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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 19 Mar 2009
Bangladesh has blocked access to the video-sharing website YouTube after it hosted a recording of a tense meeting between the prime minister and army officials following a bloody mutiny by border guards.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 19 Mar 2009
Australia blacklisted a webpage on Monday from the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks that contains an index of URLs censored by Dutch authorities, a move adding to the country's debate about whether the government should mandate internet filters.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 19 Mar 2009
The UK government is considering the mass surveillance and retention of all user communications on social-networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo.
Home Office security minister Vernon Coaker said on Monday that the EU Data Retention Directive, under which ISPs must store communications data for 12 months, does not go far enough. Communications such as those on social networking sites and instant messaging could also be monitored, he said.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 19 Mar 2009
"Editors at Wikipedia have removed a link to a blacklisted web site that sat uncontested for over 24 hours in the main body of the Australian regulator's own Wikipedia entry. The link, which directs readers to a site containing graphic imagery of aborted foetuses, was inserted into ACMA's Wikipedia entry by a campaigner against Internet filtering to determine whether Australia's communications regulator had a double-standard when it came to censoring web content. The very same link motivated the regulator to serve Aussie broadband forum Whirlpool's hosting company with a 'link deletion notice' and the threat of an $11,000 fine. Last night, the link became the subject of 'warring' between several Wikipedia administrators in the lead up to its removal, with administrators saying they didn't want to be used to prove a point."
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 19 Mar 2009
TEHRAN—Iran has arrested a number of people accused of setting up anti-religious and obscene web sites as part of a foreign-backed plot to undermine the Islamic Republic, Iranian media reported on Thursday.
The semi-official Fars News Agency listed the initials of 26 people it said were involved in the case but it did not make clear whether all of them had been detained in an operation by the intelligence arm of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 18 Mar 2009
Like many countries, Australia currently runs a blacklist of child porn sites. And like many countries, it doesn't want that list published. It doesn't even want other countries' lists published, and is in fact banning such links.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 18 Mar 2009
The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.
Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark's list of banned websites.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 17 Mar 2009
As France's National Assembly considers a law that would cut off access to the internet to those who are found to be repeatedly downloading copyrighted material without permission, "tens of thousands" of websites across the country and beyond have gone dark in a 'black-out' protest against the measures.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 16 Mar 2009
U.S. firms, spooked by export rules, seem to be practicing a kind of self-censorship oddly similar to what Chinese firms do.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 16 Mar 2009
Today, The Parliament here in Finland, have passed the controversial reforms to the data protection law, the so-called "Lex Nokia" bill. The vote was 96 for, 56 against.
Notably, three Green League MPs who had previously voted against the bill abstained from the vote: Johanna Karimäki, Ville Niinistö and Kirsi Ojansuu.
The bill, dubbed "Lex Nokia" because of the mobile phone giant's perceived advocacy for the law, angered unions and privacy rights advocates.
