"SOPA And The Film Industry," an eye-opening infographic created by Anne Rhodes, shows Hollywood's longtime war on technology using censorship and legislation as weapons of choice. The visual timeline asks the question, "Has Hollywood already forgotten the 1950s and the Hollywood blacklist?" more ›

We've come a long way, baby, since Miami rap group 2 Live Crew got the authorities all riled up with their "Nasty" music. These days toddlers in tiaras gyrate to Britney Spears to win pageants, fewer words get bleeped from the television, and a song called "Me So Horny," well, shrug--that ain't no thing. But in June 1990, U.S. district court Judge Jose Gonzalez ruled 2 Live Crew's album As Nasty As They Wanna Be obscene and illegal to sell. Well, a few folks decided not to take that lying down. more ›

Hustler founder and infamous freedom of the press advocate Larry Flynt has donated $50,000 to the WikiLeaks defense fund, and explains why he thinks we "should have a ticker-tape parade" for Julian Assange in a piece published today by the Huffington Post. more ›

Every American teenager knows Prom night begins with more virgins than it ends. Arcadia High’s prom took place Saturday, and if its students had gotten jiggy for the first time, it wouldn’t have been because of sexually-suggestive music from the likes of Lil’ Wayne, P. Diddy or Pitbull. more ›

Local band No Age recently taped a performance at CBS' Late Late Night with Craig Ferguson scheduled to be aired on October 27. Although, they made it through the taping, they almost didn't because of an Obama t-shirt. Guitarist Randy Randall explains to Stereogum in an e-mail: more ›

Jim Wirt is a St. Louis native living in LA, but most people know him as Gay Bigfoot. The 42-year-old North Hollywood resident moved out to Los Angeles in 1996 and is a local artist who recently found himself in the middle of some online censorship when he tried to get one of his pieces printed on a t-shirt. Here's his story... more ›

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It's not like the Los Angeles Business Journal is out to get us. It's just that some media outlets outsource their online advertising to affiliate programs and some of those programs have malicious ads snuck into them by evil spammers posing as advertisers. That said, Google and StopBadware.org have now joined together to bring their internet neighborhood watch to your web block:What is this page? You landed on this page because Google's independent testing... more ›

It started out with innocent users (like me). Now it's extended to entire countries. Flickr's filtering system has now prevented users from Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea from viewing any photos considered "unsafe." Compounding this problem is the fact that the filter system has so many glitches in it, that even photos of dogs and kittens can be considered "restricted content." From the Flickr FAQ: SafeSearch is a feature that allows you to... more ›

As most people in the blogosphere know, Flickr is a very (very) popular photo sharing site. It contains over half a BILLION images taken by people from every corner of the earth, and has become a meeting place for professional photographers, photo enthusiasts, and people who just want to share photos of their cats and kids. Recently, Flickr decided to invoke a new filtering system, which rates photos according to their level of safety:... more ›

Wow, this has got to hurt a little. People were a little miffed over at Digg last night, to say the least. Although, its interesting to see the power of the internet when people pull together in the same direction. Yes, piracy is bad but so is censorship. In truth, this number has been around the Internet for months so really, what's the big deal and why try to ban it now? Besides, its... more ›

Welcome to the LAist weekly tech news roundup. Each week I'll be bringing you the latest, and hopefully most interesting, technology news from around the city, the state, the country and the world. Also, if you have any news, tips or things of interest you want to point out, feel free to drop us a line at: themacist [at] gmail dot com. Ok, let's get to the news: The Bush administration is at it... more ›

LAist editor Tony Pierce appeared on Ring My Bell a few weeks ago and was asked about blogging, censoring oneself, pot, and other random things. Ring My Bell is an interesting internet/tv/call-in show shot on Hollywood Blvd. by World of Wonder. In the past they've had guests like Little Loca, Bobcat Goldthwait, and even the dude from PopBytes. Basically they tape an hour of live calls and splice it down to about 5 minutes.... more ›