March 25th 2008
Over the last few months I’ve written about the scale of China’s Golden Shield, also known as the Great Firewall of China. I’ve also posted a link to a site for testing which sites are blocked from several large cities in China. As the web is increasingly used to organize protests, Chinese censorship in advance of […]
March 18th 2008
You rate restaurants with online reviews. Same with contractors, professors, even blogs. Now a new web services allows the public to rate and comment on the work of uniformed law enforcement officers. Some sites already provide aggregate data for neighborhoods, but let’s face it, sometimes you may want to discuss the work of a particular officer. […]
March 17th 2008
Where have all the protests gone? Many of the most interesting and successful are making creative use of new online environments. And they’re winning concessions from the powers that be.
March 6th 2008
Yesterday’s New York Times reported the US Treasury has closed down dozens of websites operated by Steve Marshall, a British travel agent living in Spain. Mr. Marshall’s websites, such as BonjourCuba, promote Cuban vacations to Europeans. But that was enough for him to be added to Treasury’s list of Specially Designated Nationals, which is the business equivalent of a […]
March 1st 2008
Judge Jeffrey White has reversed his decision requiring the site’s domain registrar to direct traffic away from the site’s US domain. Users quickly discovered the site maintains mirror sites around the world, so the court order likely only increased the site’s traffic. The judge issued an order to restore the domain yesterday at 5pm. Judge White […]
February 19th 2008
Wikileaks, a controversial whistle-blower website where visitors anonymously post corporate or government documents, has had its domain name deactivated in the United States. Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss bank with operations in the Cayman Islands, petitioned that the site’s California domain register be ordered to deactivate the Wikileaks.org web address. Wikileaks had published disclosures suggesting the […]
January 13th 2008
Japan’s communications ministry is suggesting that the government prevent libelous flaming and the use of pornography by the young, through the introducing broad-based regulation of the Internet by 2010. Of note is the recommendation that all web content be “watermarked” to identify its coyright holder — and that it would be illegal to post public […]
January 5th 2008
The Chinese government operates the Golden Shield Project, a massive firewall and content monitoring initiative. The project reportedly employs 30,000 staff with a funding in excess of 800 million dollars. A broad range of sites are censored, and this provides a platform for surveillance of network traffic in China. So, how can you find out […]
November 11th 2007
Harvard’s Citizen Media Law Project has introduced its newest service, a Legal Threats Database to catalog the growing number of lawsuits, cease and desist letters, and other legal challenges faced globally by those engaging in online speech. It organizes cases using standard forms to make it easy to check their status and trial details. So […]
November 3rd 2007
This week, two diverse publications–The Christian Science Monitor and Wired Magazine–asked the same question: “Are we going overboard in regulating adult content?” I attend at least a dozen online-industry events a year, and listen to podcasts, read blogs and pay for research from countless industry pundits. And in each case, the online adult entertainment industry, […]
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