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A disgruntled agency worker has revealed Facebook's rules for blocking offensive content - and while 'crushed heads' are fine, female nipples aren't.

Moroccan-born  worker Amine Derkaoui was employed by oDesk to filter out offensive comment from Facebook, but released the policy to gossip site Gawker when he'd finally had enough of being paid $1 per hour.

It makes entertaining reading. On the banned list are 'naked private parts including female nipple bulges and naked butt cracks; male nipples are OK'.

Also out are 'blatant (obvious depiction of camel toes and moose knuckles' and 'images of drunk and unconscious peiple, or speeping people with things drawn on their faces'.

School fight videos are okay, though, as long as the video hasn't been posted to continue tormenting the person targeted in the video'. Deep flesh wounds are fine, as are 'excessive blood', and even crushed heads - 'as long as no insides are showing'.

Earwax is out; snot is fine.

California-based oDesk is an agency offering remote freelance workers, and provides content moderation services to Google, Wikipedia and AOL as well as Facebook.

Derkaoui told Gawker that around 50 people from developing countries worked from home on the Facebook account, for just $1 per hour plus commission.
 

The rest is here:
Facebook censorship rulebook leaked

NEW YORK (AP) — A global coalition against censorship is needed to protect online journalists and bloggers who are being targeted by repressive governments, a leading advocacy group said Tuesday.

At least 46 journalists died around the world in 2011, the Committee to Protect Journalists said, an increase from the estimate it released in December. Seven journalists were killed in Pakistan, where 29 journalists have been killed in the past five years.

Freelancers, bloggers and citizen journalists like those reporting in the Middle East have few resources to defend themselves against censorship and attacks, the CPJ said. Authoritarian states are buying communications surveillance equipment from Western manufacturers and using it to monitor and target journalists and bloggers, the group said.

The report cited people in Syria who smuggled video footage to reporters across the world and were consequently tracked and tortured by government authorities after their Facebook accounts were hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army, a government-sponsored hacking group.

The New York-based group said the number of deaths while covering dangerous assignments, such as street protests, reached the highest level since 1992. Most of the deaths were in the Middle East and North Africa, where 19 journalists died last year, most while covering the Arab world uprisings.

One third of those killed were freelance journalists, more than double the proportion that freelancers have constituted over the years.

Nine online journalists were killed for their work, including Mexican reporter Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro, whose decapitated body was found with a note saying she had been killed for reporting news on social media websites. Her death was the ?rst documented by CPJ that was directly tied to journalism published on social media.

The committee found that 179 journalists were imprisoned as of Dec. 1, an increase driven by widespread imprisonment across the Middle East and North Africa. About half of those work primarily online, the committee said.

The highest number of jailed journalists was in Iran, where 42 reporters were behind bars.

While the Internet and social media has helped democratize the dissemination of information, the nature of such newsgathering leaves journalists especially vulnerable to censorship and retaliation, the CPJ said in its annual survey. There are few legal mechanisms to fight censorship on an international level, the group said.

The CPJ said governments, the business community and human rights organizations must urge intergovernmental groups to create a legal framework to adjudicate press freedom cases at the international level.

In 2010, CPJ hired its ?rst Internet advocacy coordinator to act as a liaison between Silicon Valley and the journalists who depend on their products — "not only to get the news out, but also to protect them and their sources from physical harm," the report said.

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NY group: Online journalists censored, attacked

Archie Fraser says it is not a new concept for a structure appointed by the club owners to manage and run the professional league in a country. Photo: Darren Pateman

THE prospect of a breakaway A-League competition managed and run by the owners of the existing clubs is not as fanciful as the FFA might think.

After years of significant losses, some as much as $6 million each year by individual club owners, and A-League annual accumulated losses in excess of $28 million, understandably owners are running out of patience. For now it's all about control by the FFA and the fear that it might lose something, even though by holding on to the A-League it will eventually kill it off.

It is not a new concept for a structure appointed by the club owners to manage and run the professional league in a country.

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After all, the English Premier League was founded on the same premise, where the clubs took over the running of the old League Division 1 from the Football League to form the EPL.

When it was formed the English FA cried foul. However, the results since control passed from the bureaucrats to the owners have been spectacular.

Many question the ability of a governing body to run all aspects of the game and the conflicting priorities they face when the responsibility stretches from junior game development through to World Cup campaigns and the compliance that is required by the Asian Football Confederation and FIFA.

The owners have been more than patient and the FFA must step back and allow this to happen so it can focus on what it is good at - running our national teams and game development.

FFA should keep the media rights to Socceroos games and any sponsorships it can derive.

A breakaway league would need to be sanctioned by the AFC, which is the body to which the FFA reports. Or the FFA could support the new league and the structure, just as the English FA did. If the owners of the A-League clubs want to make this a reality, then they will have to call the FFA's bluff.

My reading of the 10 A-League club owners is that there could be more than half who would like to be part of a structure that allowed them to be driving their own destiny. This group certainly has the business talent and money to make this a success.

Clearly the test is the past and what the FFA has achieved. There has been some progress but the financial plight of the governing body and the clubs is well documented and it does not read well. Sponsors and media will judge how the FFA manages the game and the current crisis, which ultimately affects the total value of the A-League brand.

With a TV and new media deal being integral to the future of the A-League, owners want to know they are getting the best possible result for their product.

They are concerned that based on a string of failed ventures and an inability by the FFA to deliver substantial added value to the A-League brand there will be less on the table when the media offers start rolling in.

The owners believe - and rightly so - that the revenues derived from the A-League through sponsorship and media rights would be more than enough to manage, promote, market and expand the game if the total value of these were applied directly to the A-League.

Long term this would be an outstanding investment for the owners: the A-League brand would grow and the media rights would become increasingly valuable.

Sponsors would flock to a new entity, owners would invest in building their clubs and they would infuse themselves further into the communities, all of which would deliver a larger audience that is starved of free-to-air viewing.

The A-League ownership group has significant intellect, money and desire. When it's your reputation and money on the line you look at things differently.

The new A-League with a new media deal, expansion plans, marquee players, professional referees and a developing brand profile would be a true competitor to the other codes.

The owners are asking for the opportunity to invest more money, be allowed to actually drive the business model and to be in charge of their own destiny.

Just as the Crawford report suggested.

Archie Fraser was head of the A-League in 2009-10.

Go here to read the rest:
Owners must take control of A-League

The beauty of the current birth-control conversation for Democrats is that they not only have public opinion on their side but also have cannily managed to make contraception a front-burner election-year campaign issue — by complaining that Republicans are making it front-burner election-year campaign issue.

The answer, in other words, to the many who are wondering why the Republicans would want to ride such a losing pony is: They don’t.

The Conversation is a recurring feature that will capture what everyone is talking about in politics right now.

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“No one is making birth control a topic,” Rick Santorum’s long-time media consultant and friend John Brabender told me. “It’s not an agenda that anyone’s running on. But it’s a distortion that works to [the other side’s] benefit to imply we’re for limiting access to birth control.’’

The narrative that it’s conservatives who won’t stop talking about pills, gels and contraceptive foam is probably set in stone at this point; a story in today’s Washington Post reports that contraception has “suddenly become an obsession of the 2012 presidential campaign. To many observers, it seems that the clock has indeed been turned back.”

The first two such observers quoted in the piece are leaders of the contraception lobby, whose job is to monetize real and perceived attacks, exactly as their counterparts on the right do: “As Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, said incredulously on Saturday during a rally in Austin: “Somehow in this country, in 2012, this election might turn on whether women should have access to birth control.’ ”

Incredulously, or hopefully? It’s Democrats like Richards who keep saying this is what the election will turn on. Which is smart, if you are Cecile Richards, because for any campaign or cause these days, outrage is oxygen. (See Komen vs. Planned Parenthood.) And if the election does turn on contraception, her team wins.

When I looked back at a tape of what Republicans have been saying on the topic, what’s striking is how reluctant they are to go there.

Yes, even including Santorum’s 71-year-old bankroller, Foster Friess, whose assets may until now have buffered him from the news that his jokes need work.

But when he recycled a fragment of an (at least) 50-year-old funny about an aspirin held between the knees being all the birth control a nice girl needs, it was in response to Andrea Mitchell’s question about whether he was concerned that Santorum’s views on birth control and women in combat roles could hurt his viability as a candidate.

His first response was to deflect the question: “I get such a chuckle when these things come out. Here we have millions of our fellow Americans unemployed, we have jihadist camps being set up in Latin America, which Rick has been warning about, and people seem to be so preoccupied with sex!”

The aspirin inanity that followed has been successfully cast as his candidate’s “agenda,” mainly through the efforts of Democratic fundraisers: “We’ve already accumulated 65,000 signatures on our petition opposing their Aspirin Agenda,” Sen. Patty Murray said in a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraising letter Friday. “But I’m too mad to stop at ‘opposing.’ It’s time we punished the people responsible by taking away their jobs. The DSCC is ready to send the GOP agenda back to the 1950s where it belongs — and send these Republicans packing. Will you click here and give $5 or $10 to help us raise $100,000 by the end of today to fire anti-choice Republicans?’’

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Birth-control debate a winner for Democrats

VALENCIA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Lavi Industries, a leader in Public Guidance, crowd control systems and customer flow management, today announced the Qtrac® Media Manager, the company’s latest addition to its popular family of Qtrac Electronic Queuing Systems. The new Qtrac Media Manager centralizes control of digital signage and messaging, both for Qtrac Electronic Queuing Systems as well as stand-alone digital signage installations. See the new Qtrac Media Manager featured later this month at GlobalShop 2012, February 29th through March 2nd, in the Las Vegas Sands Expo and Convention Center, booth # 4825.

“The new Qtrac Media Manager centralizes control of digital signage and messaging for Qtrac retail in-queue displays as well as other media-only displays positioned throughout the store,” said Perry Kuklin, Director of Marketing and New Business Development, Lavi Industries. “It’s a fully scalable application, capable of simultaneously and selectively updating Qtrac monitors in hundreds of stores across multiple regions. To corporate management, this means centralized control and instant chain-wide deployment of merchandising and brand messaging.”

“Since its introduction, the Qtrac Electronic Queuing System has been well received by the retail industry, with installations now across the U.S. and Canada,” continued Mr. Kuklin. “The addition of the Qtrac Media Manager, with its centralized control of electronic media, is a compelling reason for retail organizations to adopt the system-wide implementation of a Qtrac Electronic Queuing solution. Our customers have seen a dramatic boost to impulse sales as well as a reduction in perceived wait times at checkout.”

About the Qtrac Media Manager

Lavi Industries’ Qtrac Media Manager, the newest addition to its family of Qtrac Electronic Queuing solutions, enables centralized electronic coordination of display media in Qtrac CF single-line queuing installations, QtracVR “virtual” customer service management systems, and stand-alone Qtrac display installations.

(Media Points)

Lavi Industries’ Qtrac Media Manager centralizes control of in-store electronic signage. A scalable solution that controls media across monitors, queues, stores or regions. Selectively distributes customized media to individual displays, stores, regions or custom groups. Provides “real time” operational status of system-wide Qtrac displays. Featured at GlobalShop 2012, February 29th through March 2nd, in the Las Vegas Sands Expo and Convention Center, booth # 4825. For more information, call (877) 275-5284.

About Lavi Industries

Based in Valencia, California, Lavi Industries is the premier provider of public guidance and crowd control solutions in North America. Leveraging its portfolio of world-class brands – Beltrac® stanchions, Directrac® signage systems, Qtrac® electronic queuing systems, and NeXtrac® in-line merchandising systems – Lavi has helped the world’s leading companies effectively guide people in, through, and out of their facilities. More information is available at http://www.lavi.com/.

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New Qtrac® Media Manager from Lavi Industries Centralizes Control of Retail Customer Queue Digital Media and Messaging