Redditor LolBoopje discovered that the UK’s Great Firewall of Cameron — the national censorwall put in place by the prime minister — was blocking updates to the game League of Legends. The update archive contained two files, “VarusExpirationTimer.luaobj” and “XerathMageChainsExtended.luaobj” that had the word “sex” in them, triggering the censorship algorithm. The censorship is totally silent — users got a “file not found” error — and it was only some very clever sleuthing that revealed the error.
I’ve written at length about the worse-than-useless nature of censorware as a means of keeping kids from seeing bad stuff. One of the key points to note here is that silent failure: there is no way of telling how many of the timeouts, file-not-found errors, and other miscellaneous bugs in your daily Web experience are caused by the Great Firewall, and that is by design. It is a system that is intended to make it impossible to tell if it’s working. That’s not going to be pretty.
The firewall being operated by the UK’s biggest internet service providers as part of David Cameron’s child internet safety campaign has blocked an update of an online video game due which unintentionally included the letters “s-e-x” in its web address.
The update to online strategy game League of Legends was disrupted by the internet filter because the software attempted to access files that accidentally include the word “sex” in the middle of their file names.
The block resulted in the update failing with “file not found” errors, which are usually created by missing files or broken updates on the part of the developers.
UK porn filter blocks game update that contained ‘sex’ [Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian]