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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 04 Jan 2010
Now you too can play the role of the Australian government keeping all that pesky content out of the pristine continent.
Censorship, the internet and the Australian government - that eternal threesome who never seem to tire of each other. Well, Australian internet users do seem to tire of the censorship, but the Aussie government seems to find it a constant, um, delight.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 04 Jan 2010
China says it arrested thousands of people over the course of 2009 in a crackdown on Web pornography and says it will continue the push in the new year, according to a report.
The Chinese government announced late this week that the sweeping effort resulted in 5,394 arrests and 4,186 criminal investigations, a fourfold increase over the year prior, Reuters reports. And those numbers could rise still higher. Reuters says China's Ministry of Public Security warned that in 2010 it will intensify punishments for illegal Internet operations, ramp up information monitoring, and press Internet service providers to use preventive technology.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 04 Jan 2010
Electronic Frontiers Australia is planning a number of initiatives in January against the Government's plan to introduced mandatory ISP-side Internet filtering, including National Day of Action on Australia Day, 26 January.
During the week starting Monday 25 January, EFA is encouraging Australian Internet users to take part in its Great Blackout Campaign, by blocking their profiles on Twitter and by 'blacking out' the home page of their web site.
By adding a snippet of HTML code to the code for the site's front page, EFA says a description of the Great Australian Internet Blackout demonstration will appear above a significantly darkened version of the page. Visitors need only to close the blackout box to use the website as usual, and they will only see this message once.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 04 Jan 2010
Hong Kong: The Iranian opposition, standing up against the authoritarian regime in Teheran, found support on Monday from an unlikely quarter: Chinese people, who themselves face strict censorship and restrictions on political freedom.
Chinese Internet users overcame the government's online roadblocks to voice support for protesters in Iran and criticise their own government's clampdowns. Although social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook are blocked in China, many surfers evidently got around the barriers to post messages of support for the protesters.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 04 Jan 2010
Our fellow Internet freedom advocates at Electronic Frontiers Australia are gearing up for an important fight in the new year as the Australian government proposes mandatory national Internet filters with a secret blacklist. EFA is looking for volunteers and colleagues — particularly Australians, but they can use help from outside Australia as well — to help take on this critical issue. As Lelia Green wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald, the censorship proposal risks “legitimating a range of repressive policies pursued by some of the globe’s least accountable governments.”
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 30 Dec 2009
BANGALORE, INDIA: Yes, the debate over Internet censorship has got stronger once again with search engines like Yahoo as well as Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site Flickr reportedly blocking access to 'adult material' in India, in response to the recent changes to the Information Technology Act of 2000, as did by Microsoft's hot search engine Bing.
The investigation suggests Microsoft and Yahoo have already taken steps to avoid the rather stiff punishments. If a search engine (or, indeed, Internet cafe) isn't careful about what sites it makes available, its officers might face three years in jail and a fine of up to Rs 500,000.
But interestingly such restrictions seems to have made no impact among the web-savvy Indians who go on searching 'hot' topics.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 30 Dec 2009
Nominations open today (December 29, 2009) for the Breaking Borders Award, a new prize created by Google and Global Voices to honor outstanding web projects initiated by individuals or groups that demonstrate courage, energy and resourcefulness in using the Internet to promote freedom of expression. The award is also supported by Thomson Reuters.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 30 Dec 2009
After China, it is India’s turn to censor the internet. Bing and Yahoo have started censoring sexually explicit content on the internet. You cannot search for anything that is related to vulgarity. You can’t search for “sex discrimination” because it has the keyword “sex”in it.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 27 Dec 2009
Hanoi - Vietnam is a social networking paradise, a giant village of 86 million people where everyone seems to be just one or two degrees of connection away from everyone else. It is either the kind of society that designers of social networking websites like Facebook dream of, or the kind of society where nobody needs such websites at all.
For the first 10 months of this year, it looked like the former was the case. Facebook, which had struggled to find a toehold in Vietnam, took off in 2009, and now claims 3 million members. The service received a boost in July, when Yahoo shut down the Vietnamese branch of its social networking site Yahoo360.
Then, in early November, Facebook users began having trouble accessing the site. The government had ordered it blocked, employees at internet service providers said.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 26 Dec 2009
Our fellow Internet freedom advocates at Electronic Frontiers Australia are gearing up for an important fight in the new year as the Australian government proposes mandatory national Internet filters with a secret blacklist. EFA is looking for volunteers and colleagues — particularly Australians, but they can use help from outside Australia as well — to help take on this critical issue. As Lelia Green wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald, the censorship proposal risks "legitimating a range of repressive policies pursued by some of the globe's least accountable governments."
