censorship

A lawsuit has been filed with the US District Court in Manhattan by 8 New York residents. The plaintiffs are suing Baidu Inc and the People's Republic of China accusing the search engine of conspiring with the country's government to censor pro-democracy speech.

In their filing plaintiffs claim that the Chinese company violates the U.S. Constitution and name not only Baidu by also the Chinese government as defendants. According to the plaintiffs’ lawyer it is the first case of its type.

Sunday a great number of Turks protested against new Internet controls introduced by the Turkish government. The protesters expressed their objection both online and on the streets.

Tighter Internet regulation was approved by the Venezuelan Parliament adding to a set of laws aimed to strengthen President Hugo Chavez's position before another Assembly oath.

The move will bring Venezuela in compliance with the international standards for policing the Internet, as believed by the ruling Socialist Party. Meantime, the opposition members think the regulation will help the government to prevent any dissent.

Resuming the year events and developments Andreas M. Antonopoulos, NetworkWorld, noted that the reality is going weirder than fiction as the world was told about the operation Aurora, the first national-industrial sabotage attack with Stuxnet and in the end we see how “Wikileaks [is] about to become a constitutional crisis between the First amendment and a 1917 espionage law” Talking further on security in 2011 Antonopoulos has made the following predictions.

The pressure exercised by the United States government on the Internet service providers to stop dealing with the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks was criticized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights who said she is concerned over reports of government pressure on Internet service providers and other companies to stop doing business with WikiLeaks.

On Sunday the United Arab Emirates said it would seek to protect its consumers and laws against the BlackBerry smartphones as these pose security risks to the nation. Earlier in April Bahrain warned against the use of BlackBerry Messenger software to distribute local news. Bahrain was criticized by media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) which called it an act of censorship.

BlackBerry was operating "beyond the jurisdiction of national legislation," the UAE's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said in a statement issued on Sunday.

Chinese operating license of Google has been renewed, as announced China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, affirming an announcement made by the company on Friday.

China's decision to let Google continue operating in China apparently resolves a months-long censorship dispute that had threatened the Internet search giant’s future in the world's top Internet market by users.

Extreme government of Belarus has enforced the new statute of the president “On measures to improve the use of the national Internet segment” that requires any visitor of the Internet location to provide their passports or any other identity document. The statute has come into effect starting this month.

While many citizens of Belorussia didn’t believe such a regulation would take place on July 1st all the visitors who had failed to bring ID documents with them were not admitted to the Internet houses.

Google decided to lick the hand it once bit when it decided to audaciously defy the Chinese government and quit the country on the allegations the national authorities hacked its accounts and the search giant got sick of the constant censorship.

Wishing to save its license in China Google said this week it will stop automatically redirecting China users to its uncensored Hong Kong site within the next 48 hours. However, Beijing didn’t seem much impressed with the move being true to itself and its warning when it urged Google against rash actions earlier this year.

The precedent set by the Google in China when the search engine giant decided to stop censoring its search results and close its Chinese website was followed by a domain names registrar GoDaddy.com. The Internet domain company said it would stop registering domain names in China.

"We believe that many of the current abuses of the Internet originating in China are due to a lack of enforcement against criminal activities by the Chinese government," Christine Jones, Go Daddy Group Inc general counsel, told a congressional commission hearing on Wednesday.

In line with its promises and threats Google at last took a strict and bold action by ceasing the censorship of its search results for Chinese users. The company has closed its mainland Chinese-language portal and began rerouting searches to an uncensored Hong Kong-based site. The reaction of the Chinese government was immediate.

"Google has violated the written promise it made on entering the Chinese market," said an unnamed official from China's State Council Information Office, which helps oversee Internet rules, according to the Xinhua news agency.

Latest reports reveal that Google is now "99.9 per cent" sure it will close its Chinese search engine as the negotiations with the government reached an impasse. Citing the sources familiar with the matter the Financial Times reported the news hours after a Chinese minister warned Google that it would "have to bear the consequences" if it stopped censoring results on Google.cn.

Users of a popular Chinese microblogging website which was shut down last July amid ethnic riots in China are getting sure that it won’t reopen again.

Fanfou was one of several Twitter-style sites in China that was shut down as part of a communications clampdown after ethnic violence that took nearly 200 lives in the country's western Muslim region, Xinjiang. Some of the Web sites have since reopened but Fanfou has remained down.

On Wednesday the Wall Street Journal reported that the Iranian government plans to suspend Google email service for its citizens. Meantime, Google reported that there was a sharp decline in the use of its service in Iran and that some users in the country were having trouble accessing Gmail, but said its networks were working properly.

In another move to take as strict control over the online content as possible China announced the war against online gambling industry including the banks and websites that support it, the Ministry of Public Security said in a statement.

The statement says that the campaign will "concentrate on investigating major and important cases of online gambling, knock out domestic and foreign groups that organize online gambling, and severely punish the criminal elements.”