January, 2008

Stories from January, 2008

China: Hu Jia's family become human “state secrets”

  30 January 2008

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...

Blog for a Cause!: The Global Voices Guide of Blog Advocacy

30 January 2008

Download PDF Click on the image to download Global Voices Advocacy is pleased to announce the second of several planned manuals focused on the topics of circumventing internet filtering, anonymous blogging and effective use of Internet-based tools in campaigns for social and political change. Blog for a Cause!: The Global...

Yemen blocks independent news websites

  26 January 2008

Numerous Yemeni websites have been blocked recently by government-controlled ISPs. Among them is the popular YemenPortal (English version of the site here), Yemen’s first multi-source news crawler and search engine, which extracts headlines from news sites that are being blocked by the authorities. YemenPortal is inviting Yemeni internet users to...

Turkey again blocks access to YouTube

  23 January 2008

A Turkish court has again blocked access to the popular video-sharing site YouTube over a video clip allegedly insulting the country's founding father, Kemal Atatürk. According to The New Anatolian, Turkish users trying to access Youtube are receiving a message explaining the ban : “Access to www.youtube.com site has been...

Morocco: Censorship Update

  23 January 2008

2006 was a rough year for Moroccan internet freedoms, with several sites being blocked; 2007 wasn't much better with sites that were previously open becoming only sporadically accessible. Moi, dans tous mes états (fr) summarized freedom of internet (as well as other forms of media) in a recent post: A...

Israel: Law for Censorship of Web Comments Passes Initial Knesset Voting

  19 January 2008

Israeli web culture is known for having an active talkback (web commenting) scene. Every major news site allows users to submit comments for every single one of its stories. Israeli culture at its best and worst thrives through discussions held within these spaces; discussions which are planned to fall under...

FreeAccess Plus!: Web 2.0 Censorship workaround

  14 January 2008

Based on Hamed Saber‘s “Access Flickr” Firefox extension, which enables users to circumvent the filter currently in effect in Iran and in few other countries that block Flickr, the popular photo-sharing website, another Iranian developer, MohammadR, has released “FreeAccess Plus!“, a nifty extension that turns Firefox into a proxy that...

It Could Be You: Release Syrian Blogger Tarek Baiasi

  9 January 2008

Tarek was detained on 7-7-2007 for critiquing security forces in Syria. He has not been taken to court up to this moment. His name is Tarek Baiasi and he's 23 years old. He lives in Banyas with his mother and two sisters. His father was detained during the 80s by...

Thailand: publishing house website shut down

  6 January 2008

The website of Fah Diew Kan (Same Sky), a quarterly social and political magazine, has been shut down by its host Net Service Ltd for Lèse majesté violations. The move came after pressure from Thailand’s Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The editor of Same Sky told the daily...

China: Lawyers denied visit to detained blogger Hu Jia

  4 January 2008

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...

Egypt: lawsuit demanding the websites banning is rejected

  3 January 2008

Judge Abdel Fattah Mourad, who requested the ban of 51 blogs and websites deemed insulting the state’s dignity and threatening Egypt’s interests, has lost his case. On December 29, 2007, the Administrative Judicial Court rejected the lawsuit and ruled in favor of freedom of speech on the Internet. “Minor victories...