Is this being reported as "new news" because it is available to the public?

AFAIK nothing is released yet? They are probably still trying to, like Dall-E 1/2, remove every every image and ban every word that might generate even the slightest hint of controversial imagery before releasing it to the public. To be fair, Stable Diffusion spent months basically doing the same on Discord with thousands of beta users, and had an army of moderators flagging images which were subsequently removed in order to prevent people from generating porn. Didn't help though, as people got access to the beta models (for "research" purposes) a few weeks before the official release and are using that to e.g. create "porn"[0].

[0] pornpen.ai: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32572770

Even if you don’t want to block generating porn, you still want to know if you’re getting it, because nobody wants to get porn when they didn’t ask for it. (and it may be illegal depending on your country)

It’s easy to remove the filter from the SD scripts and that’s intentional.

Fair enough and props to Stability for giving people the benefit of the doubt, not to mention actually open sourcing almost all of their work, unlike other "open" projects. Speaking of which, Dall-E bans a decent chunk of the English dictionary in the hopes of preventing people from generating anything even remotely offensive, which can be somewhat frustrating.

someone told me bloody mary was banned from dalle

This list is already a month old but it should give you an idea of what kind of words are banned: https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wa3jt6/banned_words...