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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 30 Mar 2011
Throughout most of the Middle East and North Africa, online censorship is the norm.
The level of censorship varies; in Morocco, only a handful of sites relating to the Western Sahara, Google Earth, and Livejournal are deemed offencive enough to ban, while other countries – like Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria – filter the internet pervasively, banning political sites as well as social content.
Though the filtering itself is conducted by the governments of each country, it is made possible by technology imported mainly from the United States and Canada.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 29 Mar 2011
Today, the OpenNet Inititative has released a report on the roles Western tech companies have played in enabling repressive Arabic regimes to filter and control the use of the Web by their citizens.
In the report, authors Helmi Noman and Jillian C. York "find that nine countries in the region utilize Western-made tools for the purpose of blocking social and political content, effectively blocking a total of over 20 million Internet users from accessing such websites."
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 29 Mar 2011
Even as Western leaders call for democratic freedom in the Middle East, software from US and Canadian firms is being wielded by censors in oppressive regimes, a report has said.
Programs crafted to keep children from getting to porn websites or other material deemed off-limits by parents can readily be modified for mass political censorship, according to OpenNet Initiative (ONI) findings.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 28 Mar 2011
Built as a platform for amateur and professional photographers to share their work, Flickr is among the social media networks, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, that are increasingly being used by activists and pro-democracy forces especially in the Middle East and North Africa.
That new role for social media has put these companies in a difficult position: how to accommodate the growing use for political purposes while appearing neutral and maintaining the practices and policies that made these services popular in the first place.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 28 Mar 2011
As Middle East regimes try to stifle dissent by censoring the Internet, the U.S. faces an uncomfortable reality: American companies provide much of the technology used to block websites.
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704438104576219190417124226.html#ixzz1Hu5tW2Mg
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 25 Mar 2011
Sudan's ruling National Congress Party has warned that its "cyber jihadists" will "crush" internet-based dissent.
It follows an increase in anti-government campaigns organised on Facebook and Twitter.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 25 Mar 2011
The Tor Project has long understood that the certification authority (CA) model of trust on the internet is susceptible to various methods of compromise. Without strong anonymity, the ability to perform targeted attacks with the blessing of a CA key is serious.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 25 Mar 2011
An Internet-security company said it was tricked into trying to lure Iranian users to fake versions of major websites, a sophisticated hack it suspects the Iranian government carried out.
Comodo Group Inc., a Jersey City, N.J., company that issues digital certificates to assure Internet users of websites' authenticity, said Wednesday it had issued nine such certificates to what turned out to be fraudulent websites set up in Iran.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 25 Mar 2011
A malicious attacker that appears to be the Iranian government managed to obtain supposedly secure digital certificates that can be used to impersonate Google, Yahoo, Skype, and other major Web sites, the security company affected by the breach said today.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 25 Mar 2011
For the first time in 20 years, the Australian Federal Government looks intent on updating the National Classification Scheme.
Attorney-General Robert McClelland announced that the review would be conducted by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), which will conduct a widespread public consultation across the community and industry.
The review has been sparked by outdated classification issues in the gaming sector and will also be core to plans for a proposed national internet filter.
