The BBC reports that the Open Net Initiative at Harvard University in the US has just released a report about internet censorship across the globe. It claims that net censorship has increased and that the problem about that is that net filtering always happens in the dark. There is no way one can find what is being filtered or what is being censored. Evidence of this censorship was found in the following countries: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma/Myanmar, China, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, UAE, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen.
In particular, the report conducted research in the MENA region and it states:
ONI conducted in-country testing for Internet filtering in sixteen countries in the North Africa and Middle East region. .. eight of these countries broadly filter online content: Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Another four—Bahrain, Jordan, Libya, and Morocco—carry out selective filtering of a smaller number of Web sites. ONI found no evidence of consistent technical filtering used to deny access to online content in Algiers, Egypt, Iraq, or Israel. [link]
And now there is the Twitter phenomenon. I call it a phenomenon because it really makes no sense whatsoever. Twitter is “a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?” Everybody from all over the world responds to that single question. You do not write an essay, you do not write a paragraph; you only write one sentence that describes what you are doing right this minute.
Sphere is one of the new Internet gadgets that allows you to provide related links on a specific topic on your site. When a visitor moves his/her mouse over a link on your site, a widget pops open with links related to that particular topic.