Many governments block their citizens’ access to much of the Internet. Simple workarounds are unreliable; censors quickly discover and patch them. Previously proposed robust approaches either have ...non-trivial obstacles to deployment, or rely on low-performance covert channels that cannot support typical Internet usage such as streaming video. We present Salmon, an incrementally deployable system designed to resist a censor with the resources of the “Great Firewall” of China. Salmon relies on a network of volunteers in uncensored countries to run proxy servers. Although any member of the public can become a user, Salmon protects the bulk of its servers from being discovered and blocked by the censor via an algorithm for quickly identifying malicious users. The algorithm entails identifying some users as especially trustworthy or suspicious, based on their actions. We impede Sybil attacks by requiring either an unobtrusive check of a social network account, or a referral from a trustworthy user.
In Licensing Loyalty, historian Jane McLeod explores the evolution of the idea that the royal government of eighteenth-century France had much to fear from the rise of print culture. She argues that ...early modern French printers helped foster this view as they struggled to negotiate a place in the expanding bureaucratic apparatus of the French state. Printers in the provinces and in Paris relentlessly lobbied the government, hoping to convince authorities that printing done by their commercial rivals posed a serious threat to both monarchy and morality. By examining the French state’s policy of licensing printers and the mutually influential relationships between officials and printers, McLeod sheds light on our understanding of the limits of French absolutism and the uses of print culture in the political life of provincial France.
Peres and Winkler proved a 'censoring' inequality for Glauber dynamics on monotone spins systems such as the Ising model. Specifically, if, starting from a constantspin configuration, the spins are ...updated at some sequence of sites, then inserting another site into this sequence brings the resulting configuration closer in total variation to the stationary distribution. We show by means of simple counterexamples that the analogous statements fail for Glauber dynamics on proper colorings of a graph, and for lazy transpositions on permutations, answering two questions of Peres. It is not known whether the censoring property holds in other natural settings such as the Potts model. Keywords Mixing time * Censoring * Coloring * Transposition walk
As movies took the country by storm in the early twentieth century, Americans argued fiercely about whether municipal or state authorities should step in to control what people could watch when they ...went to movie theaters, which seemed to be springing up on every corner. Many who opposed the governmental regulation of film conceded that some entity—boards populated by trusted civic leaders, for example—needed to safeguard the public good. The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (NB), a civic group founded in New York City in 1909, emerged as a national cultural chaperon well suited to protect this emerging form of expression from state incursions. Using the National Board’s extensive files, Monitoring the Movies offers the first full-length study of the NB and its campaign against motion-picture censorship. Jennifer Fronc traces the NB’s Progressive-era founding in New York; its evolving set of “standards" for directors, producers, municipal officers, and citizens; its “city plan," which called on citizens to report screenings of condemned movies to local officials; and the spread of the NB’s influence into the urban South. Ultimately, Monitoring the Movies shows how Americans grappled with the issues that arose alongside the powerful new medium of film: the extent of the right to produce and consume images and the proper scope of government control over what citizens can see and show.
Examining the breadth and scope of censorship in Fascist Italy, from Mussolini's role as 'prime censor' to the specific experiences of female writers, this is a fascinating look at the vulnerability ...of culture under a dictatorship.
This introduction lays the foundation for a collection of high-quality research papers, presenting novel findings, innovative scientific approaches, and the latest developments in the field of the ...history of Catholic censorship, libricide, and the preservation of Hebrew books during late medieval and early modern Italy. The primary objective of this thematic section is to investigate diverse topics, including the Catholic censorship and expurgation of Hebrew texts, books, and documents. Additionally, it explores the repurposing of these materials in book bindings and notary files, shedding light on how Digital Humanities facilitates the recovery of manuscripts or printed books that would otherwise be lost to history.
It is possible to uncover certain aspects of the Catholic Church’s attitude towards Jews, the Enlightenment and philosophical-cultural productions through case studies of Catholic control and ...censorship in the late eighteenth century. In this vein, an analysis of the censorship notes produced by the Roman Holy Office on the content of the book La difesa de’ libri santi e della religione giudaica, published in Venice in 1770, can be particularly useful. The original documents, currently held at the Archives for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office, Rome), shed light on the methods and approaches the Catholic Church adopted to control the circulation of new ideas in a century characterised by profound intellectual, cultural and political change.
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