and suddenly....

all the 'flickr censor' pictures fall off the 7 days interesting page. How curious. I mean Flickr wouldn't cens... not Flickr...


Update:

oh my - no - not flickr fixing things - because people were being deprived of their fix of flower macros, sunsets and kittens... not flickr. Not at all like some third world dictatorship quelling protests against their regime then.

Commentary in Salon.

"Mmmmmm - this hole we're in, maybe we can get out of it if we dig even deeper..."

48 hours after letting the sh*t storm blow and blow

Flickreenies finally get a sort of offical-ish response from staff member Heather.

The central problem is that Germany has much more stringent age verification laws than its neighboring countries and specifies much harsher penalties, including jail time, for those with direct responsibility (in our case, it would be our colleagues in the German offices and we're not willing to make a call that has that kind of consequence for them).

I think I read somewhere that a while back Yahoo got into lots of trouble over auction sites selling Nazi memorabilia.

link one.

link two.

link three.

So that might have a bearing on things. Hiving off Germany Flickr to Yahoo.de looks to have serious -albeit stupid consequences. I knew Yahoo buying Flickr would be trouble.

I wouldn't have predicted this though. I'd feel sorry for the flickr staff if they hadn't brought it upon themselves - they should have stayed in Canada where they were safe.

Anyway it's entertaining seeing people's inventiveness in response to this in the last 7 days explore interestingness page.