Latest posts by John Kennedy
China: YouTube blocked yet again
[updates below] As Tibet transitioned into total lockdown and videos of the violent situation proliferated on YouTube, people began noticing Saturday afternoon in China that the video-sharing website could not be accessed. Tech blogger Rick Martin on the CNET Asia Little Red Blog has done some tests which confirm what...
Anonymous Blogging guide now available in Chinese
Download PDF Thanks to one very gracious individual who unfortunately insists on remaining anonymous, Global Voices Online co-founder Ethan Zuckerman‘s guide Anonymous Blogging with WordPress and Tor is now available in Chinese, bringing years of experience in combining technology with activism not only to yet another part of the world...
China: Hack into Freedom City
For China's Astro Boy generation, a house arrested blogger like Zeng Jinyan could be most clearly viewed as one node in a network system needing to be re-established as quickly as possible. This seems to be at least partly the case in ‘Hack into Freedom City’, a manual being P2Ped...
Myanmar: Latt's arrest and blogger opposition to the new constitution
It's been a month now since Burmese blogger Nay Phone Latt was arrested by police in Yangon and a week since his family was allowed to visit him for the first time following his transfer to infamous Insein Prison, known for its conditions and for the many political prisoners held...
Hong Kong netizens protest nude photo ‘white terror’
Eight people have now been arrested and two charged in Hong Kong in what many netizens are calling the “white terror,” police response to the Edison Chen sex photo scandal, explained by Police Commissioner Tang King Shing last weekend when he said possession of the photos alone is now illegal....
China: Netizen Party announced
From forcing the rescue of hundreds of brick kiln slave laborers last year and seeing it through long after local bodies gave up to being analytical piranhas when dealt obvious official lies, and numerous examples in between, it seems some netizens have realized their comparative advantage over local government authorities...
China: Hu Jia's family become human “state secrets”
And likely very skinny ones at this point, having been locked away from journalists and lawyers and bringers of milk formula for over a month now. Since AIDS activist-turned house arrested blogger Hu Jia's arrest, he's been described as a one-man human rights organization, that bloggers like him are the...
China: Lawyers denied visit to detained blogger Hu Jia
Here's a Facebook app waiting to happen: can you name all 51 bloggers currently doing time in Chinese prisons? Any guesses what #52's last blog post will have been about? For house-arrested Hu Jia in Beijing, it was his firsthand news last week that Guangzhou-based Zhang Qing, wife of imprisoned...
China: A blow to citizen bloggers
Below is Zola's recount of what he's been through over the past few days and his abrupt conclusion. In a second blog post since his forced return earlier this week he talks of redirecting the space to focus more on blogger education, but also mentions some unfinished business related to...
China: Citizen reporter arrested, escorted home
Zhou “Zola” Shuguang, the IT blogger/Hunan vegetable vendor turned brave young citizen reporter with his blog coverage of the Chongqing Nailhouse earlier this year, was detained by police on Monday and sent home under constant police escort.
China: NGO blogger's house raided, hard drive confiscated
The blogger behind one nominee in the Best of Blogs competition which concluded earlier this month had his house searched earlier today and his computer hard drive confiscated. Zhai Minglei, based in Shanghai, had in recent years left his job at one of China's most widely-read liberal publications, Southern Weekly,...
China: YouTube blocked and then some
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?
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...
China: Removing the blocked RSS rumor
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...
China: Blogs ground down as National Congress gears up
There was a lot of scoffing last month when a big announcement was finally made of a pledge signed by many major blog providers encouraging their users to self-censor their blogging activities. The ‘new’ pact didn't just rehash aims that many before it had attempted and largely failed to achieve,...
Blogging for Kurds’ human rights
Young bloggers from across the Middle East have joined forces to fight for the human rights of their Kurdish brethren: “Our first target is the media which is necessary for Kurds to voice their opinion, thus we are petitioning to unblock these voices, at least on the internet, our only...
Egyptian blogger disappears
Bloggers in Egypt have reported that Ahmed Saad Domah, a poet recently known to be preparing a petition against president Hosni Mubarak's rule, was seen fighting with police before being blindfolded and driven off in a van.
Popular Malaysian blogger interrogated
The dirt-busting blogger and editor of popular news and politics blog Malaysia Today Raja Petra was brought in for questioning by police on July 26 ostensibly in connection to a complaint filed against him regarding comments left on his posts. Petra and others are saying this is part of a...
European study on legal frameworks for censorship released
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe has issued a lengthy report looking at the legal and constitutional frameworks on which state governments are basing practices of internet censorship. For Kazakhstan, the report finds, domestic threats to information security are defined as widely as “unlawful activities of political and...
