Displaying items by tag: Censorship

SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, TIPA, and more acronyms than most people care to think about are what is in the news. All of these pieces of legislation are designed with one thought in mind; to control the Internet. Now this may sound like little more than a crazed conspiracy theory, but it is not. You see right now the Internet represents a real threat to many businesses (and governments).

In mid-January the battle over SOPA and PIPA hit a peak with an unprecedented show of opposition. We saw Wikipedia go dark for the day while other large site put black censored bars over their logos. At the end of this the SOPA and PIPA backers in the Senate and the House of Representatives decided they needed to change their direction. Lamar Smith, the sponsor for SOPA made the official announcement that SOPA was being shelved. Many hailed this announcement as a victory, but it seems they did not see the finger crossed behind Smith’s back.

Microsoft is in the news again today as they are officially admitting to blocking any links to The Pirate Bay on their Messenger Software. The possibility that Microsoft was blocking links was first raised last week as more than a few people reported being unable to send or receive links. Microsoft and other messaging companies have always used filtering software to make sure that people are not bothered by spam or malware.

As we told you yesterday the government in Iran is working very hard to block connections to social networks and even email services. They have gone so far as to block the use of the SSL and TLS protocols  (Secure Socket Layer and Transport Layer Security) which will block most email services with the exception of basic IMAP and POP3 mail. As of late last night it appears that they have moved into a second phase of restriction. We are hearing that they are now blocking certain sties by IP and domain name.

I love old sayings. One reason is that some are just plain funny, but another is that so many are true. In this case the old saying is “If you squeeze something too tight it will slip out between your fingers”. This is exactly what is happening with the tight internet controls that are being worked on right now.  As Google, Twitter and others are working on hiding dissenting topics and tweets that governments do not want visible in their countries people like the TOR (The Onion Router) Project are working to get around those restrictions.