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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 20 Apr 2011
With President Obama visiting Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters today, the Wall Street Journal takes a look at the company's ramped-up lobbying efforts in Washington. But one lobbyist's quote, flagged by Time's Austin Ramzy, isn't going to do the social networking giant's public image any favors:
"Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others," Adam Conner, a Facebook lobbyist, told the Journal. "We are occasionally held in uncomfortable positions because now we're allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven't experienced it before," he said.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 20 Apr 2011
The U.S. State Department is set to announce $28 million in grants to help Internet activists, particularly in countries where the governments restrict e-mail and social networks such as those offered by Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Google Inc. (GOOG)
The program, which has drawn Republican criticism and budget cuts, has produced software that is spreading widely in Iran and Syria, helping pro-democracy activists avoid detection, said Dan Baer, deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 20 Apr 2011
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has played down the prospect of China-style Internet censorship in Russia, just two weeks after the FSB, the country's domestic security service demanded access to net communication services like Gmail and Skype.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 19 Apr 2011
The UK government appears to be pressing ahead with plans to filter the internet to prevent the great unwashed from filesharing.
While we may have thought that culture secretary Jeremy Hunt had seen some common sense about the plan by asking Ofcom to review if it was workable, it seems that plans to block 100 P2P sites are going ahead anyway.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 19 Apr 2011
The Uganda Communications Commission quietly asked Internet service providers to block communication on Facebook and Tweeter messaging platforms for 24 hours during the Walk-to-Work campaign on Thursday last week. However, Internet services carried on without a glitch that day save for subscribers on one network who experienced intermittent interruptions.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 18 Apr 2011
On Friday, Ali Aghamohammadi, the Ahmadinejad Administration’s head of economic affairs was quoted in IRNA, a state-run news agency that Iran was working on a “halal Internet.”
“Iran will soon create an internet that conforms to Islamic principles, to improve its communication and trade links with the world,” he said, apparently explaining that the new network would operate in parallel to the regular Internet and would possibly eventually replace the open Internet in Muslim countries in the regions.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 18 Apr 2011
The U.S. government will coordinate private-sector efforts to create trusted identification systems for the Internet, with the goal of giving consumers and businesses multiple options for authenticating identity online, according to a plan released by President Barack Obama's administration.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will work with private companies to drive development and adoption of trusted ID technologies, White House officials said. The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), released by the Department of Commerce on Friday, aims to protect the privacy and security of Internet users by encouraging a broad online authentication market in the U.S.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 18 Apr 2011
Russia is looking to the experience of other countries, including China, to "regulate" Internet use, though Moscow has no plans to broaden web censorship, a government spokesman said on Saturday.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 18 Apr 2011
Yahoo! is jacking up the amount of time it holds onto its log file data by a factor of six to 18 months.
The move, on the face of it, sets the firm on a collision course with the EU which sees six months as a perfectly adequate period of time to hold data, other than comms data.
The veteran dot com said the switcheroo was "to meet the needs of our consumers for personalization and relevance, while living up to their expectations of trust."
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 15 Apr 2011
European national courts in several countries have ordered Internet providers to block certain websites or to filter all traffic passing across their networks in order to reduce copyright infringement. But a new legal opinion (PDF) from one of Europe's top lawyers says that such orders are not allowed, and that they violate various European “fundamental rights.”
