According to news reports, Burma’s military government has taken further steps to restrict citizen access to the Internet by silencing dissidents and stepping up raids on Internet cafes. Hacker attacks originating from Russia, China, and Singapore blocked access to four major news websites in the run-up to the twentieth anniversary of the September 1988 pro-democracy uprising.
Our friends at Global Voices Advocacy have reported that Blogger.com has been added to the list of sites filtered in Turkey. This latest news of filtering comes on the heels of news that Wordpress.com, Richard Dawkins' web site and Google Groups have all been blocked due to the legal actions of Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar.
Australia cracks down on criticism of its latest filtering scheme.
While many Internet users in the Arab world demand access to more online content, other users campaign to have content blocked.
Under Australia's new Internet filtering scheme, citizens will be unable to opt out of inclusion. Instead, they will be able to choose between two blacklists; one blocks content inappropriate for children, the other blocks illegal material.
Bloggers in Kazakhstan are unable to access popular blogging platform Livejournal. Although Livejournal.com is inaccessible, however, Livejournal.ru can be accessed easily. Bloggers are looking for explanations for the alleged block.
A popular UAE blog, often critical of UAE politics and social issues, has been been blocked a few days after it published an analysis of the impact of the global financial crisis on the UAE economy.
The Pirate Bay is once again accessible in Italy, following a court order deeming the prior block unlawful. OpenNet has been following this story since August, when the site block resulted in an inadvertent traffic increase for the torrent sharing site.
The Pirate Bay's co-founder Peter Sunde has expressed gratitude toward his lawyers and is pleased with the results of the case.
Groundbreaking research by an ONI affiliate made major news today. Nart Villeneuve, a fellow at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, revealed in a joint Information Warfare Monitor/ONI Asia report Wednesday TOM-Skype, a special software for using Skype in Chinese, is being used to snoop on text chats containing certain keywords relating to topics such as Taiwanese independence and Falun Gong. Additional information not related to certain keywords has also been captured; Villeneuve's research indicates that perhaps certain usernames also trigger the system.
In a clear instance of vexatious litigation, a Turkish court has blocked the Web site of prominent evolutionist Richard Dawkins following complaints from Islamic creationist and author Adnan Oktar. Oktar, who writes under the nom de plume Harun Yahya, filed the complaint last week; when Turkish Internet users now attempt to access Dawkins' site, they are presented with a message that reads: 'access to this site has been suspended in accordance with a court decision'.
