In an Instagram post on Friday evening, the artist said Lego had refused the bulk order in September, quoting the company as saying it “cannot approve the use of Legos for political works”.

The Danish toymaker is expanding its presence in China as growth in the US – its biggest market – has slowed. In September, the company reported that Asia provided the highest regional growth rate.

OSF confirmed yesterday that Twitter had killed the API Politwoops relied on to aggregate deleted tweets in all 30 countries it operated in, though this should come as little surprise — Twitter first scythed the API in the U.S. back in May, saying that preserving deleted Tweets violates the developer agreement.

It’s safe to say that Twitter is at least partly motivated here by a desire to keep politicians using the platform — if they fear a tweet they delete will automatically be saved and scrutinized, they will be less likely to use the platform.

Many large US companies, like Walmart and Amazon, have already banned the sale of any Confederate flag merchandise as a reaction to the recent events. Now, it appears that Apple has decided to join them by pulling many Civil War wargames from the App Store.

It's looking like Apple has pulled everything from the App Store that features a Confederate flag, regardless of context. The reasoning Apple is sending developers is "...because it includes images of the confederate flag used in offensive and mean-spirited ways."

Sources close to the company say that it's working with the developers affected by the flag ban to get the issue resolved and get the games back on the App Store. However, the developers will have to either remove or replace the Confederate flag. If this is indeed what Apple is demanding from the developers, it raises all kind of questions about censorship and historical memory as it literally risks rewriting history.

On Tuesday, eBay announced it would be immediately banning all Confederate flags and items bearing the flag image. The move comes in the wake of the recent South Carolina shooting that left nine people dead at the Emanuel AME Church, a historic black church in Charleston.

On Tuesday, the governor of Virginia announced that it would begin the process of removing the optional Confederate battle flag from specialized license plates. And one day earlier, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley called for it to be removed from the state capitol.

The court had found that even if a website took down comments after people complained, it could still be held liable because it should have anticipated bad comments in the first place.

The Court then notes that freedom of expression is "interfered with" by this ruling, but it doesn't seem to care -- saying that it is deemed "necessary in a democratic society."

For a Europe that is supposedly trying to build up a bigger internet industry, this ruling is a complete disaster, considering just how much internet innovation is based on enabling and allowing free expression.

France’s privacy watchdog on Friday called on Google to apply a European data protection ruling to its global domains or face financial penalties.

French authorities are now increasing the pressure on the American company, saying that Google must apply the ruling across all of its domains in the next 15 days or face penalties including a one-off fine of up to 300,000 euros, or almost $340,000.

The agency’s deputy director, Maksim Ksenzov, had issued a warning to the three companies on 6 May, telling them they were in violation of the bloggers law because they had not provided requested data on the number of daily visitors to several users’ pages, as well as information allowing the authorities to identify the owners of accounts with more than 3,000 daily visitors.

Since the start of President Vladimir Putin’s third term in 2012, the government has launched a crackdown on the internet in Russia, passing laws that give state supervisory bodies wide-ranging powers to to regulate and block websites.

Several news sites critical of the Kremlin have been blocked in Russia, including Grani.ru, EJ.ru and Kasparov.ru, which was founded by self-exiled chess grandmaster and activist Garry Kasparov.

Nine new conditions were included, such as not controlling illegal online information in a timely manner, failure to implement monitoring of online comments, or reporting, reproduction, or deletion of news information to improperly gain traffic.

“It [the regulation] transfers the pressure to these networks, and make the networks into de facto law enforcement organizations. They will block online speech in accordance with instructions from the communist central authorities. Website managers will become the regime’s accomplices.”

The Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill 2015, expected to become law within weeks, regulates high-tech research and development in Australia…and may drive the nation’s best researchers and academics overseas for good.

If a university academic shares an “inappropriate” email with a fellow academic overseas on dual-use research, the Australian faces a $400,000 fine, 10 years in jail and forfeiture of work. Meanwhile, in reverse, the overseas academic could communicate exactly the same information to an Australian researcher without fault or punishment.

Like with the TPP trade agreement, the new law stems from US hegemony.

"Under existing BPI blocking orders relating to 63 illegal websites, ISPs are required to block the illegal sites themselves, and proxies and proxy aggregators whose sole or predominant purpose is to give access to the illegal sites," according to the BPI.

"To block a site that simply links to another site just shows the level of censorship we are allowing ISPs to get away with," he said.