A case that could have redefined what UK citizens are allowed to post on the Internet ended yesterday after the prosecution failed to bring supporting evidence.
Guatemala's ongoing political crisis, which began with the murder of lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg and has been fueled largely by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and blogs, reached a new level over the weekend when several ISPs began blocking access to WordPress.com.
Over the past year, ONI has witnessed consideration of filtering schemes by several Western countries, as well as the leaking of "secret block lists" for a few others (such as Norway and Denmark). The latest country to consider a nationwide policy is Germany; in April of 2009, its coalition government drafted a bill aimed at cracking down on child pornography. The bill, which passed on June 18, has received significant opposition from activists who believe that stopping child pornography requires more than just hiding it from view.
New research from the OpenNet Initiative reveals accelerating restrictions on Internet content as Asian governments shift to next generation controls. These new techniques go beyond blocking access to websites and are more informal and fluid, implemented at edges of the network, and are often backed up by increasingly restrictive and broadly interpreted laws.
ONI, in conjunction with ONI Asia, is proud to announce the release of reports on Asia and China, available now on our Web site.
Last week, as Iranian voters went to the polls to elect the country's next president, the Iranian government blocked access to number of political Web sites, as well as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Yesterday the OpenNet Initiative profiled the extent of this crackdown. Today we are releasing a new survey of Internet filtering and online content controls in Iran, which details the most recent instances of censorship and provides a basic framework for understanding the legal, technical and institutional mechanisms of filtering in Iran.
The Internet and mobile phones have taken on a major role in Iranian politics over the last several months. As protests over the contested election results continue in Iran, the government has dramatically increased its control over digital technologies. Many important Web sites have been blocked over the past couple of days, including the Web sites of the opposition parties in Iran, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. While political organizers have learned to leverage the organizing power of Web 2.0 tools, government censors in Iran are quick to shut them down when they are most effective. None of this is surprising; it reflects similar events seen in many places around the world.
A California-based software company has accused a Chinese company of lifting parts of the Green Dam Youth Escort filtering software directly from its own CyberSitter program.
Solid Oak Software Inc. claims that parts of the Green Dam code, including "blacklist" files and code using "proprietary encryption methods," are identical to code used in its own Internet filtering software.
The OpenNet Initiative worked this week to evaluate the functionality of China's Green Dam software. In "China's Green Dam: The Implications of Government Control Encroaching on the Home PC," we review the functional elements of this new software and explore the possible effects of its implementation on a national scale. We conclude that Green Dam is deeply flawed and poses critical security concerns for users.
Today the French Constitutional Council declared France's "three strikes" law unconstitutional. The Council ruled that HADOPI, the agency in charge of administering the law, has the authority to warn Internet users who are caught violating the law, but not to punish them.
The latest news in the world of Internet censorship is about China's Green Dam software, which ostensibly protects Chinese children by filtering out pornographic Web sites.
In addition to blocking sites that include keywords such as "pornography" and, somewhat less justifiably, "touch" and "play," the software also filters out images that have a high percentage of "skin colored" pixels.