart nearby where you live and a few times later every time you type Walmart it will just go to the local few near you in your city rather than just pick one on the other end of the planet. I'd say I don't like advertisements being changed to things I might be interested in based on all of my searches and websites I go to, but it wouldn't matter because I really just hate all advertisements. I block all advertisements.

[47iscool]

The sex offenders or do you mean people who may have crossed the line into hate speech during protests and so forth?

The UK has a ridiculously byzantine set of rules and laws regarding freedom of expression, so I don't think anyone there can even guess. When you read through it, it's like they've tried to codify "keep it civil", so expressing displeasure is fine, but the minute something like a slur escapes from you, your future is uncertain.

For instance, this.

[Pyriel]

I don't think that one's that weird. I'm not saying either punishment was necessarily right, I can just see how applying relevant laws might lead to that.

In the US, if I burn a flag I own while protesting outside city hall, I give offense to whole swathes of people, but I get off scot-free because of freedom of speech. If I chuck slabs of bacon around a synagogue or mosque, I give offense to swathes of people again, but I've also caused some direct injury to a specific group. I get charged with vandalism, mischief, or something similar, and probably get something from a few months to probation/suspended sentence, or possibly just a fine depending on how I went about it and what my record looks like.

Reading up on the case, everyone involved had priors, they planned it all out in advance, and they did it while worshippers were in the Mosque, in view of at least one of them.