Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says the list isn’t official but bloggers and other ‘observers’ are having a field day with it, just the same.
The list, containing 2395 Web sites supposedly to be to banned under the new Australian national Clean Feed initiative, was apparently leaked earlier this week.
Read the full story at TECHLifePost.com.
The European Union has started its official process to consider all sides of the Net Neutrality question. As we might expect, myriad lobbyists have descended on European Commission headquarters in Brussels to make their respective points.
Net Neutrality has more to do with network traffic management than content censoring, but the two concepts do overlap.
Read the full story at TECHLifePost.com.
Australian free speech activists are expressing alarm over ‘creeping’ restrictions on their Internet access following the announcement that the new government content-filtering initiative known as the Clean Feed will be mandatory for all Internet users in the country.
The censorship plan allows users to opt out of one level of filtering, designed to protect children from objectionable Internet content and predators, but forces all users to take a feed sanitized of content that the government deems ‘illegal’ under Australian law.
Read the full story at TECHLifePost.com.
European Union commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding, told the European Parliament this week that it’s time to consider passing an a measure which would send a strong message to repressive regimes, in Europe and elsewhere, that Internet censorship is unacceptable:
…many authoritarian states block the access to Web sites, filter search engine results and intimidate Internet users. While it is the duty of every government to ensure that the media respect legitimate rules pursuing objectives of public interest such as the protection of minors, restriction of free speech must be exceptional and legitimate. The principle must be freedom of speech.
Read the full story at TECHLifePost.com.
A Korean blogger whose consistently accurate predictions about the global economy won him a worldwide audience of more than 100,000 was arrested by Korean federal authorities last month and charged with two counts of disseminating false information.
In Korea, as in Latvia, publishing information the government deems false is a federal offense.
A well-known Latvian economist was arrested by the country’s national Security Police last week for allegedly spreading “untruthful information” about Latvia’s financial system via his blog.
Dmitrijs Smirnovs, a 32-year-old university lecturer, told The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), “All I did was say what everyone knows.”
What would you think if you searched the Internet after the Canadian federal budget is presented tomorrow and every article you could find about it was positive? How would you feel if you attempted to visit the blog of an outspoken critic and the site was suddenly gone?
More than 2000 years ago the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote about controlling and manipulating information. Politicians, military leaders and advertising agencies (to name just a few) have spent much of the time since refining their techniques.
Read the full story at TECHLifePost.com.
Amid the pomp, circumstance and general hubbub surrounding the inauguration of U.S. President Barach Obama last week, the U.S. Supreme Court quietly administered a coup de grace to the controversial Child Online Protection Act (COPA). The court, which ruled COPA unconstitutional in 2004, refused a U.S. Justice Department request to hear further arguments in the case. Legal experts say that’s the end, finally, of the government’s decade-long effort to have COPA enforced.
Read the full story at TECHLifePost.com.