Twitter published yesterday that they are now capable of reactively blocking certain tweets for the users from certain countries only, should they be required to censor certain content in one country but not others. Previously, they were only able to remove tweets globally, whether or not certain content was illegal in all affected countries or not. As an example, they mention tweets promoting Nazism, which is illegal in Germany and France.

Mark Gibbs at forbes.com smells the opportunity for outrage and paints a grim vision of proactive, automated censorship at Twitter, and he even announces the beginning of the end of Twitter itself. Sadly, the article teems with outrageous yet wrong claims:

For example, Gibbs states that Twitter was considering, let alone be forced, to employ preventive, automated censorship using fuzzy statistical algorithms. This is in no way backed by the original source he’s commenting on nor the laws that spawned this in the first place. For instance, while denying the Holocaust is illegal in most of Europe and many other countries across the globe, pre-censorship is usually illegal, in Germany even unconstitutional. Only “post-censorship” (i.e., keeping an existing publication from being distributed after the fact) is, by way of court order, legal — much like in many other countries including the US.

This and only this way of reacting to illegal content after the fact is what Twitter claims to be able to do in their press release. To be more precise: Twitter was already required to follow the laws in the countries it operates in. I am not aware of a case when this might have previously happened, but if they were required to remove an incendiary tweet previously, they would have to delete it globally due to technical restrictions, not only in the area where a law was being violated — only now, Twitter will not have to settle for the lowest common denominator anymore. Arguably, that’s an improvement.

That said, I am as sensitive to the dangers to freedom of speech as the next guy, and I am a passionate opponent of certain legislation in my home country. Any sort of censorship, whether it may be deemed legitimate or not, is a restriction of free speech and bears the potential for abuse. Consequently, the biggest problem here is not the removal of tweets that directly violate laws protecting the democratic order of certain countries–our biggest worry, instead, should be the Chilling Effect this may cause (Chilling Effect, or “the scissors in the head” as it was termed over a century earlier in the 1840s in Germany, refers to the preemptive self-muting by a person fearing punishment when expressing their opinion). Therefore, I am quite happy that Twitter (along with Google and others) is publishing any block requests it receives on chillingeffects.org, thus exposing such requests to public scrutiny and political discussion.

I am planning on posting a new picture or two per week, depending on what photo opportunities I come across. I also installed a widget into the sidebar of this blog, showing you the latest and greatest additions to the photo blog.

We hope you’ll enjoy looking at the pictures as much as we liked taking them! Let us know what you think!

Champagne, ready to celebrate the arrival of 2012. In the background: This year’s Times Square New Year’s Eve “Ball”.

Woah, I can’t believe it! Project 365 is coming to a close! (Oh hey! This picture is intentionally similar to Day 1. Full circle!)

Happy New Year!

The penultimate photo (!) of Project 365 is an HDR panorama of Milpitas Civic Center. Milpitas City Hall is the big building to the right, and on the left you see the community center with the Christmas tree in front of it.

Make sure to check out the full-size picture. As an added bonus, you’ll see the same kid running through the photo twice — a neat “time lapse” effect of stitching multiple exposures together.

The flag of Santa Clara County at Mountain View City Hall was flown at half-staff today. Why, the Interwebs wouldn’t tell me. Anyone know? Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day is too far back, and besides it’d be the wrong one of the flags. Hmmm!

Look at the spiffy new reception area the contractors turned our prior mail room into! As far as I can tell, looks like it’s done! Of course, there’s all sorts of Mozilla decoration missing, but since Project 365 is nearing its end, I didn’t think I could wait that long

Turns out, flowers are not a lot easier to google for than bird names… but, anyway, this one seems to be an Asiatic Lily. Pretty!

Living near a chocolate store does come in handy when getting snacks for a long Christmas weekend. Nom nom nom. These bags are almost empty…

Christmas dinner: Everyone was having a jolly good time, except Donald, who felt it was “awfully warm in here”.

This is Tara, unwrapping my Christmas present to her: A framed original painting of Place Bellecour, Lyon, France. We got the painting well over a year ago when we last went there to visit, but never got around to having it framed (and, thus, never hung it up). Sneaky Fred snuck it out of the house and had it framed, (apparently) much to the delight of the Missus. Mission accomplished.