Welcome to your internet future

Nart Villeneuve, Index on Censorship, Volume 36, Issue 4, November: In some countries, there is no technical [internet] filtering in place; it is the legal system itself which acts as the primary mechanism of Internet censorship. Threatening ISPs, or content providers such as search engines, with ”˜takedown’ requests is one of the most undocumented methods…

Killing from the air

America has greatly expanded its aerial assault against Iraq and Afghanistan. Not that you’d read that in the mainstream media. The blogosphere reveals all.

A great loss

The recent murder of Iraqi blogger Ali Shafeya Al-Moussawi, a contributor to the fascinating video blog Alive in Baghdad, reminds us of the real dangers in the war-torn country (notwithstanding deluded Murdoch commentators telling us otherwise.) Like many bloggers around the world, Ali’s death is a loss to everybody in the blogging community. As the…

This is establishment journalism

The Washington Post recently published a front page story that supposedly aimed to investigate whether Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama was a closet Muslim. It was little more than smear and innuendo dressed up as serious journalism. The paper’s ombudsman – a role that simply doesn’t exist at Australian newspapers, but surely should – has…

Let the people speak

French news channel France 24 has recently launched an interesting online project, The Observers,…  to “enrich our coverage of international current affairs with eyewitness accounts from ”˜observers’- that’s to say those people who are at the heart of events. Videos, texts, photos- none of the content is produced by professional journalists – but everything is…

Blogging is like breathing

Who said blogging isn’t taking over the world? Compared to the English-speaking world, the Japanese have gone blog wild. They write Web logs at per capita rates that are off the global charts. Although English speakers outnumber Japanese speakers by more than 5-1, slightly more blog postings are written in Japanese than in English, according…

Treat us with respect

Syrian blogger Golaniya on his government’s censorship of the internet and its recent banning of Facebook: What bothers me is that we are not treated as peers with the government, as if we cannot rightly judge what’s good and what’s bad for us … it is not only about censoring thoughts and freedom of speech…

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