In the 1980s Irina Margareta Nistor worked as a translator of TV programs in Romania under the Communist regime. But in her spare time she secretly dubbed over 3,000 banned movie titles, all VHS tapes smuggled in from the West. These tapes quickly spread throughout Romania. Nobody knew Nistor’s name. But everybody knew her voice.
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Everybody’s been freaking out in the past couple of weeks by news that South Korea is building a new broadband network that will be 50 times faster than the average connection in the United States. That’s fast! Too bad South Koreans won’t be able to use maps or access thousands of sites.
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Skype use in China was especially risky for a while — when a local company (TOM Online) was processing data with no real safeguards, it virtually guaranteed the presence of government monitoring. Now that Microsoft has teamed with Guangming Founder on a new China-specific Skype build, there’s a chance that your chats are more secure. GreatFire.org has noticed that the updated app encrypts all data and sends it directly to Microsoft, making it harder to censor or spy on any communications. Don’t be too quick to discuss taboo topics, though. It’s not clear that the Chinese software is free of back doors; Microsoft says it’s following local regulations, which aren’t exactly open-minded. Even so, anyone already using Skype in mainland China will likely want to upgrade if they value some semblance of privacy.
Update: Guangming Founder was created by Guangming Daily, a government-backed newspaper; while Skype’s new approach is still more secure, the association casts extra doubt on the privacy that users can expect.
Filed under: Internet, Software, Microsoft
Via: The Next Web
Source: GreatFire.org
After flipping to ban brutal, gruesome decapitation videos six months ago and then flopping to allow such videos to appear in the ‘book yesterday, Facebook has flipped again (or is it re-flopped?) in less than 24 hours and will reinstate its previous ban on such decapitation videos. It’s an ugly tug of war between free speech, censorship, horrifying content, etc. that can sort of dictate what people see in their feeds.
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Don’t even think about posting cartoon nipples
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China’s internet is not exactly famous for its freedom, but it takes a lot of effort to keep it tied down. Folks have done math to suggest there are thousands of government employees censoring China’s Twitter-clone Weibo alone. Now the Beijing News is pegging that total at more like two million.
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Groups like the RIAA are putting in millions of DMCA requests to pull "pirate" links off Google, and even though it doesn’t seem to help
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Here in the US, it’s easy to slip into the comfortable idea that the internet is unrestricted, a home for free speech and exploration, whether it’s meaningful and important, or dumb hashtags. It’s not that way everywhere though, and Freedom House has mapped out the current state of affairs across the globe.
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It’s like Jeff Goldblum’s neurotic, chaos theory spouting character in Jurassic Park said: “life, uh, finds a way.” Or, in this case, it’s the internet that can’t be kept down at heel. According to a Reuters report, the Chinese government’s State Internet Information Office has instituted a “crackdown” on rogue mobile news apps that purportedly transmit images of pornography and other “obscene information” to children. But what’s more likely, however, is that the apps in question serve as a workaround for citizens seeking news reports from established foreign media outlets; news that would otherwise be censored.
The move could see any offending app makers, which includes popular apps like Zaker and Chouti, effectively shut down if they fail to fall in line and sanitize their content. China’s long had a history of strangling internet access, but this development, coupled with recent news of censorship as usual for its Shanghai free trade zone, highlights just how difficult it is for the state to control the web. And with new social networks cropping up every day and promising novel means of spreading illegal information, that fight’s fast becoming a losing battle.
Source: Reuters
A few days ago, the South China Morning Post claimed that blocks put on websites like Twitter, Facebook and The New York Times were to be lifted in Shanghai’s new free-trade zone. And the justification made sense, too: relax restrictions to make visitors happy, and potentially cash in on accelerated foreign investment as a result. Plausible, sure, but according to state-run news outlet the People’s Daily, completely untrue. As it turns out, the Chinese powers that be allegedly have no intention of allowing web traffic in the free-trade zone to circumvent the Great Firewall, which means visiting Twitter addicts will still have to turn to Weibo for their social network / microblogging fix.
[Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]
Update: People.com.cn (not the People’s Daily, as reported earlier) has since pulled its post. There’s no explanation as to why.
Filed under: Internet
Via: The Register
Source: TechWeb (Chinese)
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