Microsoft Bing Reverses Sex-Related Censorship in the Middle East
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Imagine trying to do online research on breast cancer, or William S. Burroughs’ famous novel Naked Lunch, only to find that your search results keep coming up blank. This is the confounding situation that faced Microsoft Bing users in the Middle East and North Africa for years, made especially confusing by the fact that if you tried the same searches on Google, it did offer results for these terms.
Problems caused by the voluntary blocking of certain terms by intermediaries are well-known; just last week, we wrote about how payment processors like Venmo are blocking payments from users who describe the payments using certain terms—like Isis, a common first name and name of a heavy metal band, in addition to its usage as an acronym for the Islamic State. Such keyword-based filtering algorithms will inevitably results in overblocking and false positives because of their disregard for the context in which the words are used.
Search engines also engage in this type of censorship—in 2010, I co-authored a paper [PDF] documenting how Microsoft Bing (brand new at the time) engaged in filtering of sex-related terms in the Middle East and North Africa, China, India, and several other locations by not allowing users to turn off “safe search”. Despite the paper and various advocacy efforts over the years, Microsoft refused to budge on this—until recently.
At RightsCon this year, I led a panel discussion about the censorship of sexuality online, covering a variety of topics from Facebook’s prudish ideas about the female body to the UK’s restrictions on “non-conventional” sex acts in pornography to Iceland’s various attempts to ban online pornography. During the panel, I also raised the issue of Microsoft’s long-term ban on sexual search terms in the Middle East, noting specifically that the company’s blanket ban on the entire region seemed more a result of bad market research than government interference, based on the fact that a majority of countries in the MENA region do not block pornography, let alone other sexual content.
Surprisingly, not long after the conference, I did a routine check of Bing and was pleased to discover that “Middle East” had disappeared from the search engine’s location settings, replaced with “Saudi Arabia.” The search terms are still restricted in Saudi Arabia (likely at the request of the government), but users in other countries across the diverse region are no longer subject to Microsoft’s safe search. Coincidence? It’s hard to say; just as we didn’t know Microsoft’s motivations for blacklisting sexual terms to begin with, it was no more transparent about its change of heart.
Standing up against this kind of overbroad private censorship is important—companies shouldn’t be making decisions based on assumptions about a given market, and without transparency and accountability. Decisions to restrict content for a particular reason should be made only when legally required, and with the highest degree of transparency possible. We commend Microsoft for rectifying their error, and would like to see them continue to make their search filtering policies and practices more open and transparent.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/microsoft-bing-reverses-sex-related-censorship-middle-east

screen and tmux
A comparison of the features (or more-so just a table of notes for accessing some of those features) for GNU screen and BSD-licensed tmux.
The formatting here is simple enough to understand (I would hope). ^ means ctrl+, so ^x is ctrl+x. M- means meta (generally left-alt or escape)+, so M-x is left-alt+x It should be noted that this is no where near a full feature-set of either group. This - being a cheat-sheet - is just to point out the most very basic features to get you on the road. Trust the developers and manpage writers more than me. This document is originally from 2009 when tmux was still new - since then both of these programs have had many updates and features added (not all of which have been dutifully noted here). |
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Action | tmux | screen |
start a new session | tmux OR tmux new OR tmux new-session |
screen |
re-attach a detached session | tmux attach OR tmux attach-session |
screen-r |
re-attach an attached session (detaching it from elsewhere) | tmux attach -d OR tmux attach-session -d |
screen -dr |
re-attach an attached session (keeping it attached elsewhere) | tmux attach OR tmux attach-session |
screen -x |
detach from currently attached session | ^b d OR ^b :detach |
^a ^d OR ^a :detach |
rename-window to newname | ^b , <newname> OR ^b :rename-window <newn> |
^a A <newname> |
list windows | ^b w | ^a w |
list windows in chooseable menu | ^a " | |
go to window # | ^b # | ^a # |
go to last-active window | ^b l | ^a ^a |
go to next window | ^b n | ^a n |
go to previous window | ^b p | ^a p |
see keybindings | ^b ? | ^a ? |
list sessions | ^b s OR tmux ls OR tmux list-sessions |
screen -ls |
toggle visual bell | ^a ^g | |
create another window | ^b c | ^a c |
exit current shell/window | ^d | ^d |
split window/pane horizontally | ^b " | ^a S |
split window/pane vertically | ^b % | ^a | |
switch to other pane | ^b o | ^a <tab> |
kill the current pane | ^b x OR (logout/^D) | |
collapse the current pane/split (but leave processes running) | ^a X | |
cycle location of panes | ^b ^o | |
swap current pane with previous | ^b { | |
swap current pane with next | ^b } | |
show time | ^b t | |
show numeric values of panes | ^b q | |
toggle zoom-state of current pane (maximize/return current pane) | ^b z | |
break the current pane out of its window (to form new window) | ^b ! | |
re-arrange current panels within same window (different layouts) | ^b [space] | |
Kill the current window (and all panes within) | ^b killw [target-window] |