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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 22 Dec 2009
Senator Stephen Conroy's consultation paper on mandating the filtering of internet sites by Australian internet service providers suggests that our nation could soon have the most restrictive internet regime in the Western world.
The incorporation of international lists of overseas-hosted child sexual abuse material would be sufficient to align mandatory Australian practices with the voluntary practices of most liberal democracies. Indeed, the implication is that it might total the sum of all other jurisdictions' voluntary filter lists. However, the commitment to add other content that is only prohibited in Australia will mean that the scope of the content to be captured will be much more extensively drawn than in equivalent nations. There appears to be a commitment to elevate the Refused Classification category to form the backbone of the new "RC content list". This will include material that deals with "sexual violence, detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use and/or material that advocates the doing of a terrorist act", as well as other aspects of the RC regime, far beyond the relatively restricted prohibitions of "child sexual abuse imagery [and] bestiality".
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 22 Dec 2009
Popular online messaging service Twitter was left reeling overnight, after Iranian hackers appeared to break into the site and deface it.
The strike left the site completely unavailable for several hours in the early hours of Friday morning, with the site's estimated 30m users unable to access the service or send messages to each other online.
The incident took place some time around 6am in the UK, when the main Twitter page suddenly seemed to disappear – instead replaced with a stark black and red screen featuring an image of a flag.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 22 Dec 2009
MOSCOW — The Kremlin has long been irritated by the way the United States dominates the Internet, all the way down to the ban on using Cyrillic for Web addresses — even kremlin.ru has to be demeaningly rendered in English. The Russian government, as a result, is taking the lead in a landmark shift occurring around the world to allow domain names in languages with non-Latin alphabets.
Russians themselves, though, do not seem at all eager to follow.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 22 Dec 2009
According to today's the Beijing News and Mingpao, The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) is preparing to white-listing the whole Internet under the pretext of proliferation of pornography on mobile devices.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 18 Dec 2009
The New York Times reports this morning that China has recently taken additional steps to control the Internet. Under the new measures China has shut down 700 Web sites, prohibited anyone but officially registered businesses from obtaining a .cn domain and limited third parties from providing content over China’s largest mobile network. China argues that the changes are to improve security, protect children from pornography and limit piracy (which is odd considering how much pirated content is tolerated by the government). However, many see the measures as a means to limit political opposition and further censor the Internet.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 17 Dec 2009
THE Federal Government's proposal for an internet filter faces a barrage of criticism, including from both sides of politics and a former High Court judge.
Two Liberal backbenchers, Jamie Briggs and Alex Hawke, condemned the proposal. The Opposition doubts the legislation can be workable, although it has promised to examine it.
''We are open to proposals, provided they achieve their objective without unfortunate side effects,'' Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said.
He said it made sense to try to ensure homes were not invaded with pornography.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 17 Dec 2009
Google Australia posted a statement today on its official blog calling the government's ISP filter "heavy handed" and outlining the search giant's concerns about the scope of filtered content.
Google's major concern is that the scope of filtered refused classification content is too wide, citing a recent report by Australian media academics, professors Catharine Lumby, Lelia Green and John Hartley.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 17 Dec 2009
Internet users and cyber-cafe owners in Algeria are concerned that a proposed internet-filtering system would boost online security but limit privacy and hinder connectivity.
The Algerian government has proposed the centralised system to monitor all internet communications, ostensibly to prevent terrorists from hacking websites and committing other acts of piracy. Access to pornographic websites would also be restricted under the new system.
Minister of Post, Information and Communication Technologies Hamid Bessalah said in a parliamentary statement on November 5th that the proposed filtration centre would act as a gateway by monitoring information flows in and out of Algeria.
The proposed system has drawn varied responses from those working in the IT sector.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 17 Dec 2009
New fears of Internet censorship spread in the Russian blogosphere Monday after a wireless Internet provider co-owned by Russian Technologies acknowledged blocking access to some web sites.
Moscow-based users of the Yota provider have been unable to access web sites such as Garry Kasparov’s Kasparov.ru, Solidarity’s Rusolidarnost.ru and the banned National Bolshevik Party’s Nazbol.ru over the past few weeks, bloggers and the sites’ editors said.
Access also was patchy until Sunday to the site of opposition magazine The New Times, its web editor Ilya Barabanov said Monday.
Yota denied that it was blocking those sites. But Denis Sverdlov, chief executive of WiMax operator Skartel, which runs the Yota brand, did acknowledge that Yota blocks access to sites that are classified as extremist by the Justice Ministry. Because of that, Yota users cannot open the Chechen rebel web site Kavkazcenter.com.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 15 Dec 2009
A reader, identified as “Hayuhi,” recently left a message in the Internet comment section beneath a recent story in the Hürriyet Daily News: “Sometimes I have to read such articles a good few times just to reassure myself that it is not an optical illusion.”
The story was the reasoning of Transportation and Telecommunications Minister Binali Yıldırım explaining the two-year-old government ban on the video-sharing site “YouTube.” This ban, needless to say, is not the only challenge to free expression that Turkey faces. It is, however, the one most often cited when Turkey is lumped with places like North Korea or Myanmar for its policies.
But no need to worry, Yıldırım explained. This has nothing to do with freedom of expression. It’s a simple tax matter. As soon as YouTube opens a representative office in Turkey and pays taxes on income derived from being reachable from Turkish web servers ... well then no problem, the government will open the switches.
