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... You're an artist, you had some art you wanted to put on a......

In the so-called Flickrverse, inadvertently putting one naughty-esque photo in a comment thread will get you flagged and censored, maybe even having all your comments from the past, 10,000 in all, deleted. It wasn't too long ago that Flickr implemented its own questionable censorship system (which resulted them in restricting all of my photos and then apologizing about it later with a whoops, our bad) and became perhaps a bit heavy handed with their......

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......

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......

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:......

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......

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......

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.......