Essential website Wikileaks runs into some trouble (but soldiers on): The website WikiLeaks.org has been taken off line in many parts of the world. Wikileaks is a website dedicated to leaking documents that are “anonymous, untraceable, uncensorable.” Several factors have taken the site off line including DDoS attacks, which was followed by a fire which…
Showing all posts tagged censorship
Let the words run free
China’s Beijing Games will have to contend with the blogging phenomenon: The International Olympic Committee is for the first time permitting athletes to write blogs. The IOC has set out guidelines for blogging at the Beijing Games to ensure copyright agreements are not infringed. They include bans on posting any audio or visual material of…
Dark days ahead
A friend writes from Tehran: Here the political weather is terrible. You might know that the parliamentary election is near and the reformist nearly are not allowed to be involved. About 80 per cent of reformist candidates has been labeled as unqualified by the Government. Mr Khatami and Rafsanjani had a meeting with the Supreme…
Repression comes at a price
It may be an act of pure symbolism, but I applaud Spielberg for this decision (and expect many more of this kind before the August Olympics): US film maker Steven Spielberg said he was abandoning his artistic role in the Beijing Olympics, accusing China of not doing enough to press its ally Sudan to end…
The need for a post-Fidel world
Take your mind back to Cuba, in the 1990s, and the introduction of the internet: In 1995, the Republic of Cuba received a Class B license from InterNIC, the US-based cooperative that registers servers joining the Internet, effectively giving the Cuban government an address in cyberspace. In October 1996, the revolution connected full-time to the…
Behold the Chinese web
Tudou, the Chinese video sharing site, claims to have overtaken YouTube with over one billion megabytes of data transfers every day.
Before the Olympic storm
The fear: A Western journalist set to cover the upcoming Beijing Olympics games said recently that he is concerned that communist authorities will crack down and arrest reporters who cover social repression in the country. Francesco Liello, China correspondent for La Gazetta dello Sport of Italy and the first reporter credentialed for the games told…
Fighting back against a major
Western internet companies should get ready for many more cases like this one: A Chinese scholar who challenged the Communist government by setting up a democratic opposition party has vowed to sue the US internet company Google for excising his name from its local search results. If a company such as Google censors its own…
Mad for the web
While internet majors are fighting for the spoils of a growing web market, the Chinese continue to embrace the new technology: One of the more striking end-of-year statistics pumped out recently by the Chinese government was an update on the number of internet users in the country, which had reached 210m. It is a staggering…