China

Country Profile: China
Background The convening of the 17th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress in October 2007, at which China’s top echelon of government leaders chose their eventual successors, was the beginning of a momentous year for China, and consequently for domestic and international news media....
ONI Blog: Sina Weibo Updates User Contract with More Content Restrictions
Last week, Voice of America reported that Sina Weibo, China's largest microblogging service, has released a new user contract. Updates to the contract include agreeing not to post content deemed "untrue," threatening to "the honor of the nation," promoting "evil...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: May 12, 2012
Tor found two blocked sites in Palestine with their latest OONI-Probe tool. The organization's latest available software installed on local computer networks crawls millions of websites using a transparent HTTP proxy. Sina Weibo released a new set of guidelines that specify...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: April 27, 2012
ONI releases its annual "Year in Review" report, which details all the most significant cases of Internet censorship and surveillance around the world. Among the most high-profile controversies were the SOPA/PIPA debates in the US Congress and European software firms' cooperation...
ONI Blog: $17M Lawsuit Filed Against Baidu for Censorship
The news recently surfaced that group of eight Chinese writers in New York filed a lawsuit in May against Baidu for complying with government policies to censor their writing, Bloomberg reports. They claim that the search engine banned their writings supporting...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: April 20, 2012
Google co-founder Sergey Brin criticized China, Iran, entertainment companies, and Facebook for obstructing the openness of the Internet. He specifically targeted oppressive policy measures to censor content and the fact that Facebook's platform remains closed to Google's search crawls. Contemporary artist and...
ONI Blog: Sergey Brin criticizes China, Hollywood in interview on web freedom
In an exclusive interview with The Guardian UK, Google co-founder Sergey Brin criticized governments, companies, and industries for threatening free Internet activity. He called attention to China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other countries with restrictive Internet policies as threats to the...
ONI Blog: Ai Weiwei Says Censorship in China Will Ultimately Fail
After being released from retainment last year, Ai Weiwei has published an op-ed criticizing Internet censorship by the Chinese Communist Party. The Guardian UK published a commentary titled "China's censorship can never defeat the internet" last Sunday by Ai. In criticizing...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: April 13, 2012
Iran's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has denied that they are planning a domestic intranet. In a statement, they claimed that rumors about an intranet were the result of hostile propaganda from the west. Major software and Internet companies have ...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: April 6, 2012
The House of Representatives proposed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. In what critics call the sequel to SOPA and PIPA, the bill if passed would allow Congress to circumvent privacy laws and monitor private Internet activity in attempts to...