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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 22 Jul 2009According to the Chinese government, Namibia — a southern African country with a population of 2 million — does not exist. Government censors ordered Chinese search engines to show no search results for the country's name this week, following a corruption scandal involving a Chinese tech company's dealings with Namibia's government.0 comment(s)
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 13 Jul 2009Australian Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Stephen Conroy has come under fire from Australian citizens and digital activists around the world for his attempts to increase Internet filtering in Australia.
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 06 Jul 2009China has completely shut down Internet service in the autonomous region of Xinjiang after ethnic riots left at least 140 people dead and hundreds more injured. Twitter also appears to be blocked throughout the country.
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 01 Jul 2009A 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.
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 29 Jun 2009Guatemala'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. This is the first known case of widespread Internet filtering in the country.
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By: Jillian C. YorkDate: 22 Jun 2009Over 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.
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By: Jillian C. YorkDate: 16 Jun 2009Categories: Burma, China, India, Malaysia, North Korea, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Nepal, Japan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Asia, Non-filtering content restrictions, Surveillance, Publications, ONI, Political filtering, Social filtering, Conflict and security filtering, Internet tools filtering, Voluntary filtering, IP blocking
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. -
By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 16 Jun 2009Last 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.
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 15 Jun 2009The 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.
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 15 Jun 2009Categories: China, United States of America, United States/Canada, Asia, Copyright, Filtering tech and software
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. -
By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 12 Jun 2009The 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.
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 10 Jun 2009Today 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.
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 10 Jun 2009The 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.
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 09 Jun 2009Less than a week after China blocked access to a host of prominent web services in preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, multiple media sources are reporting that on July 1, 2009 China will begin requiring all computers sold in the country to come equipped with Internet filtering software.
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 02 Jun 2009In preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on Thursday, China has blocked access to Twitter, Hotmail, Flickr, MSN Spaces and several other web services.
