Censor Watch

Given that fully jabbed people can pass on covid then it seems ineffectual for countries to insist on vaccine passports for venues.

Perhaps the point is rather to ensure that most customers are carrying their phones so enabling secret state snooping.

Rights groups in Israel have called on the country's top court to repeal the recently announced measures to use the counter-terrorism phone (presumably GPS) tracking system to track carriers of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.

On Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced emergency measures including phone tracking to locate those infected by the Omicron variant. The Shin Bet counter-terrorism agency's phone-tracking technology was to be used to enable to surveillance.

The phone tracking system can match the carriers of the virus locations to other phones nearby to identify people that might have been exposed.

An in-app ad for the mobile app game Gold and Goblins, seen in the Hooked Inc: Fishing Games and Quizzland apps on 17 September 2021, included a video of a woman playing a game on her mobile phone, while behind her a man picked up a chair and drew it back over his head as if to strike the woman with it. The ad then showed the man looking at the phone over the woman's shoulder as she continued to play.

Two complainants, who considered the ad encouraged domestic violence, challenged whether it was offensive and socially irresponsible. Response

AppQuantum Publishing Ltd said they would immediately stop running the ad across all their platforms. They said they had intended the ad to be humorous in nature, and apologised for any offence it might have caused.

ASA Assessment: Complaints upheld

The ASA acknowledged AppQuantum's willingness to remove the ad.

The ad depicted a man about to assault a woman, and we considered that consumers would understand from the context of the setting that it was because her attention was focused on the game she was playing, rather than on the man.

We considered that such a reference used in an ad for a mobile app game trivialised and condoned the serious and sensitive subject of domestic violence. This was likely to cause serious and widespread offence, and we considered the ad had not been prepared in a socially responsible manner.

The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told AppQuantum Publishing Ltd not to trivialise or condone domestic violence in its advertising.

Rocky IV is a 1985 USA sport drama by Sylvester Stallone.
Starring Sylvester Stallone and Talia Shire and Burt Young.    

The BBFC uprated the film from PG to 12A for 2020 cinema release. Director Sylvester Stallone produced a PG-13 rated Director's Cut in 2021, whereas the original was PG rated. The Director's was passed 12A for UK cinema release in 2021.

Summary Notes

Rocky Balboa accompanies his friend Apollo Creed to the ring in a boxing match against a Russian Boxer named Ivan Drago. Drago is too strong for Creed, and unfortunately kills him in his match. Balboa blames himself for Creed's death and is determined to defeat Drago in a boxing match. He gains the help of Creed's former manager, Duke and travels to U.S.S.R. to take on Drago.

Versions

uncut run: 94m pal: 90m

UK: The Director's Cut was passed 12A uncut for moderate violence, bloody images: 2021 cinema release titled Rocky Iv: Rocky Vs. Drago (Director's Cut)

The UK government has announced that it is funding five projects to snoop on your device content supposedly in a quest to seek out child porn. But surely these technologies will have wider usage.

The five projects are the winners of the Safety Tech Challenge Fund, which aims to encourage the tech industry to find practical solutions to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse online, without impacting people's rights to privacy and data protection in their communications.

The winners will each receive an initial £85,000 from the Fund, which is administered by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Home Office, to help them bring their technical proposals for new digital tools and applications to combat online child abuse to the market.

Based across the UK and Europe, and in partnership with leading UK universities, the winners of the Safety Tech Challenge Fund are:

• Edinburgh-based Cyan Forensics and Crisp Thinking, in partnership with the University of Edinburgh and Internet Watch Foundation, will develop a plug-in to be integrated within encrypted social platforms. It will detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM) - by matching content against known illegal material.
• SafeToNet and Anglia Ruskin University will develop a suite of live video-moderation AI technologies that can run on any smart device to prevent the filming of nudity, violence, pornography and CSAM in real-time, as it is being produced.
• GalaxKey, based in St Albans, will work with Poole-based Image Analyser and Yoti, an age-assurance company, to develop software focusing on user privacy, detection and prevention of CSAM and predatory behavior, and age verification to detect child sexual abuse before it reaches an E2EE environment, preventing it from being uploaded and shared.
• DragonflAI, based in Edinburgh, will also work with Yoti to combine their on-device nudity AI detection technology with age assurance technologies to spot new indecent images within E2EE environments.
• T3K-Forensics are based in Austria and will work to implement their AI-based child sexual abuse detection technology on smartphones to detect newly created material, providing a toolkit that social platforms can integrate with their E2EE services.

Sky TV have published a detailed plan about how the company educate, propagandise, nudge, nag and bully viewers into submitting to right think and right behaviour when it comes climate change.

Dana Strong Group Chief Executive, Sky explains:

At Sky, we believe in a better world, and we're committed to reducing our impact on the environment by transforming our business to become net zero carbon by 2030.

As Europe's largest media and entertainment organisation, we also want to accelerate our industry's efforts to drive global progress towards net zero. However, it is now widely accepted that we must shift the behaviour of millions of people to deliver on our collective net zero goals.

That's why when we became the Principal Partner and Media Partner for COP26, we were clear we wanted to lead the way in new standards for the broadcast industry, and to invest in research to better inform our collective approach.

Building on the work of BAFTA's albert consortium, and Sky's own Planet Test, the next frontier for our industry will be thinking not just about how we can reduce our own carbon footprint, but how we can encourage our viewers to do the same.

We know that what we broadcast has the power to change how we as consumers feel and act. What we see on our screens can shock us, inspire us, educate us, and entertain us.

By partnering with the Behavioural Insights Team, we aimed to answer a simple question: how does the content we see on our screens influence the sustainable choices we make in our daily lives? In this study from BIT and Sky, we spoke to 3,500 people in all the six markets in Europe where Sky operates. We are hopeful the results of this study will be the beginning of a growing data set that will inspire broadcasters and content creators to work in partnership to encourage - and normalise - less carbon use by consumers.

For the first time, we have the empirical evidence to help broadcasters understand how change can be achieved if we work together. We believe that by feeling closer to our planet, to the problems that it faces, and to the solutions available to protect it, consumers will truly feel empowered to act. Now we must all commit and work to deliver this.

Offsite Comment: Big Media is turning into Big Brother

8th November 2021. See article from spiked-online.com by Brendan O'Neill

TV news used to be about informing people. Now it's about manipulating us. Now it's about socially engineering us to make us more green. Now its ambition is to be a powerful tool of persuasion in order to transform viewers from the polluting pests we currently are into the eco-switched-on citizens of the future. At least that's the conclusion one is forced to draw from the deeply chilling report commissioned by Sky and authored by the Behavioural Insights Team, which is part-owned by the Cabinet Office.

I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses is a 1978 Canada mystery drama by Murray Markowitz
Starring Elke Sommer, Donald Pilon and Chuck Shamata

Briefly banned as a video nasty in 1984. A cut version was released on VHS in 1984 and 1986.

Thanks to Richard:

I saw this video from YouTube about the BeyondFest Festival. At the end (at 41m32s) they show a brief video clip of what US Severin are releasing in 2022, the pool scene in a red tint is from I Miss You. I got out my VHS rip to check and it's the same.

Delirium is a 1979 USA thriller by Peter Maris.
Starring Turk Cekovsky, Debi Chaney and Terry TenBroek.    

Banned as a video nasty in 1983 until 1985. Passed 18 after BBFC cuts for 1987 18 rated VHS. Not released in the UK since.

This film is also set to be released by US Severin in the next few months.

Hong Kong has passed a toughened film censorship law empowering authorities to ban past films for supposed national security threats and impose stiffer penalties for any breaches in the latest blow to the city's artistic freedoms.

In June the city announced censors would check any future films for content that breached China's repressive security law. But this latest law allows scrutiny of any titles that had previously been given a green light.

It empowers Hong Kong's chief secretary to revoke the screening license of past and current films.

Maximum penalties for screening an unlicensed movie have been raised to up to three years in jail and a HK$1 million ($130,000) fine.

Film censorship inspectors can enter and search any premises suspected of displaying unlicensed movies without a warrant and titles deemed a security risk will not be able to appeal via the usual channels.