Category: tech news

report: net censorship increases around the world

mtadros

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:

filteringmap.gifONI 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]

attempted thinking

mtadros

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is proposing a new bill that would “increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including “attempts” to commit piracy.” [link]
Apparently the Bush administration is supporting the bill which is entitled  the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007 [link to pdf of the bill]. Naturally, the intellectual property laws are aimed at protecting big music and movie industries.

Here are some of the proposed measures in the law:

  • Criminalize “attempting” to infringe copyright. Federal law currently punishes not-for-profit copyright infringement with between 1 and 10 years in prison, but there has to be actual infringement that takes place.
  • Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software.
  • Permit more wiretaps for piracy investigations.
  • Allow computers to be seized more readily.

What’s next? criminialize ‘attempted thinking’?

cyber war

mtadros

A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications. [The Guardian]

According to The Guardian, “Alarm over the unprecedented scale of cyber-warfare is to be raised tomorrow at a summit between Russian and European leaders outside Samara on the Volga.” If the Russians are proven to be behind the attacks, the Guardian says this would be considered the first officially known attack by a state on another.

Not really. In fact in the Frontline film Cyberwars, one Pentagon official acknowledges that the US conducted a cyberwar attack on Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1992. In addition, cyberwars have been very common between Israel and the Palestinians. In particular, Israel as a State, and Palestinians as individual computer-savvy people.