A group of anonymous Internet activists has set up a Web site to display information about Thailand that comes from the whistle-blower site Wikileaks, which is blocked to some viewers in the Southeast Asian country. The group calling itself "Wikicong" said Friday it set up the thaileaks.info site as "a tool to break the censorship" -- an apparent reference to alleged efforts by the Thai government to block access to the material, which includes a private video of the country's Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn. Some access to the main Wikileaks site has been blocked in Thailand since at least late June. It has been accessible, however, using some variants of the domain name, and through some local Internet service providers. Wikileaks drew worldwide publicity in late July when it posted a huge trove of secret U.S. military documents about the war in Afghanistan.

Ph.D. student Sam Burnett has developed Collage, a tool that relies on user-generated content sites like Flickr to help citizens in countries oppressed by censorship communicate more openly. The basic idea is to hide censored content in seemingly innocuous photos that are hosted on user-generated content sites like Flickr. The landscape of internet censorship has changed drastically due to more refined and sophisticated censorship techniques. This has particularly been the case in China, over the last decade, where the infamous “Great Firewall of China” has been set up. He says this has been the impetus to a rise in techniques to try and circumvent internet censorship. According to Feamster’s article, an infranet system can provide countries and companies with the capacity to work around censorship firewalls as it “uses a tunnel protocol that provides a covert communication channel between its clients and servers, modulated over standard HTTP transactions that resemble innocuous web browsing.”

The Australian Sex Party is up in arms over what it claims as censorship from anti-filter campaigner Google. The search engine company reclassified the party's lampoon advertisement "Jerk Choices" as Adult Only content in spite the fact that it has already aired on primetime on free to air television. The campaign, which is meant to highlight wowsers in Australian society, had already appeared on shows such as The 7pm Project and Gruen Nation. The advertisement was also used in an AdWords campaign through Google. Fiona Patten, the Sex Party's president, says that the advertisement, which had been considered suitable for general release, was suddenly reclassified as Adults Only two days before the election. Patten says that the change hurt the campaign's viewing numbers.

We learned that the censorship imposed illegally on hundreds of Tunisian blogs and websites, both Tunisians and foreigners, was “shut off” temporarily for few hours on Monday, August 16, 2010. And although the information on this brief lifting of the censorship in the country is still contradictory - as some claimed they had no access to certain websites, while to others the same websites were accessible- it is still early to determine what really happened at the top level of Tunisian censorship, which is, remember, dark, top-secret, centralized at the highest level of the state and is never in the control of the several Tunisian ISPs, though, with an excess of zeal, they have the ability to add an extra layer of censorship to their customers. Thus, we learned that access to Flickr, the photo sharing site (censored April 22, 2010) and video-sharing sites, blip.tv and wat.tv (respectively censored on the 22nd and 28th of April, 2010), has been restored. Ditto for many French and Arabic news websites. Curiously, during this same period, which lasted only a few hours, access to the two popular video-sharing websites, Dailymotion and Youtube (respectively censored September 3, 2007 and November 2, 2007) has not been restored. Something that raises some questions - but mostl importantly, provides some answers - about the nature of Tunisia’s secretive censorship infrastructure.