My latest column for New Matilda is about China’s crackdown on internal dissent and its fear of the internet: Although China is also battling a seemingly unsurmountable pollution problem, the regime appears determined to ignore Western calls for greater openness. “Why can’t China accept that dissent and argument are part of being a normal country?”…
Showing all posts tagged Google
Let the videos run free
When will dictatorships ever learn? The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has directed the country’s ISPs to block access to the videos sharing website YouTube for allegedly featuring a blasphemous video. However, and according to the Pakistani “Don’t Block The Blog” there are two theories that could explain PTA’s recent move to ban YouTube: vote rigging…
Searching for stroke victims
The power of the internet giant is getting way out of hand: Google’s efforts to engulf the world’s medical records will begin in Cleveland. Today, the search engine cum world power announced a joint project with the Cleveland Clinic, an 87-year-old not-for-profit medical center, that will see between 1,500 and 10,000 of the center’s patients…
The Orwellian censorship of Wikileaks
The following article appears in today’s edition of Crikey: Internet censorship is something we normally associate with countries such as Iran or China, but increasingly Western governmental and legal authorities are aggressively restricting the ability of users to view information unimpeded. Such is the story with Wikileaks, one of the most essential websites launched in…
Endorsing ethnic cleansing
Who knew that the internet giant Google would actually recognise Israel’s 1948 ethnic cleansing? The northern town of Kiryat Yam is suing Internet giant Google for slander, a local official said Monday, because a feature of its worldwide map service shows the town was built on the ruins of an Arab village.… With Israel’s 60th…
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.
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…
The big boys want to get bigger
This news was almost inevitable: Jerry Yang, the chief executive of Yahoo, was finishing a regularly scheduled company board meeting Thursday night when his assistant interrupted him with an urgent phone call. It was Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, and his message was curt. He did not call to negotiate. Microsoft would…
The online future is shared?
Afraid that Google has far too much power in the marketplace? David Eun, Google’s VP of Content Partnerships, tries to calm the fear: The biggest misconception is that they fear Google has aspirations to become a media company, meaning that we would produce and own content that would compete against theirs. That’s a major misconception.…
