An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, the Internet got a much better look at military facilities across Russia. Google Maps stopped obscuring the sensitive locations due to Russia's ongoing invasion of its neighbor Ukraine. The Ukrainian Armed Forces announced the end of Google's censorship of Russia's bases on Twitter. Thanks to former US President Donald Trump, we know that the 0.5 m per pixel resolution available on Google Maps' satellite view is a far cry from the images available to the US government. But it will be invaluable to the growing mass of open source intelligence analysts. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began in late February, the OSINT community on Twitter has been cataloging Russian losses by geolocating images of destroyed tanks, fighting vehicles, aircraft, and cruise missile attacks.

Twitter users have already identified some interesting sights. Images taken of a Russian airbase at Lipetsk show partially disassembled MiG-31s (or perhaps MiG-25s). Another shows several Sukhoi fighter jets painted in patriotic colors, at least one of which is also missing its wings. Zhukovsky Airport near Moscow shows some oddities parked outside thanks to its role as a test flight center, including a Buran shuttle and a Sukhoi Su-47 technology demonstrator. UPDATE: A Google spokesperson told Ars that the company hasn't changed anything with regard to blurring out sensitive sites in Russia, so perhaps none of us were looking closely until now.

CNN reports on "an ironic effect" of efforts to remove books from libraries in America. "The more certain books are singled out, the more people want to read them."

And for some U.S. teenagers, "banned book clubs, recent book banning attempts have been a springboard for wider discussions around censorship." The Banned Book Club at Firefly Bookstore [started by 8th grader Joslyn Diffenbaugh] read George Orwell's "Animal Farm" as its first pick. While the satirical novella, which makes a pointed critique of totalitarianism, isn't one of the books currently being challenged in the US, it was banned in the Soviet Union until its fall and was rejected for publication in the UK during its wartime alliance with the USSR. And it faced challenges in Florida in the '80s for being "pro-communist." That history made for some thought-provoking conversations. "It taught a lot because it had references to different forms of government that maybe some adults didn't like their kids reading about, even though it was run by pigs," Diffenbaugh said. "I really thought it shouldn't have been banned for those reasons, or at all."

Teenagers at the Common Ground Teen Center in Washington, Pennsylvania, formed a banned book club soon after a Tennessee school district voted to remove "Maus" from an eighth grade curriculum. But while the graphic novel about the Holocaust was the catalyst for the club, says director Mary Jo Podgurski, the first title they chose to read was, fittingly, "Fahrenheit 451" — the 1953 dystopian novel about government censorship that itself has been challenged over the years. "Obviously this whole idea of taking away books that they wanted to read or that they thought they should read sparked a nerve in them," said Podgurski, an educator and counselor who oversees the Common Ground Teen Center....

Since reading "Fahrenheit 451," the club has also discussed "Animal Farm" and "1984," which has been challenged for its political themes and sexual content. So far, the young readers at the Common Ground Teen Center have been puzzled as to why those books were once deemed inappropriate. "I often wonder, do adults understand what kids have in their phones?" Podgurski said. "They have access to everything. Saying 'don't read this book' shows that you're not understanding teen culture. Young people have access to much information. What they need is an adult to help them process it."

Decentralized finance (DeFi) firm Truflation is building a new gauge to track inflation independent from the government and in real-time. CoinDesk reports: Think of it as a competitor to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and one where officials can't move the goalposts. "The framework that [the government] is using is a hundred years old ... and they have continuously tried to evolve that versus taking a fresh approach in an age where we've got everything computerized," Truflation founder Stefan Rust told CoinDesk in an interview. The team started building Truflation after former Coinbase (COIN) Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan challenged Web 3 developers to build a censorship-resistant inflation feed, claiming that "the centralized state isn't going to provide reliable inflation stats," and promising an investment of $100,000. On Friday it was announced that Truflation won the challenge.

The key difference between the CPI and the Truflation index is that while the government uses survey data to measure inflation, Truflation looks at price data. The CPI is measured in the form of a survey that collects about 94,000 prices per month for commodities and services and 8,000 rental housing units for the housing component. While the Truflation index is based on the same calculation model as the widely used CPI, it is different because it measures and reports inflation changes daily by using current real-market price data from sources like Zillow, Penn State and Nielsen, among others. About 40% of the data that is being looked at is the same goods basket that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses. The remaining 60% is being substituted with data from other sources. Truflation, which runs on Chainlink and is therefore accessible and visible for everyone, currently measures a 13.2% inflation rate, as opposed to 7.9% measured by the CPI in March.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Book banning is not new -- in the U.S. alone the practice goes back to Puritan times, when Thomas Morton's book New English Caanan and others opposing this way of life were tossed from Massachusetts. But the American Library Association said Monday that this year there have been more challenges to books than they have seen since they started tracking it in 2000.

The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom counted 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials in 2021. It's a significant jump: Last year the group noted 156 challenges -- and in 2019, there were 377. Although the 2020 number was impacted by the pandemic, which forced schools and libraries to shut down, the ALA said they don't usually get more than 500 book challenges in any given year. And sometimes, those challenges contain more than one book title. The number of individual books challenged in 2021 totaled 1,597. In a press release, ALA President Patricia Wong said: "We support individual parents' choices concerning their child's reading and believe that parents should not have those choices dictated by others. Young people need to have access to a variety of books from which they can learn about different perspectives."

The organization is launching a nationwide initiative meant to empower readers to fight censorship.

What happened after Russia blocked 80 million users of Instagram? Reuters reports: A black and white, melancholy alternative to Instagram that asks users to post sad pictures of themselves may launch in Russia this week, its creators said, to express sadness at the loss of popular services such as the U.S. photo sharing platform....

Although people can still sometimes access [Instagram] using a Virtual Private Network, domestic alternatives have started appearing, the latest being 'Grustnogram', or 'Sadgram' in English. "Post sad pictures of yourself, show this to your sad friends, be sad together," a message on the platform's website read.... "We are very sad that many high quality and popular services are stopping their work in Russia for various reasons," Afisha Daily quoted Alexander Tokarev, one of the service's founders as saying. "We created Grustnogram to grieve about this together and support each other."
Insider looks at the larger landscape now for Russia's social media apps: Rossgram joins a slate of Russian versions of major platforms that seek to mimic larger and more popular social media companies, resulting in a landscape of Russian knockoffs that often struggle to attract users while raising questions about how much access the Kremlin has to users' data.... Russia has been trying to coax internet users to turn to its own versions of popular sites, such as YouTube knockoff RuTube, for years. Authorities this year offered online creators the equivalent of $1,700 a month to move their content to RuTube, according to Coda Story, attempting to make up for its minuscule audience.

A 2021 report by the Levada Center, an independent polling organization, found that YouTube is used by 37% of Russians, Instagram by 34%, and TikTok by 16%. But some native platforms hold influence too. Out of Russia's 70 million active social media users, according to research by Linkfluence, a market research platform, 83% use a social media platform similar to Facebook called VKontakte, and 55% use another called OdnoKlassniki. According to Alyssa Demus, an associate international and defense researcher at Rand corporation, Russia has long been building up an ecosystem of alternative social media platforms. But people tend to be more skeptical and cautious when using them out of fear that the government is involved in their operations and users' information isn't secure.

"Either Russia has a hand in the building of the platform from this start, or they strong arm or co-opt whatever is popular later," Demus told Insider. "I know there's significant use of platforms like WhatsApp or others that are believed to be encrypted for that very reason — so that there can be open communication without the fear of reprisal." Russia has also enacted laws to exert influence on non-Russian social media platforms, including passing legislation stating companies need to place their servers for Russian accounts on Russian territory. "Presumably so they can then sort of meddle and do whatever kind of surveillance they need to," Demus said.
Demus adds at one point that "anything Russia touches has the potential to land you in jail."

But the article also notes that younger tech-savvy Russians are using VPNs to access sites blocked by the government — ultimately resulting in a kind of "generation gap" where they're less aligned with pro-government rhetoric from state-controlled media.

Russia's omnipresent tech company, which created products ranging from the country's dominant search engine to its biggest ride-hail service, is facing a looming shortage of hardware as U.S. sanctions punish President Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine. From a report: Yandex NV may run short of the semiconductors needed for the servers it uses to power its business within a year to 18 months because of import restrictions, two people with direct knowledge of the issue said, asking not to be identified in order to speak candidly. Sanctions on dual-use technology, which have both military and commercial uses, have hit its self-driving vehicle unit particularly hard, they said. Yandex has plunged into crisis since Putin began the war Feb. 24, caught between the Kremlin's increasingly harsh internet censorship and a backlash in its key foreign markets. The company's international partnerships are crumbling, two board members resigned, and its number two executive, Tigran Khudaverdyan, was forced to step down after being sanctioned by the European Union. The company's market value has slumped from a record $31 billion in November to $6.8 billion after the invasion began.

In early March, contractors working for Google to translate company text for the Russian market received an update from their client: Effectively immediately, the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine could no longer be referred to as a war but rather only vaguely as "extraordinary circumstances." The internal email, obtained by The Intercept, was sent by management at a firm that translates corporate texts and app interfaces for Google and other clients. From the report: The email passed along instructions from Google with the new wording. The instructions also noted that the word "war" should continue to be used in other markets and that the policy change was intended to keep Google in compliance with a Russian censorship law enacted just after the invasion of Ukraine. Asked about the guidance, Google spokesperson Alex Krasov told The Intercept, "While we've paused Google ads and the vast majority of our commercial activities in Russia, we remain focused on the safety of our local employees. As has been widely reported, current laws restrict communications within Russia. This does not apply to our information services like Search and YouTube." According to a translator who spoke to The Intercept, the orders apply to all Google products translated into Russian, including Google Maps, Gmail, AdWords, and Google's policies and communications with users. (The translator asked for anonymity to avoid reprisal by their employer.) The internal memo helps explain why some Google web pages, including an advertising policy and video help document found by The Intercept, use euphemistic terms like "emergency in Ukraine" in their Russian version but âoewar in Ukraineâ in the English version.

The non-profit Creative Commons (founded by Lawrence Lessig) opposes a new anti-piracy bill that "proposes to have the US Copyright Office mandate that all websites accepting user-uploaded material implement technologies to automatically filter that content." We've long believed that these kinds of mandates are overbroad, speech-limiting, and bad for both creators and reusers. (We're joined in this view by others such as Techdirt, Public Knowledge, and EFF, who have already stated their opposition.)

But one part of this attempt stands out to us: the list of "myths" Sen. Tillis released to accompany the bill. In particular, Tillis lists the concern that it is a "filtering mandate that will chill free speech and harm users" as a myth instead of a true danger to free expression-and he cites the existence of CC's metadata as support for his position.

Creative Commons is strongly opposed to mandatory content filtering measures. And we particularly object to having our work and our name used to imply support for a measure that undermines free expression which CC seeks to protect....

Limitations and exceptions are a crucial feature of a copyright system that truly serves the public, and filter mandates fail to respect them. Because of this, licensing metadata should not be used as a mandatory upload filter-and especially not CC license data. We do not support or endorse the measures in this bill, and we object to having our name used to imply otherwise.

"It's no longer possible to watch any content starring Keanu Reeves in China," reports PC Magazine, "and searching for his name returns no results from search engines."

The AV Club explains: Earlier this year, about a month after the release of The Matrix Resurrections, Reeves was announced as a performer at the 35th annual Tibet House Benefit Concert. The concert was organized by Tibet House, a nonprofit founded by supporters of the Dalai Lama that Chinese authorities have labeled "a separatist organization advocating for Tibetan independence," according to The Hollywood Reporter....

Now, after his appearance at the show, it's being reported by the Los Angeles Times that the Matrix movies, Speed, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, The Lake House, and more films from the actor's catalog can no longer be streamed on platforms such as Tencent Video, Youku, and Migu Video.... The one Reeves picture that is still up and available to stream in the country is Toy Story 4 — but that's because the film's credits feature the dubbing cast, not the original cast from the American release.
But it's more than that, notes PC Magazine: As Reuters reports, the Chinese authorities have seemingly wiped the actor's existence from servers across the country.... And with the internet being so restricted and controlled there, it's relatively simple for those in power to digitally disappear someone. So far, Tencent and iQiyi have removed at least 19 of the actor's movies from their streaming platforms, and performing a search for either his English name or its Chinese translation will return zero results from search engines, apparently.
The Los Angeles Times supplies some context: The development emerged just after his latest film "The Matrix: Resurrections" became the first blockbuster to hit Chinese theaters in over two months, ending an unusually prolonged drought of censorship approvals on U.S. titles in a year of rising geopolitical tensions and a further cooling of relations with Hollywood.... "It's a curious case that's worth following. We tend to think of the censorship machine in China as this really coordinated monster, but the fact that we're seeing these conflicting signals [between the online and theatrical markets] suggests that some of these measures come from different places," said Alex Yu, a researcher at China Digital Times, a U.S.-based news organization that translates and archives content censored in China.

It's unclear who ordered the deletions, China's regulatory agencies or platforms acting proactively to remove potentially troublesome content, Yu said.... "Why all of a sudden did they decide to take this measure at this exact moment? It's a question we as outsiders might never be able to answer," Yu said. "The system is so opaque that it's pretty much impossible to pinpoint which agency or person is responsible...."

The ban on Reeves' past works bodes poorly for the China prospects of his upcoming projects. These include animation "DC League of Super-Pets," starring Chinese fan favorite Dwayne Johnson, and the pandemic-delayed sequel "John Wick: Chapter 4," which appears to target mainland viewers with its top billing of Donnie Yen, the Hong Kong action star known for his expressions of loyalty to China's ruling Communist Party....

Despite the original trilogy's popularity, "The Matrix: Resurrections" was a flop in China even before it faced nationalist backlash, grossing only $13.6 million and notching just 5.7 out of 10 on the taste-making ratings platform Douban.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: As Russia makes preparations to possibly disconnect from the global internet in a bid to control the narrative around the invasion of Ukraine, one secretive U.S. company is rushing to lay the final pieces of an unbreakable network that the Kremlin won't be able to take down. The company is Lantern, which says it has seen staggering growth inside Russia in the last four weeks for its app that allows users to bypass restrictions the Kremlin has put in place on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But now the company is building something even more robust, an internal peer-to-peer network that will allow dissenting voices to continue to upload and share content even if the Kremlin pulls the plug on the internet.

Within the next week, the network will be fully operational, allowing opposition voices to use the Lantern app to post content like videos from protests or updates on the war in Ukraine directly to the Lantern network. This would allow users to share it with other Lantern users without fear that the content will be removed or blocked. [...] Lantern was founded in California in 2010 with the goal of keeping "the world's information, speech, expression, and finance uncensored." The free version of the app has a data cap of 500MB, but the pro version, which costs $32 a year, has no data cap. It has become hugely popular in China because of its ability to stay one step ahead of the government's censorship efforts, spreading mainly via word-of-mouth as it's not available via the Google or Apple app stores inside China. n Russia, like all new markets it enters, Lantern removed the data cap for all users. Despite this, some users still paid for the pro version.

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece: Protest is an important element of free speech that should be protected. Openness and inclusivity are cornerstones of the culture of open source, and the tools of open source communities are designed for global access and participation. Collectively, the very culture and tooling of open source -- issue tracking, messaging systems, repositories -- offer a unique signaling channel that may route around censorship imposed by tyrants to hold their power.

Instead of malware, a better approach to free expression would be to use messages in commit logs to send anti-propaganda messages and to issue trackers to share accurate news inside Russia of what is really happening in Ukraine at the hands of the Russian military, to cite two obvious possibilities. There are so many outlets for open source communities to be creative without harming everyone who happens to load the update.

We encourage community members to use both the freedoms and tools of open source innovatively and wisely to inform Russian citizens about the reality of the harm imposed on Ukrainian citizens and to support humanitarian and relief efforts in and supportive of Ukraine. Longer term, it's likely these weaponizations are like spitting into the wind: The downsides of vandalizing open source projects far outweigh any possible benefit, and the blowback will ultimately damage the projects and contributors responsible. By extension, all of open source is harmed. Use your power, yes -- but use it wisely.

In a formalization of an earlier Twitter-led push to try to exert influence over fast-forming European digital regulations, the social media firm has used its Twitter Spaces platform to host the official kick off of a policy advocacy lobby group that's being branded the Open Internet Alliance (OIA). From a report: Alongside Twitter, video streaming platform Vimeo; Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce and Tumblr; the Czech and Slovak focused search engine company, Seznam; and Jodel, a Berlin-based (profile-less) social network, are named as founding members. Twitter said the establishment of this formal lobbying alliance has been some two years in the making. Notably Mozilla -- which had joined Twitter, Auttomatic and Vimeo in a earlier call for incoming EU digital regulations to support better user controls to tackle bad speech rather than hone in on content censorship -- is not being named as a founding member so appears to be sitting this one out. At the time of writing it's unclear why Mozilla is missing. But the Alliance is putting out a wider call for other "middle-layer" Internet companies to join the initiative -- so the grouping may grow in size.

Albeit -- very clearly -- big tech need not apply.

Speaking during a Twitter Spaces event today to discuss the formation of the alliance, Sinead McSweeney, Twitter's global policy VP, said the group is making a plea to lawmakers to think about the wider web ecosystem -- rather than see the Internet as "a monolith" comprised of just a handful of tech giants. "Our plea in aid of the open Internet is that [lawmakers] not view the Internet as a monolith, nor indeed view it as fixing the Internet solving all of societies problems," she said, urging policymakers to: "Take a wider focus when they're looking at solutions -- not look at the Internet just through the lens of a handful of companies. And really think about the entire ecosystem -- and get away from this sense 'oh big tech is the problem.' Because -- in actual fact, in their efforts to tackle so called 'big tech -- that is all we may end up with."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Slate.com: On March 1, after a week of horror in Ukraine, reports came out that Russia's censorship office had threatened to block Russian Wikipedia. A 32-year-old who asked to be called Alexander soon made a plan to download a local copy of Russian-language Wikipedia to keep with him in eastern Russia. "I did it just in case," he told me over Instagram Messenger before sharing that he and his wife are "working on moving to another country" with their two dogs, Prime and Shaggy. (Instagram has been blocked in Russia, but many continue to access it using virtual private networks. On Monday, the Russian government officially declared Facebook and Instagram "extremist organizations.")

Alexander wasn't the only Russian citizen to make a local copy of Wikipedia. Data suggests that after the threats of censorship, Russians started torrenting Wikipedia in droves. Currently, Russia is the country with the most Wikipedia downloads—by a landslide. Before the invasion, it rarely broke the top 10, but after the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, it has kept a solid hold on first place. The 29-gigabyte file that contains a downloadable Russian-language Wikipedia was downloaded a whopping 105,889 times during the first half of March, which is a more than 4,000 percent increase compared with the first half of January. According to Stephane Coillet-Matillon, who leads Kiwix, the organization that facilitates these downloads, Russian downloads now constitute 42 percent of all traffic on Kiwix servers, up from just 2 percent in 2021. "We had something similar back in 2017 when Turkey blocked Wikipedia," he said, "but this one is just another dimension." "Wikipedia routinely makes a dump of its databases available publicly, which Kiwix compresses into an archive so it can be more easily shared," adds Slate. "The entirety of English Wikipedia, from 'List of Informally Named Dinosaurs' to 'Floor' to 'Skunks as Pets' and everything in between, is 87 GB with pictures or 47 GB without. Russian-language Wikipedia is even smaller, continuing 1.8 million articles compared with English Wikipedia's 6.4 million."

Slashdot reader nickwinlund77 quotes the New York Times (also quoted here): DuckDuckGo has little control over its search results because they are provided by Microsoft's Bing, which announced that it would follow the European Union's order to restrict access to the Russian state news agencies RT and Sputnik. But the criticism from the far right was directed at DuckDuckGo. The conservative website Breitbart said DuckDuckGo was "adopting the censorship policies" of Big Tech. In social media channels devoted to conspiracy theories, users vowed to switch to alternatives like the Russian search engine Yandex....

In a statement, Kamyl Bazbaz, the vice president of communications for DuckDuckGo, said that the affected sites were engaged in "active disinformation campaigns," meaning they were similar to other low-quality websites already penalized by search algorithms. "This isn't censorship, it's just search rankings," he said....

The company also announced this month that it would pause its relationship with Yandex, the Russian search engine, which was providing certain links for results in Russia and Turkey.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets has released what it says is 800GB of data from a section of Roskomnadzor, the Russian government body responsible for censorship in the country. On Distributed Denial of Secrets' website, the organization describes the data as coming from a hack and says that Anonymous claimed responsibility. Roskomnadzor is the agency that has in recent days announced a block of Facebook and other websites in the country as the war in Ukraine intensifies.

Specifically, Distributed Denial of Secrets says the data comes from the Roskomnadzor of the Republic of Bashkortostan. The Republic of Bashkortostan is in the west of the country. Motherboard found references to the Republic of Bashkortostan in some of the released files. The data is split into two main categories: a series of over 360,000 files totalling in at 526.9GB and which date up to as recently as March 5, and then two databases that are 290.6GB in size, according to Distributed Denial of Secrets' website. "The source, a part of Anonymous, urgently felt the Russian people should have access to information about their government. They also expressed their opposition to the Russian people being cut off from independent media and the outside world," wrote DDoSecrets on its website, as highlighted by Forbes.

"We will soon be releasing the raw data while we look for solutions to extracting the data. One appears to be a legal research database that was, according to the file timestamp, last modified in 2020. The other appears to be a database for HR procedures." Given the size of the leak and timing, they note "it's always possible that something could be modified or planted."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: DuckDuckGo is now down-ranking sites associated with Russian disinformation in response to the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine, but some critics say the change amounts to censorship. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg announced the down-ranking on Twitter. "Like so many others I am sickened by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create," he wrote in the tweet, which included the hashtag StandWithUkraine. "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation," he added. Weinberg didn't elaborate on the decision, or how the down-ranking will work. [...] Weinberg was quick to defend the decision, saying it was necessary to provide relevant search results over disinformation. Not everyone is a fan of the decision. "So you are censoring your users? DDG now decides what is or isn't misinformation? This decision should be left to the user," wrote one user on Twitter.

"You've got that magic 'disinformation finder' eh?" wrote another user. "You're just sure you're going to only downrank things that are wrong?"

Others referenced DuckDuckGo's commitment to "unbiased search."

The Wikimedia Foundation has issued a statement supporting Russian Wikipedia volunteers after a censorship demand from internet regulators. From a report: On Tuesday, tech and communications regulator Roskomnadzor threatened to block Wikipedia over the Russian-language page covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine, claiming it contained "false messages" about war casualties and the effects of economic sanctions, among other things. "On March 1st 2022 the Wikimedia Foundation received a Russian government demand to remove content related to the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine posted by volunteer contributors to Russian Wikipedia," reads the statement sent to The Verge via email. "As ever, Wikipedia is an important source of reliable, factual information in this crisis. In recognition of this important role, we will not back down in the face of efforts to censor and intimidate members of our movement. We stand by our mission to deliver free knowledge to the world."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The Russian state-controlled news network RT said on Thursday that it would start broadcasting on the video site Rumble, two days after YouTube announced that it would be blocking channels connected to RT and another Russian state-backed outlet, Sputnik, across Europe. "After a multitude of platforms have moved to knock out our broadcast and limit social media, you can stay on top of our LIVE broadcast," RT posted on Twitter Thursday.

Rumble, which was founded in 2013 to compete with YouTube, is one of several alternative platforms that have attracted millions of users with the promise of a space untethered by what many on the American right have called a censorship of conservative voices. Prominent voices on the platform include Stephen Bannon, former President Donald J. Trump's onetime chief strategist, and Sean Hannity of Fox News. On Thursday afternoon, Misha Solodovnikov, the general manager of the production company behind RT America, T&R Productions, told staff that RT "will be ceasing production" and "must lay off most of its staff who work at all its locations," according to a company memo seen by The New York Times. RT America has offices in Miami, New York, Los Angeles and Washington. Mr. Solodovnikov cited "unforeseen business interruption events" as a reason for the company's announcement.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese fans of U.S. sitcom "Friends" have expressed dismay online after noticing censorship in recently released episodes of the beloved show, including of LGBT issues. Several major Chinese streaming sites, including Tencent, Baidu's IQiyi, Alibaba's Youku, and Bilibili, started showing a version of the first season of the show on Friday, its first re-release in China for several years. But fans soon noticed parts of the long-running show were different to what they had seen before and complained of censorship which included the removal of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-related content, as well as mistranslations. In one example, a conversation where a main character, Ross, explained his wife was a lesbian, was deleted. Another scene where another character, Joey, suggested going to a "strip joint" was translated as "go out to play" on the version shown on Tencent Video. As users started to notice the changes, they began discussing and "boycotting" the move. The discussion was a "hot search topic" on Weibo on Sunday. Reuters adds: But in a sign the discussion itself may have caught the attention of censors, searches on Weibo on Sunday for several variations on the hashtag or search term #Friendshasbeencensored produced either zero or limited recent results. The development follows a similar treatment of David Fincher's 1999 cult classic "Fight Club." Fans were shocked to find that a version of the movie that was made available on Tencent Video had a new ending where the authorities win. After much uproar, the original ending for the movie was restored.

Last month streamers in China discovered that Fight Club had arrived on streaming platform Tencent — but with an entirely new ending where local authorities "rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals....."

But now there's been another round of changes, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "After widespread online backlash to clumsy censorship of the film's ending, Chinese streaming service Tencent Video backtracked in recent days and restored most of the cuts it had made." Crucially, Fight Club's complete ending is now viewable in full in China...

News of the cuts went viral around the world and sparked much debate and embarrassment on Chinese social media about local censorship practices.... [I]t would appear that the backlash has been deemed more troublesome than the fictional film's ending, as Tencent has now restored 11 of the 12 minutes it originally cut from the 137-minute movie. The minute still missing is mostly comprised of brief nude sex scenes between Brad Pitt's and Helena Bonham Carter's characters.
Insider reports that changing the original ending provoked comments like these on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo:

- "This has become a Chinese-only joke. Even dogs won't want to watch this."

- "This is exactly why, even if you have streaming platform subscriptions, you still have to watch pirated versions."


And it brought massive attention to China's history of changing movies, notes the Wrap since "word quickly spread across the globe, bringing embarrassment to the country," reports the Wrap: Censorship of American films and TV shows at the behest of Chinese officials has become common as Hollywood has made in-roads in the country over the past decade. Last year, an episode of "The Simpsons" in which the titular family visits China was removed from Disney+ in Hong Kong over a joke made in the film about the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and the Chinese government's censorship of the event.
Even the South China Morning Post reported that Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the novel that inspired the film, "appeared to mock the move on Twitter. 'Everyone gets a happy ending in China!' he wrote..." Similar changes have been made to other films in China in the past. Nicolas Cage's 2005 crime film Lord of War had its final half-hour cut and replaced with text reading, "Yuri Orlov confessed all the crimes officially charged against him in court and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the end."
And another example from the Hollywood Reporter: After 20th Century Fox's Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody won multiple Oscars in the 2018, it was granted a theatrical release in China — but only after all mentions of Freddie Mercury's homosexuality were cut from the film.
But in this case a global popular outcry appears to have been too embarrasing to endure. According to the Hollywood Reporter now we even have an expected ending to the story of how China tried to censor Fight Club.

"Reversals of censorship actions are extremely rare within China's entertainment industry — but cuts to Hollywood movies are not."