The cosmic censorship hypothesis introduced by Penrose thirty years ago is still one of the most important open questions in classical general relativity. In this essay we put forward the idea that cosmic censorship is intrinsically a quantum gravity phenomena. To that end we construct a gedanken experiment in which cosmic censorship is violated within the purely classical framework of general ...

Content providers often face legal or economic pressures to censor or remove objectionable or infringing content they host. While decentralized providers can enable censorship-resistant storage, centralized content providers remain popular for performance and usability reasons. But centralized content providers can always choose not to respond to requests for a specific file, making it difficul...

Internet Censorship is a phenomenon that crosses several study fields, from computer networking and computer security to social sciences; together with censorship detection and censorship circumvention it has impact on Internet infrastructure, protocols and user behaviors. Detection of Internet Censorship is the basis for the study of this phenomenon, and recently it has received focus from a t...

Censorship in social media has been well studied and provides insight into how governments stifle freedom of expression online. Comparatively less (or no) attention has been paid to detecting (self) censorship in traditional media (e.g., news) using social media as a bellweather. We present a novel unsupervised approach that views social media as a sensor to detect censorship in news media wher...

While mechanics of Web censorship in China are well studied, those of other countries are less understood. Through a combination of personal contacts and Planet-Lab nodes, we conduct experiments to explore the mechanics of Web censorship in 11 countries around the world, including China. Our work provides insights into the diversity of modus operandi of censors around the world and can guide fu...

We discuss several aspects of cosmic censorship hypothesis. There is evidence both in favor and against the hypothesis. On one hand one can prove that cosmic censorship holds in several special cases and on the other hand there is a number of special solutions of Einstein equations in which it is violated. One way to resolve cosmic censorship problem is to test it observationally. We point out ...

In this work, we examine the effect of the 2016 Turkish coup on social media censorship, both by the government ordering Twitter to conduct censorship and as well by people removing their own tweets. We compared 5.5M tweets collected from Turkey pre-coup to 8.5M tweets collected post-coup. Although self-censorship of the press is not a novel practice following past military coups in Turkey, in ...

Using censorship to forbid access to certain content on the internet is very common in the world today. Some censorship mechanisms are well-studied, however there remain a large number of techniques that remain unknown. Furthermore, many censorship implementations are dynamic as they attempt to prevent against new circumvention techniques. Current tools often tell us when something is censored,...

An ever increasing amount of governments, organisations, and companies employ Internet censorship in order to filter the free flow of information. These efforts are supported by an equally increasing number of companies focusing on the development of filtering equipment. Only what these entities consider right can pass the filters. This practice constitutes a violation of the Universal Declarat...

The Iranian government operates one of the largest and most sophisticated Internet censorship regimes in the world, but the mechanisms it employs have received little research attention, primarily due to lack of access to network connections within the country and personal risks to Iranian citizens who take part. In this paper, we examine the status of Internet censorship in Iran based on netwo...