• By: Jillian C. York
    Date: 11 Sep 2008
    Malaysia has pulled the plug on a popular news portal often critical of the government, sparking protests from a resurgent opposition. Malaysia's telecoms watchdog ordered Internet providers to block access to the Malaysia Today (www.malaysia-today.net) Web site because it posted comments that could incite the country's multiracial society, a government official said on Friday. Home (Interior) Minister Syed Hamid said Malaysia Today's editor Raja Petra Kamaruddin had ignored warnings from the watchdog to abide by the law.
  • By: Jillian C. York
    Date: 11 Sep 2008
    You’ve heard of the FBI’s “Quantico Circuit” and were outraged by illegal warrantless wiretapping by Bushist minions. To no avail, you flooded Congress with emails and phone calls, angered by the bipartisan “FISA Amendments Act of 2008″ and the swell party thrown by AT&T for “Blue Dog” Democrats in Denver this week for the convention. But just in time for a new administration (and the bundles of cash always at the ready for the expanding homeland security market), comes a complete “surveillance in a box” system called the Intelligence Platform!
  • By: Jillian C. York
    Date: 11 Sep 2008
    China unblocked many usually censored web sites following intense international pressure and scrutiny after having promised uncensored access during the Olympics. Five days later (August 6, 2008) I tested the search engines that Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft customize for the Chinese market as well as the leading domestic search engine Baidu. I found that all of the search engines were still censoring content that was unblocked by China. one interesting find was that Yahoo! was censoring less than all the others and Baidu (and Google) were censoring much less than Microsoft.
  • By: Jillian C. York
    Date: 11 Sep 2008
    In September 2001, when the student Salman Jarbar established the first Iranian weblog, no one imagined that blogging would become a social phenomenon in Iran. But over the past seven years blogs have come to fulfil the role of liberal newspapers, civil society organisations and even private gatherings. In 2004 unofficial estimates placed Persian as the fourth most common language in the blogosphere. The state's backlash against the virtual community started in 2003. Sites and blogs that clashed with official state policies were blocked, but censorship then expanded to cover blogs with the term "woman" or "gender" in the title.
  • By: Jillian C. York
    Date: 11 Sep 2008
    Bloxx, a web content filtering specialist, warns that as the new academic year approaches, educational institutions should be aware of the escalating use of anonymous proxies by students trying to bypass web filtering technology and the risks associated with unrestricted internet access. The Internet is an incredibly important and useful resource for education, yet it can also impact productivity as students have the opportunity to waste time surfing social networking websites or bandwidth-sapping media download sites.
  • By: Jillian C. York
    Date: 10 Sep 2008
    Internet assaults are playing a larger role in military strategy and political struggles. Even before Russia invaded Georgia last month, Citizen Lab's researchers noticed sporadic attacks aimed at several Georgian Web sites. Such attacks are especially threatening to countries increasingly linking critical activities to the Internet.
  • By: Jillian C. York
    Date: 10 Sep 2008
    Amnesty International has issued a call for the immediate and unconditional release of Mohamed Erraji, the 29-year-old blogger sentenced this week to two years imprisonment reportedly for 'lack of respect due to the King'.
  • By: Jillian C. York
    Date: 10 Sep 2008
    With the Olympic spotlight on China fading, speculation is increasing about whether controls on foreign journalists, relaxed in the lead-up to the Games, will be allowed to expire next month.
  • By: Jillian C. York
    Date: 10 Sep 2008
    It seems axis of evil Internet censorship member, Syria, is up to its old tricks again, this time blocking 160 websites which purportedly expressed dissident views.
  • By: Jillian C. York
    Date: 09 Sep 2008
    The Internet is an incredibly important and useful resource for education, yet it can also impact productivity as students have the opportunity to waste time surfing social networking Web sites or bandwidth-sapping media download sites. More importantly, there’s a lot of bad stuff on the Net which really shouldn’t be seen by children.

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