Wikileaks, a proposed system enabling whistle-blowers and cyber-activists to post confidential documents anonymously from repressive regimes, has been criticised by the BBC’s Bill Thompson for promising more than it can deliver, as the service prepares to go live.
The People’s Republic of China has passed a new law aimed at curbing spam that makes it a crime to own an unregistered mail server. Businesses and ISPs must inform the government at least 20 days before an email server is built and must keep all email for a minimum of 60 days.
Reporters Without Borders today condemned the closure of Advar News, a website linked to an independent student group, which has been shut down since intelligence agents raided its office on 19 September. A blog service, persianblog.com, was also briefly blocked “by mistake” by Iranian ISPs.
Human Rights Watch has a 149pp report on how China keeps control of free thought on the net, including with co-operation from Microsoft, Skype, and search engines. Parliament’s Foreign Affairs committee also denounced such collaboration as ‘morally unacceptable’, and HRW suggests ways of bringing pressure to bear. The report itself is also likely to be censored – read our mirror of it here.
A website that hosts a network of blogs about Central Asia and the Caucasus has been inaccessible for several weeks. It is thought that local ISPs were orederd to block the Neweurasia.net domain name after it launched Russian and Uzbek-language versions.
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