> Needless to say this was an issue for the saudi censors, who at that time would ink over magazine covers by hand.

Even funnier is that the people employed to do the censorship were usually foreign guest workers, often Indians, to ensure that no Saudis themselves were exposed during the process of censorship.

I lived in Saudi for a time in the 90s too.

The censors with their felt tip pens clearly had a variety of artistic talent. I found myself choosing from various censorings of Nirvana's Nevermind which had the cover with the naked baby.

Some had a blocked out rectangle, some were scribbled on, some just blocked out the silhouette of the baby. I settled on one which had neatly drawn on a pair of swimming trunks!

Seems like another life now.

Wait, they employed people to censor individual items of commercial art manually?

Swimming trunks is a pretty funny way to do it.

Meanwhile, The Stones' Live Licks European cover is better because the American one has a bra.

I saw that cover on the BBC, on QI, and it was censored. I was angry. Kirk cobain made a big deal about that album cover, saying in effect that anyone who thinks it needs to be censored should look more to themselves.

How come the cover was censored on QI but there exists things in the UK like page 3 girls? Is a newspaper/tabloid somehow different or less accessible to minors than the tele?

The image on the album cover was of a child. It's a totally different conversation than page 3.

Man, it would be so bad if a western democracy had a similarly prudish censorship policy online, right? (Welcome to the UK in 2020, where by default I can't watch whatever I want and I don't think my ISP will let me download a VPN at all)

Apple doesn't allow porn apps and provides no way to side load. That's 1.3 billion people who are effectively being censored. And before you say you can still watch videos there are apps that do things videos don't. 3D games, real VR, etc... Apple has a whole list of things you aren't allowed to have in apps.

In a cool world, Apple would have an optional, unmonetized un-curated community app store that allows everything but criminal facilitation, is scanned for malware, and possibly requires open source.

When you say that your ISP won’t let you download a VPN, what does that mean?

If i want to download a VPN I have to download a "free" one on the app store to browse to the proper vpn site. They seem to be intercepting the SSL in some way

Mozilla vpn works (it's new) but the websites for proton, Nord etc. don't work. The actual service works fine

They may just be being blocked at the DNS level by your ISP. This is relatively easy to bypass by using one of the many other DNS services available like 9.9.9.9 or 1.1.1.1 (I'm sure everyone on HN will have opinions about which one is better). You can google to figure out how to change the default DNS used by your computer depending on your OS.

Calling it 'censorship' seems a bit inflated...you can request UK ISPs to remove the content filter. Further, the UK government retracted the internet 'porn' bill, which was a big driver of the act anyway.

I think it's a bit unfair to conflate 'always on' and 'default on, but easy to remove'.

edit: also, I'm in the UK, and happily using a VPN on Windows, Linux, and Android with no issues.

It might just be a virgin media thing but I cannot browse to any vpn sites but the filtering is done differently the porn filter i.e. it's by government request but not publicly enough to warrant a redirect to their site

Nobody else I know on Virgin Media is experiencing this. Is it possible you have some malware on your device/network?

I swapped to TalkTalk recently and have the same problem. All but the most obscure VPN sites are blocked. My guess is because using them is aginst TOS?

Have you checked that you've turned off any "parental controls". I believe by default, new connections come with a "family friendly" filter. And that includes VPN services, since (presumably by their logic) VPNs are the first thing a kid will download to get around this filter...