[Metatron]

Censorship on the part of a private body is nothing new, and completely acceptable. If the owner/controllers of a website don't want certain content on their site then they are completely within their rights to remove it.

This is a meta-article. It has a small amount of value to Slashdot as content, but then a massive negative value for its nature concerning the gaming of an online community, which Slashdot is.

It'd be like posting a guide to DDOSing vBulletin on a vBulletin forum.

It's fair enough to post the content on a lone website, but not in an online community. You can claim that knowledge of the article is harmless, and will inform the public, but it won't stop people trying to use it as a set of guidelines. And is that worth all of Slashdots time to clean up? No.

But ultimately, it's a private site, they can do what they want. If you don't like it, then go somewhere else.

[nacorbier]

I've never understood why people think "Freedom of Speech" applies to private enterprise. Freedom of Speech provides, as far as the internet is concerned, that the US Government (if it has jurisdiction over your hosting provider or domain name) will not censor your material unless it violates a federal law (including the National Security Act or Atomic Energy Act.)

If you post instructions for an exploit of software X on their own forums, they'll probably remove it. If you post it on a website that doesn't care, you will most likely be "safe" in that the material will not be removed. It would take a federal case to remove that information, if it was illegal.

But some people, it seems, believe that "Freedom of Speech" applies to everyone, as in "If I like X, you shouldn't be able to remove X." Unfortunately, many times, that person dislikes Y and seeks to actively remove Y from any site he's active on through various means -- downvoting, flagging as spam, offensive replies, disinformation, etc. al.