April, 2011
Stories from April, 2011
18 April 2011
Iran:Persecuted blogger won Theodor Haecker prize
Shiva Nazar-Ahari, a persecuted Iranian human rights activist and blogger, awarded Theodor Haecker prize.
Spam Bots Flooding Twitter to Drown Info About #Syria Protests [Updated]
After recent protests demanding freedom and democracy in Syria and the regime's brutal crackdown started, information warfare has been taking place on twitter. This post attempts to analyze the proliferation of twitter spams bots especially designed to flood the #Syria hash tag on twitter in order to make information about the events harder to find, and stop the conversation about them.
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14 April 2011
Over the Firewall and into the Fire
The Freedom House report Leaping over the Firewall is a new report designed to help users understand, evaluate and select a tool or series of tools for security, privacy and most importantly, for circumventing Internet censorship. As a long time developer with The Tor Project and as a member of the circumvention community, I feel that it is important to set the record straight about a number of issues. My motivation for writing this response is to inform readers of the serious concerns that many people, myself included, have about the recent Freedom House report. I am always pleased to see more analysis of censorship circumvention and Internet security tools, but I have concerns about this report’s methodologies and resulting conclusions. The report in its current form could be dangerous to the users it aims to help.
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11 April 2011
Egypt: Blogger Sentenced to 3 Years for Insulting the Military
Along the many years where the former president Hosni Mubarak ruled the country we didn’t witness large scale of cases where a blogger gets jailed for a blog-post. The first case in Egypt was in 2007 when Kareem Amer was sentenced for 4 years in jail based on blog-posts, he was charged for insulting Islam and Mubarak.
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Blogger Release in Azerbaijan: Forgotten Human Rights Crisis Unfolds at Council of Europe’s Doorstep
Inspired by pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, a recent wave of protests in Azerbaijan has resulted in scores of bloggers, cyber activists, journalists, civil society activists and opposition political party members harassed, arrested and beaten.
