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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 13 Jul 2009
The 11th annual Internet Industry Awards ceremony was hosted by the Internet Service Providers' Association in London this week. The ISPA is the UK's Trade Association for ISPs and the awards ceremony has become something of an Oscars for the online world.
Stephen Michael Conroy was actually born in England, but has found fame (or should that be infamy) as an Australian politician. Specifically for his role as the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy in the Australian Government.
The Internet censorship policies which were pitched as protective measures for children in the face of online pornography, have actually ended up painting a much broader filtering landscape. Indeed, so broad are the censorship brush strokes that they include revolting and abhorrent phenomena that offends standards of morality. Whatever that means.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 13 Jul 2009
Pseudonymous blogger dafengqixi, writing on a Hong Kong-based blogging platform, has linked to this very interesting post published Saturday on the overseas Chinese news platform, Boxun.com (blocked in mainland China).
It reports that QQ, China's largest instant-messaging and micro-blogging service (with over 570 million registered users of its IM service, see Wikipedia entry about it here), is now requiring users of the QQ IM client to install a censorware upgrade - possibly also containing spyware - before they can continue using the client.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 13 Jul 2009
ISLAMABAD: The government announced on Sunday that sending indecent, provocative and ill-motivated stories and text messages through e-mails and mobile telephone Short Messaging Service (SMS) was an offence under the Cyber Crime Act (CCA) and its violators could be sent behind bars for 14 years.
An official announcement by the interior ministry said that the government was launching a campaign against circulation of what it called ill-motivated and concocted stories through emails and text messages against civilian leadership and security forces.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 13 Jul 2009
The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has launched a campaign against the people involved in spreading ill-motivated and concocted stories through e-mails and text messages against the civilian leadership, interior ministry sources said here on Sunday.
Interior Minister Rehman Malik has directed the relevant agencies to assist the FIA to counter such anecdotes against the political government, the sources maintained. A similar campaign has also been initiated against the proscribed organisations using the Internet for malicious propaganda against security forces.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 11 Jul 2009
acebook Inc.’s social-networking Web site was inaccessible in China as the government blocks information after violent clashes in one of its regions.
As of 1:36 p.m. Beijing time, there were at least 36 reports of Facebook.com being unavailable from China, according to Herdict.org, a project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which tracks Web outages. Local access to the YouTube.com video site of Google Inc. was also broken, and connections to Amazon.com Inc.’s online store were irregular.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 10 Jul 2009
Australian and New Zealand Xbox Live users clocked up more than 101 million hours on the interactive gaming service during the 2009 financial year. With the service set to incorporate social networking sites, including Facebook and Twitter, Current.com.au asked Xbox senior product category manager Jeremy Hinton how secure this service was, from both a social and technological perspective.
In his response, Hinton said that control was a big part of the Xbox Live experience. Microsoft wants to control the interactions between users, with corporate social responsibility playing a part in this decision. Hinton said this was one of the reasons why, unlike the PlayStation 3, Xbox Live does not incorporate open web browsing.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 10 Jul 2009
The following list contains keywords that propaganda authorities, in one day, reportedly ordered search engines to block, filter, or promote. In search engine lingo, the “white list” is words or phrases that must be publicized and forcefully promoted. [A "black list" is words that cannot be publicized.] This list has been exposed by search engine insiders and has been translated by CDT.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 10 Jul 2009
In response to the recent flurry of street-level updates from citizens using social media during the unrest that followed the disputed Iranian election, a lawmaker is calling for a congressional inquiry to ensure that those services don't go dark under pressure from repressive governments.
Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) has appealed to the leadership of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to hold a hearing to revisit the contentious issue of Internet censorship overseas, hoping to raise awareness and lend a formal stamp of approval to the groups and companies working to keep Web sites and services like Twitter and Facebook up in the face of government restrictions.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 10 Jul 2009
Child rights groups have come out in force to criticise the Rudd Labor government's controversial plan to censor the internet, saying the scheme will divert around $33 million away from more effective ways of tackling online child pornography.
In a joint statement with lobby group GetUp, both Save the Children Australia and the National Children's & Youth Law Centre believe the resources could be better spent on law enforcement agencies battling to eradicate child pornography on the internet.
GetUp national director Simon Sheikh said the mandatory filter won't work on most of the content it is intended to block, and that would be money down the drain.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 09 Jul 2009
The Federal Government has now set its sights on gamers, promising to use its internet censorship regime to block websites hosting and selling video games that are not suitable for 15 year olds.
Separately, the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has been nominated by the British ISP industry for its annual "internet villain" award, competing alongside the European Parliament and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Australia is the only developed country without an R18+ classification for games, meaning any titles that do not meet the MA15+ standard - such as those with excessive violence or sexual content - are simply banned from sale by the Classification Board, unless they are modified to remove the offending content.
