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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 09 Feb 2009
If you thought that net filtering and grandiose firewalls were the exclusive preserve of West Island (or "Australia", as the locals like to call it), think again. New Zealand is showing that it, too, is ready to play its part in the great Antipodean censorship stakes.
Last week, the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) announced it was setting up a filter system that will allow internet service providers to stop people accessing child pornography
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 05 Feb 2009
WASHINGTON--Is your Internet provider interfering with your network traffic, and perhaps even running afoul of Net neutrality principles? Google and some like-minded folks believe they've come up with what amounts to an early warning system.
The idea behind the so-called Measurement Lab, or M-Lab, is that just about anyone interested in Internet regulation--including consumers, regulators, and content providers--could use more details about their network's performance. Google, the Democratic Party-affiliated New America Foundation, and the PlanetLab Consortium (a university-business consortium devoted to next-generation networks) announced M-Lab on Wednesday.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 05 Feb 2009
For over 25 years I have worked in Australia and overseas to prevent the sexual abuse and exploitation of children. One of the most horrendous developments that we have experienced in the last 15 years is the dramatic explosion in the global trade of child sexual abuse images on the internet.
The world was relatively unprepared to deal with this unprecedented phenomenon and it took some years for governments, law enforcers and child protection organisations to not only understand the nature of this issue but also how we should combat this trans-national problem.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 04 Feb 2009
Google has dismissed concerns that terrorists are using its free mapping technology to help them carry out attacks.
The head of Google Earth said the program, which allows users to get a detailed bird's eye of practically any location on the planet, was not "tipping the balance in favour of the bad guys".
In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, John Hanke said: "The evilness is in the philosophies and the desires of those that want to do evil. They will use the tools at hand to do that, whether it's throwing a Molotov cocktail, or shooting a rifle or using some piece of technology as part of the process."
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 03 Feb 2009
Four executives of Google begin trial Tuesday in Milan on criminal charges of defamation and privacy violation in regard to a video posted on Google’s Italian site.
The case involves a three-minute cellphone video, posted in 2006 to Google Video, in which four youths in Turin tease a boy with Down syndrome. After an Italian advocacy group complained that the video was objectionable, Google quickly removed it from the site. Prosecutors argue that the video should not have been published at all.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 29 Jan 2009
Reporters Without Borders condemns the wave of censorship that has hit many Iranian and foreign Farsi-language websites since 24 January. Most of the sites contain articles critical of the government and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose term expires on 12 June. International news media websites have also been blocked since 26 January.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 26 Jan 2009
The crackdown on lèse majesté is intensifying as politics becomes polarised around the monarchy, says Sinfah Tunsarawuth
Years ago when this writer was a mass communication student at a Bangkok university, a senior editor of the English-language Bangkok Post was invited to speak about the editorial management of the daily.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 23 Jan 2009
The Child Online Protection Act is still dead.
Today, Bloomberg reports, the US Supreme Court upheld an earlier ban on the infamous free-speech-throttling statute, snubbing an appeal from the now-defunct George W. Bush administration.
Passed by Congress in 1998 - but never enacted - COPA threatens six months of jail time and hefty fines for any American who uploads net material "harmful to minors."
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 23 Jan 2009
New Parliament, new legislation – and time for the government’s favourite pastime of "closing loopholes". This time it's about even more dangerous pictures, or maybe less dangerous, given that the subject matter is - allegedly - cartoons.
The government last week proposed, via s49 of the Coroners and Justice Bill, to make illegal the possession of "prohibited images of children". This sub-title – as so much else about government legislation in this area – is seriously misleading, since the images to be prohibited will in future be anything but images of children.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 21 Jan 2009
Germany has announced that it will introduce compulsory Internet censorship starting in March.
The censorship scheme will block access to child pornography, and will follow a similar model to Norway, where the Government decrees a list of child pornography sites to be blocked by ISP’s.
