October, 2007

Stories from October, 2007

Morocco: Stop Internet Censorship!

29 October 2007

In March of 2006, Livejournal, the popular blogging site, was blocked by the state-controlled telecommunications provider Maroc Telecom (a subsidiary of Vivendi International), depriving Moroccan citizens of access to the roughly 2 million blogs the service hosts. On May 25, 2007, Maroc Telecom blocked access to YouTube for few days....

Syrian blogger Roukana Hamour has been Kidnapped

  26 October 2007

Update: Last night (October 26), we've received a call from Rokana Hamour. She is fine. She has been interrogated by the Syrian Security Services about a comment left on her blog. Rokana was released three hours later. We've received an email that appeared to come from someone who witnessed the...

Kazakhstan blocks opposition websites

  25 October 2007

On October 18, 2007, Kazakhstan has blocked access to a number of independent websites switching off main opposition outlets including kub.kz, geo.kz, zonakz.net and inkar.info. “All those websites published links to audiofiles of telephone conversations of high-ranking officials in Kazakhstan, freely available on the Net” Rachid Nougmanov, from the International...

Syria: Blogspot blocked? What to do next?

  22 October 2007

According to the last report from Syria, Google's Blogger platform, which hosts the popular blogspot.com blogs, is apparently being blocked by all Syrian ISPs. Syria has blocked access to Blogspot on more than one occasion. It started in February 2006 when Damascus-based bloggers reported that both government-affiliated ISPs, Syrian Telecom...

China: YouTube blocked and then some

  18 October 2007

Is YouTube blocked in China? YouTube is blocked in China. And accompanying the news are more mentions of pathological GFW paroxysms than usual; blogspot is back, so is Flickr, sort of, and for a period of time yesterday, Live.com, Yahoo.com and blogsearch.google.cn were either inaccessible or being re-routed back to...

China: Can using a proxy tool be dangerous?

  16 October 2007

Just days before we were reminded that China remains the world's largest “prison” for bloggers and online journalists, with the former now at as great a threat as traditional reporters, and just three days before the Seventeenth Party Congress put the country on edge, a post appeared on V2EX, an...

Bahrain blocks Haq political movement website

  15 October 2007

A Press Release issued on October 12th by the HAQ: Movement of Liberties and Democracy- Bahrain, which Global Voices Advocacy received a copy of it, reveals that Bahrain has blocked access to its electronic website: This is not the first nor the last electronic site the Bahraini Authorities prevent access...

Syria: more victims of Internet repression

  13 October 2007

A new report released by Human Rights Watch reveals that two persons are being held in incommunicado detention at an undisclosed location in Syria. Karim ‘Arbaji (29) and Tarek Biasi (22) were arrested in June 2007 by Syrian Military Intelligence for expressing online views critical of the Syrian government. A...

Two interesting documents on censorship

  11 October 2007

Two interesting documents related to Internet censorship and circumvention were published yesterday: (1) “Everyone's Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide”. This is a rich and user-friendly guide released by The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which is meant to introduce non-technical users to Internet censorship circumvention technologies, and...

Jordan: sending emails and writing online poems can send you to prison!

  10 October 2007

Yesterday (October 9, 2007), Ahmad Oweidi al-Abbadi, the 62-year-old former parliamentarian and leader of the Jordanian National Movement, was sentenced to two years in prison for “undermining state dignity”, “sending false news through emails” and “illegally distributing leaflets.” Ahmad Oweidi al-Abbadi was arrested on May 3, 2007, for accusing the...

China: Removing the blocked RSS rumor

  9 October 2007

Very annoying hearsay and bullshit is how the anonymous rumor from this past weekend that all RSS feeds have been blocked in China has been judged by bloggers both in the country itself, and those with years of posts spent dealing precisely with this ever-frustrating and -evolving complex matter; Jeremy...

Internet user profiling and surveillance process initiated in Bangladesh

  5 October 2007

We have got some disturbing news from Bangladesh. E-Bangladesh reports: RAB (Rapid Action Battalion) members assisted by BTRC (Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission) officials are conducting house-to-house searches in Dhaka, Chittagong and Sylhet pinpointing each and every internet user with a fast connection. In an unprecedented move that clearly violates privacy...

Facebook blocked in the United Arab Emirates?

  3 October 2007

According to Download Squad, access to the popular social networking website Facebook has been blocked in the United Arab Emirates. Some UAE internet users are confirming that the ban was ordered by the government-owned Etisalat. The Administrator of itihad.net (UAE) called up his ISP’s call center and they stated that...

Belarus: Give Lukashenko his LuNet!

  1 October 2007

  When the Belarusian activist Dzianis Dzianisau was detained for nearly two months on charges of “taking part in manifestations which disturb public order”, the Belarusian blogsphere successfully organized an online (and offline) campaign to raise the bail (15.500.000 Belarusian roubles or $7,300) and got the young political prisoner out...