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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 09 Jul 2009
Last week’s coup in Honduras is the latest incident where a government shut down radio and television stations during a political crisis, which has yet again outraged the international community. Just in the last month, China and Iran have made all efforts to create media blackouts in their respective countries. Digital activism has now made its way to the Central American country and making an impact in citizen journalism.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 09 Jul 2009
The French Senate Wednesday adopted a revamped version of a contested Internet piracy bill, after the original text was struck down as unconstitutional in a blow to President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Adopted by the upper-house Senate, where Sarkozy's right-wing UMP party holds a clear majority, the new bill will head to the National Assembly in the coming weeks for its definitive adoption.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 09 Jul 2009
Very few people in Turkey are exercised by the YouTube blackout, now in its second year. Despite the ban, the video-sharing site is believed to be the ninth most popular site in Turkey. Almost every Internet user -- from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the humblest teenage porn connoisseur -- knows how to circumvent it with proxy browsers. "I get in," Erdogan told reporters in November, 2008. "You can do so as well."
But maybe they should be more concerned. Blocking the exchange of information through the Internet is a top priority with some of the world's most oppressive regimes. China is devoting considerable energy to developing technology to block the best Web 2.0 sites, for example. Inexorably, a line is between drawn between countries that restrict their citizens' access to information and those that do not. And which side of that line does Turkey – with its European Union membership aspirations – find itself on?
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 08 Jul 2009
In the first legal challenge to Internet filtering practices enacted by relatively few libraries, the Washington Supreme Court is weighing whether the North Central Regional Library (NCRL), Wenatchee, can refuse to turn off filters at the request of adult patrons seeking constitutionally protected material.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 08 Jul 2009
Cyberattacks that have crippled the Web sites of several American and South Korean government agencies since the July 4th holiday weekend appear to have been launched by a hostile group or government, South Korea’s main government spy agency said on Wednesday.
Although the National Intelligence Service did not identify whom they believed responsible, the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported that the spy agency had implicated North Korea or pro-North Korea groups.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 08 Jul 2009
On Saturday, July 4, 2009, The 8th Criminal Chamber of the Court of First Instance in Tunis has condemned a retired professor, Dr Khedija Arfaoui, to eight months in prison for spreading rumors, on the social networking website Facebook, liable to disrupt public order.
Dr Khedija Arfaoui, a feminist retired professor at the Manouba University in Tunis, was accused of spreading a message on Facebook about the rumor of 5 children being abducted from school in Tunisia. Recent rumors that children have been abducted and trafficked in Tunisia have been circulating for some months and have reached epidemic proportions with many parents concerned that their kids will be kidnapped, despite an official denial by Tunisia's Minister of Interior during a press conference.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 08 Jul 2009
A U.S. company will seek legal action against Lenovo, Acer and Sony next week over their shipment in China of controversial software that the company says stole its programming code.
Solid Oak Software may also take action against other PC makers that have started shipping the software, a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail late Thursday. She declined to give details of the action, but the company previously said it might seek a U.S. court injunction to stop PC vendors from shipping the program.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 07 Jul 2009
China’s central government has urged local officials to get more Internet savvy. One provincial government that knows a little something about online scorn is heeding the call.
China’s southern Yunnan province plans to appoint an Internet spokesperson, according to state-run Xinhua news agency (in Chinese). Provincial authorities hope the new person, when appointed, will give them the initiative when dealing with Web users as well as the general public.
Wu Hao, deputy chief of Yunnan provincial government’s propaganda office, said that it’s time for local governments to change their image as not being responsive when communicating with the public, according to the report on Xinhua.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 07 Jul 2009
International media coverage of the Iranian protest movement in the past weeks has widely celebrated ‘Twitter power' as a tool of organizing and reporting on protests, but the reliance on Twitter has had both positive and negative results in this crisis. We look at some of them here to demystify the actual degree of impact.
There is no doubt citizens protesting the results of the June presidential election have made efficient use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs to ‘immortalize' their movement and broadcast scenes of violence by security forces, but the centerpoint of this movement are the people and not technology.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 07 Jul 2009
There has been a lot of talk about a dam bursting in China this week and it is being seen as a good thing. Only hours before the July 1 deadline that the Chinese Government had set for the mandatory installation of the “Green Dam Youth Escort” software on every new computer sold in China, there was a rare and hasty retraction from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announcing that the initiative would be delayed.
This desktop software designed to block “harmful content” from the web was to be a new tool that would take China’s effort to censor the internet, already the most heavily controlled in the world, to a new level. That it has not succeeded is a fascinating insight into China today.
