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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 09 Feb 2010
Today marks Safer Internet Day, a day observed by more than 50 countries across the globe to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology, particularly among children and young people.
Children wade into the world of technology at increasingly younger ages - by the time they become teenagers, the technological divide between generations can pose challenges for parents who want to guide their children safely through the virtual world.
Young people reportedly spend about two-thirds of their online-time on social networking sites, which have paved the way for a sharp increase in cyber bullying.
Cyber bullying - the use of the internet, mobile phones, and other digital technologies to threaten or abuse - means bullying can take place without time or geographic constraints.
Up to 10 per cent of Australian students have reported being bullied by means of technology over a school term, predominantly among secondary students.
So how do we make the internet safe for children and young people?
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 09 Feb 2010
The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a cybersecurity bill that calls for beefing up training, research, and coordination so the government can be better prepared to deal with cyberattacks.
The Cyber Security Research and Development Act of 2009, which passed by a vote of 422 to 5, authorizes the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop a cybersecurity education program that can help consumers, businesses, and government workers keep their computers secure.
It also creates cybersecurity scholarship programs for college students and research centers, and asks NIST to boost development of identity management systems used to control access to buildings, computer networks, and data.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 09 Feb 2010
TEHRAN (Reuters) - With their paths through the Internet increasingly blocked by government filters, Nooshin and her fellow Iranian opposition-supporters say their information on planned protests now comes in emails.
They say they don't know who sends them.
Internet messages have been circulating about possible rallies on February 11, when Iran marks the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution. But the climate in the Islamic Republic is much harder than before last year's post-election protests.
Last June, social media sites were hailed in the West as promising opposition supporters an anonymous rallying ground -- especially when they were accessed via proxy servers that could mask participants' actions and whereabouts.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 08 Feb 2010
Police in central China have arrested three people and seized money and equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in a crackdown on the country’s biggest commercial operation to train computer hackers, state media reported over the past two days.
But Western specialists in cybersecurity were skeptical that the arrests signified any broad commitment by China to halt the assaults on computer security that Google and other Western companies have endured in recent months.
China has not shut down the well-known servers that have been used in these attacks or arrested their operators, so the detention of three people in central China is unlikely to make much of a difference, said Ronald J. Deibert, a cybersecurity expert at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 08 Feb 2010
The Home Office is considering blocking a childrens' website run by the Palestinian group Hamas following suggestions it incites hatred of Jews.
Liverpool MP Louise Ellman, chair of the Labour Jewish Movement, has called on ministers to block access to al-Fateh.net, a webzine launched by Hamas in 2002. Alongside baking recipes and exam advice, the fortnightly publication features tributes to suicide attackers and encourages "love of jihad".
Ellman told The Register: "It's nasty stuff. It incites hatred of Israel and Jews - the government should remove it."
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 08 Feb 2010
When President Asif Ali Zardari says “Shut up,” he apparently means it.
A few weeks ago, a short video of Pakistan’s unpopular, democratically elected president began playing on endless loop on the dozen private channels here. In the clip, he is giving a speech in Urdu to a crowd that apparently wasn’t listening to him too closely (not uncommon in Pakistan). As he speaks, you can hear background chitchat from the inattentive audience. Well, he could hear that same chitchat too, so at one point he looked down at someone and yelled, in English, ”Shut Up!”
All the local television anchors had a good laugh featuring the video, as did those at home -- some of whom created remixes of Zardari’s outburst and posted them to YouTube.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 08 Feb 2010
If the opposition depends on the internet and text messages to organize against an illegitimate government, what can that government do? Clamp down on communication, hard.
That is just what Iran seems to have done, with widespread reports of problems with both the internet and SMS capabilities in the nation.
You don’t even have to hit anyone, making it all seem so pedestrian. “We’re sorry, but internet is slow for a bit. We are working on it.” International outrage is hard to come by when the tubes get clogged.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 08 Feb 2010
Fred Chang has a theory about how hackers affiliated with the Chinese government hacked into Google and at least two dozen other major American companies. Chang is a professor of computer science at the University of Texas -- so we should listen to him. But he is also the former director of research for the National Security Agency, so he has a pretty good idea of what hackers can do -- and whether these things can be picked up by the government or industry.
Chang says he has no inside or special knowledge, but here is his theory: the hack was much more of a sophisticated intelligence operation than many believed. The first step was espionage and data collection.
The second step was the hack itself. Chang believes that the Chinese hackers figured out the identities of the system administrators for various computer networks. Then, the hackers figured out, using publicly availably Facebook data, the social networks that these systems administrators were part of.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 05 Feb 2010
Editors Note: This is a guest post by Duncan Riley, Australian entrepreneur,respected blogger and editor of The Inquistr . We are delighted to have someone of his calibre and experience share his thoughts on the potential consequences on Australia’s Internet censorship plans.
050510 300x188 Why You Should Be Afraid Of Internet Censorship in Australia, Even If You Dont Live There The spectre of broadscale Internet censorship in Australia has been covered previously here on The Next Web before, but many outside Australia may wonder: why should you care if you don’t live in Australia.
If you’re not aware of what’s proposed, the short version is that Australia is proposing to introduce a compulsory firewall that filters content based on a blacklist of banned sites.
What’s going to be on that list is even now still somewhat confused. The Censorship Minister Stephen Conroy has stated that all Refused Classification content will be banned, which in Australia would extend to computer games unsuitable for children (Australia has no adult (R18+) rating for computer games,) small breasts, information about euthanasia, discussion forums on anorexia, as well as the usual nasties of child porn. To complicate matters, a site may be refused classification in Australia if it links to a site that is
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 05 Feb 2010
BEIJING — The Chinese Foreign Ministry lashed out Friday against criticism of China in a speech on Internet censorship made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, calling on the United States government “to respect the truth and to stop using the so-called Internet freedom question to level baseless accusations.”
Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in a written statement posted Friday afternoon on the ministry’s Web site that the criticism leveled by Mrs. Clinton on Thursday was “harmful to Sino-American relations.”
“The Chinese Internet is open,” he said.
