Displaying items by tag: Censorship

The Indian government these days enters the final stage of the first phase of implementation of the system for monitoring Internet activity, text messaging (e-mail, SMS) and voice calls of their residents. It is about $74 million heavy security project that is broadly conceived as a weapon to fighting terrorism. It is difficult, however, to ignore the fact that the privacy of users now virtually will not exist.

In Saudi Arabia, there is no joking about the data traffic that comes out of the country, and therefore apps such as Skype, Viber and WhatsApp could soon be in serious problem. The government has announced through the telecom operators that if they don’t start start to censor messages sent from these services, they will seriously think about how to ban their use.

In China, for 12 years now, sales of consoles have been banned. According to local authorities, these devices are intended solely for entertainment and that is corrupting children's health, and therefore they are not desirable. [Ed – sounds like some of the politicians that are in the US…]

In preparation for launching their own internet, the Iranian government has decided to block Google. This move should “protect” Iranian citizens from big bad internet freedom. An official known only by his last name Khoramabadi stated "Google and Gmail will be filtered throughout the country until further notice“. The Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) said that this move was provoked by the anti-Islamic movie posted on YouTube that Google refused to remove. As we all know, Muslims don’t take these kinds of things lightly and we saw many newspapers or TV shows that made fun of their religious figures have received death threats shortly after the incident.

After a New York court decided to request account information and tweets from Occupy Wall Street protester, Malcom Harris, Twitter responded with filling an appeal. Unlike Facebook, who has been accused of giving up their users’ data to legal institutions like it was something meaningless, Twitter has decided to stand their ground and defend their users’ privacy. Harris is being prosecuted for allegations of disorderly conduct during protests on Wall Street and information on his two accounts @destructuremal and @getsworse is being asked for by the court.  For @getsworse they requested all public tweets and “[t]he following subscriber information: name; address; records of session times and durations; length of service (including creation date); types of service utilized; telephone or instrument number or any other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address.”

On June 11^th something happened across the internet that has reverberated through many online services that we take for granted. Starting with Facebook there was an unexplained (and Facebook still refuses to comment) run of legitimate sites suddenly being marked as spam, then just as suddenly being “fixed”. We saw this with our links where after posting an article on Microsoft we lost all links between June 11^th and May 28^th. When we tried to repost them we were told that the links were blocked because they were “spammy”. Our report of this issue resulted in well over 100 others stating the same thing was happening to them.

In what can only be described as a “the pot calling the kettle” style move corporations, the US Congress and the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) have all gotten together to keep the Internet Free. When we first read the headlines about the UN having a conference in Dubai to discuss the possibility of moving governance of some aspects of the Internet to them (actually the ITU) we chuckled a little bit. When we heard the garbage spewing from members of congress and the FCC we began to outright laugh.

So yesterday (Friday May 18^th) we heard that Apple was censoring the word “jailbreak” in iTunes and the App Store. This was reported by a few sites and seemed to be rather odd after the backlash from the obvious censoring of a single search string when using Apple’s Siri Voice Assistant. When we ran the story on Siri we had a rather large and enthusiastic response to the article. The one thing that many people kept trying to say was that Apple did not alter the results, but more on that after we talk about the jailbreak issue.

Remember the original trial for the “criminal” copyright infringement case against The Pirate Bay (TPB) and some of the shady things that went on behind the scenes? Well now we find that the copyright industry is doing it again, this time with the legal proceedings that just arranged for all links, proxies and any other references to The Pirate Bay banned in the Netherlands. This is actually popping up right after we talked about the methods the industry will go to just to maintain control.

Well, well, well; it looks like Apple has been caught altering the data that Siri returns to their users when asked specific questions. Last week it was reported that when users asked Siri “What is the best smartphone” it replied with the answer The Nokia Lumia 900. Now Apple has previously stated that the information from Siri all comes from WolframAlpha “computational knowledge engine” (pronounce that search engine) and they have no power to alter the data that Siri sends.