After several weeks of multiple outages a day, he says, the firm solved the puzzle: the files were named for the Swedish town of Falun, where the client was working. Mr. Bergman says his firm thinks the name triggered the filters China’s online censors use to block discussion of Falun Gong, a religious group long banned in China.

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Apple doesn’t like a scandal, especially concerning anything genitalia-related. And it seemed the immediate solution was to cut Vine from the prominently featured list of “Editor’s Picks” in the App Store.

But that wasn’t enough. On Tuesday evening, Vine pushed an update to its app for download. Now, when users download the Vine app or update for the first time, they’re faced with a “17+” age-restricted material rating.

That’s a big bummer for Twitter, but it seems it wasn’t avoidable. We’ve been told by people familiar with the matter that Apple reminded Twitter of Clause 3.8 from the App Store guidelines, which says:

“Developers are responsible for assigning appropriate ratings to their apps. Inappropriate ratings may be changed by Apple.“

In other words, Apple gave Twitter a nudge, implying Twitter might want to change its maturity rating in order to keep within the confines of the App Store guidelines. Otherwise, Vine could have faced ejection. Twitter did it, albeit begrudgingly.

Apple declined to comment on my report, and Twitter isn’t responding to requests for comment.

To some degree, we should have expected this. Apple cut Twitter a lot of slack when the porn scandal first broke — at least, by Apple’s standards. (This, after all, is the company that deep-sixed a comic-book-app version of Joyce’s “Ulysses” for depicting cartoon boobs.) Why? Probably because Apple and Twitter are elbow-rubbing pals, with deep ties into one another’s companies and software.

But as we argued last week, Vine doesn’t have a porn problem per se — it has a porn discovery problem. That gnarly porno found on Vine was all too easily surfaced in the app, due in part to the nature of the service itself. Search a hashtag keyword for sex, penis or what have you, and you’ll be taken straight to the hardcore stuff. That’s not as easy to find in, say, YouTube, which has a more mature engine for filtering out objectionable content. Or even Tumblr (though Tumblr is also rated 17+ in the App Store).

The prudish Apple can deal with the fact that yes, we are human, and yes, we watch porn (lots of it). And to some degree, it will always exist across the Internet. It’s a fact of life. But what Apple can’t deal with is said porn front and center, easily discoverable for any and all to see. It’s why SnapChat has a 12+ rating, and why Vine doesn’t.

In other words, think of yourself as a teenager to Apple’s repressed mother — you hide your porn under your mattress. You don’t leave it out on the coffee table.

This is no doubt a bad thing for Vine and Twitter. Video and photo sharing apps are some of the fastest rising among the teenage group. That’s the category that SnapChat is currently dominating, where Tumblr is killing it, and the age group that every social media company needs to dominate. Slapping a mature rating on Vine automatically eliminates any youngsters who have parental settings turned on from downloading it, potentially a large swath of the teen population.

Twitter might be advised to hurry up and release that Vine Android app post haste — Google isn’t as uptight with its app market.

So, no, tweets haven’t become more lascivious than usual. Let me catch you up.

Twitter released a new video-sharing app, Vine, last week. It has blown up, rising fast to the top of Apple’s App Store. But over the weekend, users found it was entirely too easy to come across NSFW content — i.e. weird porno — using the app.

Funny, at first. But as The Verge first pointed out, that may be a problem for Apple, the famously conservative company that has been heavily promoting the app since its release. And more than just Apple, it could be a problem for Vine’s usability in the long run.

So Twitter faces two problems right now. First, is Vine going to become a haven for porn mini-vids (the latest Chatroulette)? And the more pressing question: How long will Apple put up with having the porny Vine app in the App Store?

From what I understand, Twitter is currently in violation of Apple ToS item 18.2: “Apps that contain user generated content that is frequently pornographic (ex “Chat Roulette” apps) will be rejected.”

So parse that language, paying special attention to the word “frequently.” Twitter doesn’t need to kill all the porn. It just needs to make porn a heck of a lot harder to find. In other words, porn appears only as “frequently” as you can sniff it out. Not easy to find? No longer a problem.

But fixing the discovery issue isn’t simple. As of Vine’s launch, it has been easy to go into Vine’s “Explore” menu, start typing something that begins with “P-E-N” or “P-O-R” and have the hashtag or search term pop up for the words “penis” or “porn,” complete with a healthy cache of hardcore porno to browse through. Part of that problem rests on the issue of the hashtag — the built-in mechanism for discovering lots of content associated along the lines of a single theme.

The other, I would guess, is the myriad ways that the degenerate human mind can figure out how to hash something pornographically by search term. (Just ask this guy how creative some people can be with their porn labels.)

The impetus now is for Vine to figure out how to nix those prevalently pornographic hash tags or search terms, and do it fast.

Right now, despite Twitter being in pretty clear violation of Apple’s bylaws, Apple seems to be cutting Twitter some slack. Apple opted not to deep-six the app from the App Store — as is the usual protocol for something in violation of Apple’s ToS — but instead has appeared to just cut Vine down from Apple’s list of “Editor’s Picks.” (It certainly pays to be buddy-buddy with a company like Apple, eh, Twitter?)

But however much slack Twitter has been given, I assume that the Vine team is still under the gun to get the whole ordeal smoothed over. It’s probably a strain, too, as Vine’s team consists of only a handful of engineers in New York. Tackling pornography has proved challenging to powerhouses as large as YouTube, staffed by hundreds of Googlers, much less a little startup in its first launch days.

“We’re in the process of changing how users find and view sensitive content,” a Twitter spokesperson told AllThingsD. “We’re experimenting with a number of approaches and will continue to iterate.”

Right now Twitter looks to be nixing the porny hashtags — like #porn, for instance — as a first step on the road to this.

“Yes, but!” you may argue, “there are workarounds! You can upload porn clips and label them with non-sexual hashtags!”

This is true. And I expect that Twitter will continue to argue for relying on user-side crowd control to report said content violations, or potentially draft a team member into working on this more intensely somehow. Perhaps the solution rests in some sort of combination of manual and automatic, computerized curation. I don’t know.

But as my friend Sam over at Gizmodo reminds us, trying to eliminate porn from the Web is a fool’s errand. You can’t get rid of it all.

You’ve just got to find a better way of hiding it.

Hubert Burda Media/DLD China Youthology COO Kevin Lee in conversation at DLD, Munich.

After “social local mobile” or “SoLoMo,” the buzzword I hear around the Valley the most these days isn’t a neologism, it’s a country: China.

It’s the key international growth market that so many U.S. tech companies want to break into — especially social Web companies like Facebook. Problem is, there’s this whole state censorship thing they’ve got to deal with. (Just ask Google how easy that is.)

Perhaps, however, there’s a subversive way of sneaking free expression in the back door. (Listen up, Facebook.)

“It’s really hard for the government to censor things when they don’t understand the made-up words or meaning behind the imagery,” said Kevin Lee, COO of China Youthology, in conversation at the DLD conference in Munich on Monday. “The people there aren’t even relying on text anymore It’s audio, visual, photos. All the young people are creating their own languages.”

So, look at an app like WeChat, “a WhatsApp on steroids,” as BDA China chairman Duncan Clark put it. It’s the social network owned by Tencent — China’s largest listed Internet company — replete with hundreds of millions of users. Aside from its basic popularity as a mobile messaging application, Chinese youth can use it as a way around the traditional text-based censorship rained down upon users by the state. Even after Tencent agreed to censor words appearing on WeChat that the Chinese government doesn’t approve of.

Take a Mini Cooper ad that appeared in China. The ad featured a shot of a car with a large bandage on its bumper, with no text anywhere else on the page. It’s a signal that yes, even Mini Cooper and the big brands are also upset that they’re forced to censor themselves due to state demands.

But the ad still ran untouched. “The government either doesn’t understand, or can’t do anything because the brand isn’t really saying anything overtly,” Lee said.

It’s the same with the young people who adopt these visual languages. Even if Tencent is nixing certain keywords within the WeChat app on the order of the state, there are still the pictures and audio messages flowing through the app’s network. “And by the time the government realizes what’s happening, they’re already passe, they’ve already moved on,” said Kitty Lun, CEO of Lowe China.

Censorship issues aside, alternate forms of communication are flourishing across all social networks, both foreign and domestic. The Tokyo, Japan-based Line app has ballooned to upward of 70 million users in the short time it has been on the market. South Korea’s Kakao Talk hosts more than 50 million users on its network internationally, with at least 30 million of those operating on smartphones inside of South Korea.

And of course there’s WhatsApp, the mobile messaging app that saw explosive growth over the past year, was courted by both Facebook and Google (and shot both big companies down), and remains massively popular among more than half the countries in the world.

Now that WhatsApp has rebuffed major acquisition offers, I’m curious to see Facebook’s Chinese strategy play out. We may have seen a hint of that last year, however: Facebook released an update to its Messenger app for Android in a number of countries that lets users message one another without the need to have a Facebook account. Maybe the Chinese who don’t have a Facebook account — because it’s blocked in the country — can use this as a back door to access Messenger and start contacting their friends inside and outside the country, free from the threat of government censorship. I’ve asked Facebook whether the Messaging app update is available to Chinese users who don’t have a Facebook account, but I haven’t heard back yet.

Perhaps, however, time is running out for Facebook. “It’s not like the Chinese are just sitting around, waiting desperately for Facebook,” Lee said. “They’ve got plenty of options.”

The reversal was important because the previous decision had effectively censored Jane Perez’s Yelp review of contractor Christopher Dietz without a court finding that what she wrote was actually false and libelous.

Previously, a judge had told Perez that she had to rewrite her posts to remove a reference to jewelry missing from her home, and to recharacterize the dispute between her and Dietz over nonpayment.

But an appeal by Public Citizen and the American Civil Liberties Union led to the court determining just two days later that “the preliminary injunction was not justified and that the respondents have an adequate remedy at law.”

“It shouldn’t be easy to take down speech that you don’t like,” said Paul Alan Levy, an attorney for Public Citizen. “You can’t get injunction against defamation. If it’s really defamation, you get damages.”

Yelp and Angie’s List were not directly involved in the case in their role as online forums for user content. However, Yelp provided the following statement:

Consumer freedom of speech provides an important public service, protected by law. Yelp provides a valuable contribution to this dialogue by providing a two-way platform for consumers to share their experiences and for businesses to respond to their customers. Courts have consistently ruled that consumers have the right to share their truthful experiences. As a result, businesses that choose to sue their customers to silence them rather than address their comments, rarely prevail and often bring additional unwanted attention to the original criticism.

Senior members of China’s National People’s Congress on Monday began considering a bill that would require users to report their real names to Internet and telecom companies, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. The draft bill is designed to protect personal information, Xinhua said. Proposals to the rubber-stamp congress often reflect the higher-level concerns of the Chinese Communist Party, signaling legislators will likely take action on the issue.

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The site aims to spread the influence of Islamic and Iranian culture throughout the Persian-speaking world.

Mehr’s debut comes after years of the Iranian government blocking its population off from many YouTube videos. It also comes after Iran recently expressed its intent to create a domestic Internet network, cutting off access to the international Web at large (not to mention many of Google’s existing apps, like Gmail and Search).

Iran aims to make the Mehr network completely without any anti-Islamic videos, such as the anti-Mohammad film created by an American filmmaker that surfaced months ago on YouTube. The video incited rioting in the Muslim world, and was eventually censored in Iran, Egypt and a number of other predominantly Muslim countries by Google.

The service interruptions would mark the latest in a series of problems for the company after it stopped self-censoring its Chinese Web-search engine in 2010.

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I know there are people out there who don’t like me. But I don’t think they should be able to use Facebook like this to get at me. And this story isn’t just about me. It’s about everyone who uses Facebook to promote themselves and their work. If anonymous complaints can shut you down, that’s interference with your livelihood.

– Comic artist Wendy Pini, after receiving her second Facebook ban, for posting a widely shared photo by artist Ryan McGinley to her wall

If Bradley Manning really did as he is accused, he is a hero, an example to us all and one of the world’s foremost political prisoners.

– Julian Assange, speaking at the Ecuadorian embassy in London

As China’s 500 million Internet users rapidly adopt social media, academics and entrepreneurs are figuring out ways to track online messages and blog posts to better understand what the government censors — and even how to predict its intent.

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The Internet search giant unveiled on its Chinese search site this week a new mechanism that identifies political and other sensitive terms that are censored by Chinese authorities. For example, when users search for keywords like “carrot” — which contains the character for Chinese President Hu Jintao’s surname — a yellow dropdown message says: “We’ve observed that searching for ‘hu’ in mainland China may temporarily break your connection to Google. This interruption is outside Google’s control.”

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The popular Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo on Tuesday deleted the accounts of several users, including that of Li Delin, a senior editor of the Chinese business magazine Capital Week, whose March 19 post helped fuel rumors of a coup in Beijing. The service announced the move to many of its more than 300 million user accounts, thereby turning it into a public lesson in the consequences of rumor mongering.

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The case is the highest-stakes example yet of the controversy in India over what role Internet companies should have in policing content on the Web. If convicted, executives from the companies could face jail time and the companies could face fines, lawyers following the case said.

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A decade later, as Ms. MacKinnon documents in her recently released book “Consent of the Networked,” the party is still alive and still fighting to manage the flow of information online, though with far more success than many had previously assumed possible.

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A person familiar with the matter said Google removed content from its search service, YouTube video site and Blogger after receiving an order to do so from Judge Mukesh Kumar of a New Delhi district court.

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The company said last week in a blog post that it is now able to censor tweets by country, igniting something of a firestorm over how it will use that power.

“There’s been no change in our stance or attitude or policy with respect to content on Twitter,” Costolo said, speaking Monday evening at the D: Dive into Media Conference.

What is different, Costolo said, is that now it will only have to block tweets in the country issuing an order, rather than for all users around the world.

“When we receive one of those, we want to leave the content up for as many people as possible while adhering to the local law,” Costolo said.

He added that the policy isn’t really about China or Iran, countries where Twitter is already blocked entirely. Nor does he expect this new capability to allow the company entree into China.

“I don’t think the current environment in China is one in which we could operate,” Costolo said.

Costolo also rejected the idea that Twitter could just ignore certain countries’ laws and still do business there.

“It is simply not the case you can operate in these countries and choose which of the laws we want (to adhere to),” Costolo said.

The announcement, published on the official blog of the microblog operator, said Twitter is now able to withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available to the rest of the world.

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Poor Chris Dodd — he just got the top media lobbying job in Washington, D.C., at the very moment that the strong-arming-pols, scare-the-children, Jack Valenti era in media lobbying is now decidedly over.

It’s obviously a very confusing time for big media these days, on a lot of fronts. But any of the consummate insider moves once used by the legendarily pugnacious Valenti (pictured here onstage at our first D: All Things Digital conference in 2003) had a hard time this past week, as Internet players went very public in protesting two Congressional bills aimed at combating piracy online.

Not that Dodd didn’t try to cope.

The former Senator — who is now the chief lobbyist for the once much more powerful Motion Picture Association of America — gave a can’t-we-all-get-along interview to the New York Times on Thursday, in which he called for a meeting with techies to come to some acceptable compromise.

Wrote the Times:

“In an interview Thursday, Mr. Dodd said he would welcome a summit meeting between Internet companies and content companies, perhaps convened by the White House, that could lead to a compromise … ‘The perfect place to do it is a block away from here,’ said Mr. Dodd, who pointed from his office on I Street toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

But on Friday, after politicians quickly moved to delay both the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s PROTECT I.P. Act (PIPA) — after successful protests pointing out that the legislation could lead to censorship — Dodd went to the full Valenti again:

“We applaud those leaders in Washington who have chosen to stand with the millions of hard working Americans all across this nation whose livelihoods are threatened by foreign criminal websites designed to steal. As a consequence of failing to act, there will continue to be a safe haven for foreign thieves; American jobs will continue to be lost; and consumers will continue to be exposed to fraudulent and dangerous products peddled by foreign criminals.”

Foreign criminals! Foreign thieves! Is it just me, or does Dodd sounds like Cher, singing, “Gypsies, tramps and thieves”?

(Let’s be clear, that utterance could never top Valenti’s most infamous quote: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”)

To be fair, Dodd is hindered by strict restrictions on his lobbying Congress until next year. That said, this is not an old-timey, private Capitol Hill fight, but a modern-era, social-media-charged one.

And it’s pretty clear that the old scare tactics used by big media will no longer work as well, as consumers — as much as they like their movies — seem to love their Internet more.

Thus, what has happened is that — at least for now — the MPAA and media companies have lost and lost big, after the typically fractious Web powers decided to lock arms for once and cooperate with a creative, take-it-to-the-people approach of showing a disabled Internet.

Dramatic? Yes. Effective? Certainly. (That Facebook and Google agree on anything? Astonishing!)

Where it goes from here is unclear — the MPAA and its constituents could certainly rally and put forth their own protest. Ironically, the most effective way to do that is not via the airwaves or other former means of broadcast to the public, but on the Web.

Which is controlled by Dodd’s foes. (You see the problem here.)

The answer, in the end, might have to be the cooperation he first suggested.

As he told the Times:

“The companies, Mr. Dodd said, are ‘rethinking everything,’ not just about the bills, but about their relationship with an estranged Silicon Valley. That need for rapprochement, he said, ‘has come home in a way that no rhetoric of mine could express.’”

Much more to come, obvi.

Unless there’s a really big shift in sentiment among members of Congress on both sides of the ideological aisle, some version of the Stop Online Piracy Act is going to be passed by Congress sometime in 2012.

That means the legislation is going to wind up on President Barack Obama’s desk, requiring his signature, which would make it law; or his veto, which would effectively kill it. That makes it pretty much the first significant bit of technology policy he will face in the new year.

What’s not entirely clear is which way Obama is likely to decide. So far, the administration hasn’t sent any signals, one way or the other, on either SOPA or its companion bill in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

But there are some key clues.

SOPA and PIPA are proposed laws that would, among other things, give media companies significant new tools to police pirated online content that appears on Web sites hosted outside of U.S. borders. It would also require U.S. companies that link or do business with them in the normal course of operations — sites such as Google, Yahoo and eBay’s PayPal — to cease doing so.

For instance, Google might be forced by the courts or U.S. law enforcement agencies to stop providing search links to BitTorrent sites that host pirated copies of major motion pictures and television shows. It could go even further than that, by stopping U.S.-based Internet-service companies from allowing users to access any overseas site carrying pirated content.

Critics of the legislation charge that the two bills have gone overboard to protect content. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has said it would “criminalize intermediaries.” Other companies, including Yahoo and Facebook, have claimed it could stifle innovation.

The problem the White House will face is that both bills appear to have a broad base of support in Congress. And proponents, such as the House Judiciary Chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, are pushing the bill as a means of protecting American jobs by ensuring that profits from U.S.-produced intellectual property flows to the companies that created it.

But there are a few tea leaves indicating where the president might come down on this issue. For one thing, the administration has been pretty clear from the beginning that it supports an open Internet; not vetoing the bill now would be a major policy shift.

And, during 2011, the power of the Internet as a force for social change has been demonstrated throughout the Middle East: Dictatorships in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya are gone, and others are under threat by movements that have been largely organized and coordinated on Facebook and Twitter.

Just last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking at a conference on Internet freedom in The Hague, made an interesting comment that perhaps captures the nuance of the Obama administration’s position.

As the Hill noted, while sympathetic to the problem countries and companies face in combating the theft of intellectual property, Clinton said that governments can do so “without compromising the global network, its dynamism or our principles.”

The SOPA bill, in particular, would also criminalize contributing to or distributing technology that is meant to circumvent actions that block access to such content. That would put the government at odds with a project it has funded, the Onion Router (a.k.a. TOR), created by U.S. Naval Researchers and a nonprofit organization.

Under SOPA, the problem might be that people in more repressive countries, like China, can use TOR to anonymize traffic and thus bypass technical measures that prevent the free flow of information. The language in the bill is vague enough that TOR could be made illegal.

Then there’s also Obama’s promise to support a free and open Internet generally, which has been a major bedrock of his technology and Internet policy agenda. Early last month, Obama promised to veto a Congressional resolution that would overturn net neutrality rules that the Federal Communications Commission put in place earlier this year, and which was to take effect on Nov. 20. (The Senate saved him the trouble by voting against the resolution.)

Therefore, Obama’s stance on the issue perhaps hints at an aversion to any significant changes in the status quo of the Internet, which suggests he would likely veto any version of SOPA or PIPA that reaches his desk.

A congressional “tech mandate” on search engines to delete a domain name from search results does not result in the website disappearing. Users can and do today find their way to these websites largely without the help of search engines. Relative to the questionable efficacy of this proposed remedy, requiring search engines to delete a domain name begins a worldwide arms race of unprecedented “censorship” of the Web.

– From a letter written by Vint Cerf to Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the House Judiciary chairman and author of SOPA, warning of the dangers of the bill

Separately, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on corporations to do “human-rights due diligence” before making sales in new markets.

“In recent months we’ve seen cases where companies’ products and services were used as tools of oppression,” Mrs. Clinton told a conference on Internet freedom in the Netherlands.

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The sponsor, Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.), said the proposed legislation is in response to reports that some governments have used American products to crack down on dissidents.

“How will all these dictatorships ever matriculate into democracy if the dissenters … are all in prison, hunted down with high-tech capabilities sold or acquired through U.S.-listed companies?” Mr. Smith said.

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