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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 25 Mar 2010
One cold but sunny autumn day, a young white-collar worker in Shanghai received an anxious phone call from his family. The authorities were requisitioning their farmland for development.
Wang Shuai believed the scheme was illegal, but officials refused to discuss it. He tried journalists, but they thought his story both too common and too sensitive. That was when he turned to the internet.
"It was the choice of having no choice," he said. "But I had read complaints about injustices on the net before and I knew some cases had worked out. There were reports like officials who used public money for holidays; when they appeared, the nation began investigating."
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 25 Mar 2010
Reporting from Beijing - The ever-quotable Deng Xiaoping once said that when you open the window, flies get in.
Although the late Chinese leader hardly could have conceived three decades ago of Google, Twitter or Facebook as those troublesome pests, the sentiment remains unchanged. The Communist Party has long wrestled with how to weigh the competing dictates of economic openness and social control. How to attract international businesses without bringing in too many foreigners and their alien ideas? How to let their own people enjoy the educational opportunities of the outside world without undermining the party's ideological hold?
When there's been a clash of those interests, Beijing almost always has come down on the side of control. In that context, its unwillingness to bend to Google's demands for less censorship of the Internet was a foregone conclusion.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 24 Mar 2010
Google and other tech giants are making waves today over Internet censorship in a place people might not expect — Australia.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Google, Yahoo and others “delivered a withering critique” of government plans to force Internet service providers to block certain content.
The Australian government has been putting its censorship plans in place for more than a year now. And it plans to introduce legislation this year that will require that ISPs use filters to block content such as child sex abuse, bestiality, detailed instruction in crime or anything advocating terrorism, according to Australia’s Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 24 Mar 2010
Citizens, states and corporations are battling for online space. What happened to the dream of global communication? Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski report
At the end of 2009, a social movement mobilised once again around an Iranian political crisis – from the streets of Iran’s cities spreading through networks of support to Europe, North America and beyond. In Toronto, where the Citizen Lab internet research and development centre is located, a dynamic group of Iranian students banded together with activists across the world, raising awareness and building support. Together they have formed an identity unique to the 21st century: a cyber enabled, planetary resistance community.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 24 Mar 2010
SHANGHAI — Even before Google began threatening to shut down its search service in China, it was not fitting in.
Google and other major American Internet companies like Yahoo and eBay failed to gain significant traction in the Chinese market. And Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by the government.
Instead, the hottest companies in the world’s biggest Internet market have names like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba — fast-growing local firms that are making huge profits. Post-Google, China’s Internet market could increasingly resemble a lucrative, walled-off bazaar, experts say. Those homegrown successes, however, could have trouble becoming global brands.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 24 Mar 2010
Kaduna — A curious order emanating from a Sharia judge in Kaduna State is seeking to gag users in a forum launched recently on an amputation case on Facebook and Twitter.
Justice Lawal Muhammed of Magajin Gari Sharia Court in Kaduna has ordered social networking sites - Facebook and Twitter - to stop discussions on the amputation of Buba Bello Jangebe until the determination of the suit instituted by the Association of Muslim Brotherhood of Nigeria.
The restraining order is the first of its kind in Nigeria where a court seeks to interfere in the freedom of interaction and activities of people online.
It is not clear how the restraining order would be enforced.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 24 Mar 2010
All internet providers in the United Arab Emirates have been ordered to block the unnamed user behind the site, after he alleged his claims were supported by verses of the Koran.
His actions sparked a wave a protest, with many calling on users to boycott the social networking site unless the site was removed.
After dozens of complaints about the Arabic-language site, titled “God and Prophets”, the country’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) announced this week it would ban the user from holding an internet account.
But that decision was met with more protest from what some viewed as censorship of the internet.
The user claimed they were an atheist and believed in no God but him/herself, reports in the Middle East claimed.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 23 Mar 2010
EU foreign ministers have vowed to "act" against the Iranian state's unacceptable jamming of satellite broadcasts and internet controls, showing the bloc's increasing impatience with Tehran.
Europe "calls on the Iranian authorities to stop the jamming of satellite broadcasting and internet censorship and to put an end to this electronic interference immediately", the European Union's 27 foreign ministers said in an agreed statement on Monday.
Ministers are "determined to pursue these issues and to act with a view to put an end to this unacceptable situation", they insisted.
The decision to take unilateral European action comes as impatience is growing for stronger UN measures against Tehran over its controversial nuclear program.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 23 Mar 2010
San Francisco, U.S. (FT) -- Russia has quietly arrested several suspects in one of the world's worst cyberbank heists, raising hopes of a previously unseen level of official co-operation in a country that has been a haven for criminals.
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) detained suspects including Viktor Pleshchuk, one of the alleged masterminds behind a $9m attack on the payment processing unit of the Royal Bank of Scotland, people familiar with the inquiry told the Financial Times.
The FSB asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the U.S., which has made the probe one of its top international priorities, to keep silent on the arrests to avoid scaring other targets in Russia into covering their tracks.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 23 Mar 2010
Debate is heating up in Venezuela after a series of decrees and statements from President Hugo Chávez, who questioned how the Internet is being used in the country. Many are interpreting these statements and policy proposals by the Assembly that there is the desire by the government to control the Internet in Venezuela.
After almost a year of discussion regarding the decree that questioned the Internet as a priority, these concerns are appearing once again online. Much of the government's concerns were demonstrated when a bit of news was falsely declared in the forums of the site Noticiero Digital, an online Venezuelan newspaper that Diosdado Cabello, the Minister of Public Works and Housing had died. The false information remained published for two days, and was picked up and republished on other blogs. It was two days until the site's administrators took the information down and made the correction.
