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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 25 Aug 2009
At time of writing, according to the OL! blog, youth activists and video bloggers Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli have been held in pre-trial detention for 48 days on charges of “hooliganism.”
Moreover, despite huge interest in their case from the international media, as well as strong criticism and monitoring from international human rights and freedom of expresison groups, it remains unclear whether they will be freed any time soon let alone be cleared of what many consider to be politically motivated charges.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 25 Aug 2009
Bangalore: Emails and phone calls of millions of Indians could be tracked and saved on a "big brother" database, under a new plan being drawn up by the Centre. The government, in the wake of terror threats, is planning to set up a centralised system to monitor communications on mobile phones, landlines and the internet.
The Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT), a telecom research and development organisation, is working on the Telecom Security project, which will help the government track calls and monitor emails.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 25 Aug 2009
Following the earlier court defeat for Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter and the pending civil action taken by several Hollywood studios, the Swedish authorities have now ordered The Pirate Bay to be disconnected from the Internet. The site’s bandwidth suppliers have been threatened with a large fine. The site is completely offline.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 24 Aug 2009
A growing number of employers are refusing to be Facebook's friend.
Companies around the world are increasingly choking off their employees' access to social-networking websites, such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, says ScanSafe, one of the Internet's biggest security providers.
In the past six months alone, there's been a 20% increase in the number of companies blocking such websites, says ScanSafe, which released a study on the phenomenon this week.
"When web filtering first became an option for companies, we generally saw them block access to typical categories, such as pornography, illegal activities and hate and discrimination," said ScanSafe spokesman Spencer Parker.
"I imagine, before long, social networking will be up there with pornography in terms of categories blocked."
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 24 Aug 2009
Reporters Without Borders is disturbed to learn that access to the Twitter pages of two Saudi human rights activists, Walid Abdelkhair and Khaled al-Nasser, has been blocked since last week, apparently because of the human rights content they had been posting on the micro-blogging webservice.
“We condemn the blocking of these cyber-dissidents’ Twitter pages and we call for their immediate restoration,” Reporters Without Borders said. “This situation is very worrying and is symptomatic of a growing crackdown on Saudi Internet users.”
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 24 Aug 2009
Sorry seems to be the hardest word for the blogger who anonymously scorned a model as a "ho" and a "skank," igniting a legal and media maelstrom.
Speaking out for the first time since a court order forced Google to reveal her identity, blogger Rosemary Port tells the Daily News that model Liskula Cohen should blame herself for the uproar.
"This has become a public spectacle and a circus that is not my doing," said Port, whose "Skanks in NYC" site branded the 37-year-old Cohen an "old hag."
"By going to the press, she defamed herself," Port said.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/08/23/2009-08-23_outted_blogger_rosemary_port_blames_model_liskula_cohen_for_skank_stink.html?page=0#ixzz0P7kviYNS
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 21 Aug 2009
Red faces all round in the New South Wales Education Department, as news surfaced last week that a filter supposed to block porn was actually letting it through, and blocking perfectly good educational material instead.
This unfortunate state of affairs came to light when a female school student from Greenfell, NSW, went looking for information on the "swallow" – the avian variety – and the malfunctioning filter blocked access to a documentary on swallowing toothpaste whilst allowing her to view a male site talking about "inappropriate material".
Her father, George Cochrane, duly described himself as scandalised, before adding: "The system isn't actually protecting anybody, especially isolated kids."
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 21 Aug 2009
BOSTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government is covertly testing technology in China and Iran that lets residents break through screens set up by their governments to limit access to news on the Internet.
The "feed over email" (FOE) system delivers news, podcasts and data via technology that evades web-screening protocols of restrictive regimes, said Ken Berman, head of IT at the U.S. government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, which is testing the system.
The news feeds are sent through email accounts including those operated by Google Inc, Microsoft Corp's Hotmail and Yahoo Inc.
"We have people testing it in China and Iran," said Berman, whose agency runs Voice of America. He provided few details on the new system, which is in the early stages of testing. He said some secrecy was important to avoid detection by the two governments.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 21 Aug 2009
A Vogue cover girl has won a precedent-setting court battle to unmask an anonymous blogger who called her a “skank” on the internet.
In a case with potentially far-reaching repercussions, Liskula Cohen sought the identity of the blogger who maligned her on the Skanks in NYC blog so that she could sue him or her for defamation.
A Manhattan supreme court judge ruled that she was entitled to the information and ordered Google, which ran the offending blog, to turn it over.
Ms Cohen, a tall, Canadian blonde who has modelled for Giorgio Armani and Versace, went to court after reading the wounding anonymous comments on Google’s Blogger.com.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 20 Aug 2009
WHEN thousands of protestors took to the streets in Iran following this year's disputed presidential election, Twitter messages sent by activists let the world know about the brutal policing that followed. A few months earlier, campaigners in Moldova used Facebook to organise protests against the country's communist government, and elsewhere too the internet is playing an increasing role in political dissent.
Now governments are trying to regain control. By reinforcing their efforts to monitor activity online, they hope to deprive dissenters of information and the ability to communicate.
The latest evidence of these clampdowns comes in a report on the Middle East and north Africa by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a collaboration of researchers based in the UK and North America. Among the restrictions it reports are clampdowns on Facebook in Syria and the use of hidden cameras in Saudi Arabia's internet cafes.
