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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 05 Apr 2010
THE determination of the federal government to go ahead with mandatory internet filtering is not only creating diplomatic tensions between Canberra and Washington but is casting a dark cloud over the beleaguered $43 billion national broadband project.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is believed to have been summoned to a meeting with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd last week after media reports revealed the US was concerned that this ran contrary to its policy of encouraging an open internet to promote economic growth and global security. One senior cabinet minister is said to have responded to the US reaction by telling Conroy: "With internet censorship you won't need a national broadband network."
Conroy believes internet companies should be required to block blacklisted websites carrying illegal and abhorrent material such as child pornography. His detractors say the impact of this action needs to be weighed against the economic, social and educational benefits of the internet. They also point out that there is a wide range of home-based filters commercially available to the community.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 05 Apr 2010
Google's departure has saddened many netizens in China who believe it marks the end of obtaining information from the Internet. In fact, for quite awhile now, at least a million Chinese people have been using anti-censorship software and have enjoyed being a part of the free world through the Internet.
Bill Xia, a member of the “Global Internet Freedom Consortium” and president of Dynamic Internet Technology, told The Epoch Times that his company had helped people in China solve the information blockade problem, known as “anti-censorship,” as early as five years ago. With their software—UltraSurf and FreeGate being the most popular—anyone anywhere in China can freely surf the Web with a mere double-click.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 05 Apr 2010
In 2006, Google started operating a mainland China-based search engine at Google.cn — agreeing to censor search results, so long as it could mention on censored search results pages that it was blocking content at the request of the Communist government. Then in January 2010, Google announced publicly that it was sick of censorship and seeing hacking attempts aimed at government critics and would no longer abide running a censored search engine in China.
So just two business weeks ago, Google abruptly redirected all Google.cn traffic to its uncensored servers in Hong Kong, an arrangement that seems to have reached a sort of stable peace with the Chinese government.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 02 Apr 2010
The European commissioner for home affairs, Cecilia Malmström, is proposing a directive this week to block websites that show images of child abuse.
While tackling such websites is clearly laudable, we should not be misled by a politically motivated and ultimately destructive measure. Europe's approach is in fact counterproductive, dangerous and could ultimately lead to gross abuses against the most vulnerable in society. The only truly effective way to address these abhorrent crimes is an international measure that has the websites deleted as quickly as possible. All available resources – including resources currently wasted on blocking measures – should be spent on the identification and rescue of victims, and on ensuring that the criminals behind the websites and peer-to-peer trafficking are prosecuted with the full force of the law.
Blocking websites merely offers an illusion of action, reducing pressure for effective policies to be implemented and for the international community to tackle the issue head on. As a result, citizens are led to believe that something is being done, and politicians can take refuge in a populist policy in the full knowledge that blocking has no positive benefits and leaves the websites online.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 02 Apr 2010
Reporters Without Borders calls for the withdrawal of all charges against journalist Chiranuch Premchaipoen, the editor of Prachatai.com website, who is facing up to 50 years in prison under the computer crimes and lèse majesté laws for failing to remove comments from her site with sufficient speed. Posted by visitors, the comments are deemed to have insulted the monarchy.
Arrested and charged on 31 March, Chiranuch was released after three and a half hours when her sister stood guarantee for the 300,000 bahts (6,000 euros) in bail demanded by the judicial authorities.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 01 Apr 2010
Web experts recoiled today at communications minister Stephen Conroy's assertion that the internet is not "special" and should be censored like books, films and newspapers.
In an on-camera interview with Fairfax Media's national Canberra bureau chief, Tim Lester, Senator Conroy dismissed the torrent of criticism directed at his policy as "misleading information" spread by "an organised group in the online world".
Asked what percentage of all of the nasty material on the internet his filters would block, Senator Conroy dodged the question, responding that his filters were "100 per cent accurate - no overblocking, no underblocking and no impact on speeds".
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 01 Apr 2010
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Google's search engine was down in China on Tuesday -- a glitch the company initially said was due to its own technical tweaks, but now claims was caused by the Chinese government's Internet filtering.
"Having looked into this issue in more detail, it's clear we actually added this parameter a week ago," Google spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said late Tuesday in an e-mailed statement, referring to a change Google made to its search engine coding. "So whatever happened today to block Google.com.hk must have been as a result of a change in the 'great firewall.'"
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 01 Apr 2010
(March 31) -- Critics of the Vietnamese government are being subjected to cyber-attacks on the Internet, Google charges.
Just a week after Google shut down its servers in China to protest the country's Internet censorship, the company says it has discovered malicious software designed to silence political dissent in Vietnam.
Google said on its online security blog that it had found software that "broadly targeted Vietnamese computer users around the world," and is specifically designed to target criticism of a government bauxite mine that many Vietnamese activists oppose because of environmental and political concerns. The mining project is partially backed by Chinalco, a state-owned Chinese aluminum company.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 31 Mar 2010
BEIJING—The confusion over a major outage in China of Google Inc.'s search sites on Tuesday spotlights one of the most remarkable aspects of the Chinese government's Internet censorship apparatus: It is designed to be obscure.
By Wednesday, access to the sites appeared to have returned to normal—searches for some terms, but not all, were blocked. Government officials declined to comment when asked if they were the source of Tuesday's outage, leaving the situation and Google's future in China a mystery for users.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 31 Mar 2010
BEIJING/SAN FRANCISCO, March 31 (Reuters) - Yahoo email accounts of some journalists and activists whose work relates to China were compromised in an attack discovered this week, days after Google announced it would move its Chinese-language search services out of China due to censorship concerns.
Several journalists in China and Taiwan found they were unable to access their accounts beginning March 25, among them Kathleen McLaughlin, a freelance journalist in Beijing. Her access was restored on Wednesday, she told Reuters.
The compromised accounts include those of the World Uyghur Congress, an exile group that China accuses of inciting separatism by ethnic Uighurs in the frontier region of Xinjiang.
"I suspect a lot of information in my Yahoo account was downloaded," the group's spokesman, Dilxat Raxit, told Reuters on Wednesday. He said the email account, which was set up in Sweden, has been inaccessible for a month.
