Regulating internet content today is viewed as an anti-democratic practice but Southeast Asian governments seem able to justify it by invoking the need to save the young from the scourge of indecent sexual behavior.

Indonesia’s plan to filter web of “bad” content through its Multimedia Content Screening team was shelved last February after it was opposed by the public. Today, the proposal is being revived in the wake of a celebrity sex tape scandal which continues to shock both the young and old in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. After enacting an anti-pornography law two years ago, Indonesia now wants to enforce an internet blacklist in response to the demand of conservative voices to protect the morals of the young.

A similar celebrity sex scandal hounded the Philippines last year which paved the way for the passage of an anti-voyeurism law. The internet was also blamed for the instant dissemination of the sex tapes which prodded lawmakers to craft a cybercrime bill.

Federal regulators lifted a cloud of uncertainty when they announced it was lawful to hack or “jailbreak” an iPhone, declaring Monday there was “no basis for copyright law to assist Apple in protecting its restrictive business model.”

Jailbreaking is hacking the phone’s OS to allow consumers to run any app on the phone they choose, including applications not authorized by Apple.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation asked regulators 19 months ago to add jailbreaking to a list of explicit exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions.

The UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority warned yesterday that the use of BlackBerry smartphones posed a potential threat to national security. Accusing the company that operates the phones of operating “beyond the jurisdiction of national legislation,” the TRA said it would try to protect both consumers and the law.

“This threat by the authorities constitutes a new offensive against BlackBerry phones and their potential for disseminating news and information,” Reporters Without Borders said. “As its servers are based abroad and its communications use encrypted networks, Research in Motion, the company that makes these phones, is not subject to local laws and is thereby avoiding the government’s attempts to have access to users’ personal data.”

Pakistan will start monitoring seven major websites, including Google and Yahoo, for content it deems offensive to Muslims.

YouTube, Amazon, MSN, Hotmail and Bing will also come under scrutiny, while 17 less well-known sites will be blocked.

Officials will monitor the sites and block links deemed inappropriate.

In May, Pakistan banned access to Facebook after the social network hosted a "blasphemous" competition to draw the prophet Muhammad.

The new action will see Pakistani authorities monitor content published on the seven sites, blocking individual pages if content is judged to be offensive.

Telecoms official Khurram Mehran said links would be blocked without disturbing the main website.

BEIJING — Word leaked out slowly, spread by Web-savvy folks on Twitter: Internet porn that once was blocked by Chinese government censors was now openly available.

"Are they no longer cracking down on pornographic websites? A lot of porn sites and forums are accessible," technology blogger William Long wrote on his feed.

Messages like that startled Chinese Web surfers, long accustomed to the authorities' Internet blockades. The country had been in the midst of highly publicized anti-pornography sweeps, and there had been no announcement of any change in government policy.

Yet eight weeks later, the porn sites are still accessible. Still unanswered are questions about whether it's an official change in policy, a technical glitch or some sort of test by the usually disapproving Chinese Internet police.

"This has never been done with the (Chinese) Internet before," said Beijing-based Internet analyst Zhao Jing, who goes by the English name Michael Anti.

As the Australian government pushes forward with plans to have ISPs spy on users as part of its effort to control and censor the internet, some have made a freedom of information request to see the details of the plan... and the government provided the documents with 90% of the content blacked out. Yes, the government is censoring its plans about censorship. Even better is the "reasoning" for this.

Global Voices Advocacy (GVD), a global anti-censorship network of bloggers and online activists, has launched a shocking report that Thailand has blocked at least 113,000 websites deemed to pose a threat to national security.

With its objective to defend free speech online, Global Voices revealed that Thailand's Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT) and the Centre for the Resolution of Emergency Situations (CRES) admitted to blocking 48,000 websites in May this year, 50,000 in June and July and adding 500 more per day. Asia Sentinel has been blocked intermittently in Thailand over stories critical of the political crisis in the country.

Meanwhile, Freedom against Censorship Thailand (FACT), whose website has also been blocked, conducted its own extensive testing across Thai Internet service providers (ISPs). It found that ISPs blocked at least a further 15,000. GVD has already criticized the government's policy on curbing freedom of media and called Thailand an "Internet Desert" approaching leaders' paranoia in Burma and North Korea.

Almost all blocked websites were accused of breaching Thailand's infamous lèse-majesté law.
Lèse-majesté, or the crime of injury to the royalty, is defined by Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code, which states that defamatory, insulting or threatening comments about the king, queen and regent are punishable by three to 15 years in prison.

In a space of a month, Singapore authorities caused a major uproar when they banned a film of an ex-political prisoner and arrested a British author who wrote a book about the death penalty in Singapore.

On 12 July 2010, the Media Development Authority announced its decision to ban a film (starting from 14 July 2010) depicting Dr Lim Hock Siew speaking publicly on his experience being detained under the Internal Security Act. The film was filmed by Director Martyn See. Mr See was also asked to remove the film from YouTube. You can read the transcripts of the film here.

Labor's internet filtering policy isn't being discussed in the run-up to the election but its impact on Australia is significant.

Championed by Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, the $30million+ filter is being sold by Labor as an internet block for child pornography, bestiality and extreme pornography with 'wide ranging support from the Australian public' and 'only minimal opposition against'.

But after a new, lengthy investigation it transpires that virtually none of this is true. What Australia will get from this internet filter is a framework for censorship that doesn't stop "the worst of the worst" but will absolutely curtail discussion on politically incorrect topics like euthanasia, safe drug taking and graffiti while banning relatively-tame adult content.

Below we examine the filter from the point of view of the people who know most about it, Australia's tech community, which in the past week has united in one last ditch attempt to bring Labor's censorship policy into the open and bring its discussion into the mainstream media in the run up to the election.

China said Tuesday that Google's license to operate in the country had been renewed after the company pledged to obey censorship laws.

The remarks were Beijing's first comments about Google since the search giant shocked the Internet world in January with the announcement that it would end four years of self-censorship and pull out of the country entirely after alleged intrusions into its network by hackers.

In March, Google raised the stakes in its censorship row with China by shutting down its search service in the mainland and redirecting searches to Hong Kong, which is semi-autonomous and enjoys greater freedom of speech.

Zhang Feng, an official with China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said at a news conference on Tuesday that Google had promised to "obey Chinese law" and avoid linking to material deemed a threat to national security or social stability.