|
Posts with tag: censorship | Return to BloggersBlog.com Homepage
Pakistan Temporarily Shuts Down YouTube
 The BBC is reporting that Pakistan's attempts to block YouTube resulted in an hour-long nearly worldwide blockage of YouTube's website.
BBC News has learned that the outage was almost certainly connected to Pakistan Telecom and Asian internet service provider PCCW.
A leading net professional said the global outage was "probably a mistake".
Pakistan ordered internet service providers to block the site because of content deemed offensive to Islam.
The BBC News website's technology editor, Darren Waters, says that to block Pakistan's citizens from accessing YouTube it is believed Pakistan Telecom "hijacked" the web server address of the popular video site.
Reporters Without Borders, Christian Science Monitor and Boing Boing say Pakistan was trying to block all those "blasphemous" non-Islamic videos. Earlier, OpenDNS told its concerned users that it was a Pakistan Telecom problem not an OpenDNS issue. For more on the story see Google Operating System and Theat Chaos.
Posted on February 24, 2008
Permalink | | | Comments (View)
| |
Microsoft Defends Blocking Zhao Jing's Blog
 Microsoft has blocked the blog of Zhao Jing (also known as Michael Anti), a Chinese journalist and blogger who has spoken out against censorship in China. Microsoft has blocked the journalist's blog and also defended the practice. There is lots of outrage in the blogosphere about Microsoft's decision. Computerweekly has an article about Microsoft's defense. The article also notes that Yahoo has also complied with requests from the Chinese government.
Although MSN Spaces is not controlled by Microsoft's Chinese operation, Microsoft has said the blocking of the blog is in line with its policy of complying with "global and local laws, norms and industry practices".
China is the second-largest internet market after the US and
Microsoft is one of the leading western IT companies operating in China.
Last autumn Yahoo gave information about journalist Shi Tao's personal
e-mail account to Beijing. The regime later jailed him for 10 years on
charges of divulging state secrets.
More stories about Microsoft's decision to remove Jing's blog
can be found in the New York Times, BusinessWeek and Red Herring.
Robert Scoble, the well-known Microsoft geek blogger who is so popular in parts of the blogosphere that some bloggers dream about him, initially disagreed with Microsoft's decision: "Guys over at MSN: sorry, I don't agree with your being used as a state-run thug." However, he has since backtracked from his original post and appears more understanding of Microsoft's behavior. Corante's Get Real has a good post summarizing Scoble's change in view. A ZDNet article describes some other Microsoft employee blogs discussing the issue.
Microsoft is playing defense and hoping the issue will go away.
Zhao Jing was a well-known blogger -- he was recently listed on the jury of the 2005 BOBs. This will be an issue that bloggers will continue to raise against Microsoft and other companies that censor blogs for Beijing or the governments of other countries. Gridskipper says you can still see some of Zhao Jing's blog at Google's cache. It looks like you can also see the blog on MSN's cached copy as well -- at least temporarily. Gridskipper also points to some EastSouthWest archived objectionable posts from Zhao Jing's blog here and here. RConversation, written by Rebecca MacKinnon, had one of the earliest posts on this topic. RConversation's post also describes ways Microsoft censors blog posts that contain words like "Tibet Independence" or "Falun Gong." News stories from July of last year said even words like "democracy" are censored.
Posted on January 8, 2006
Permalink | | | Comments (View)
| |
How Beijing Censors the Blogosphere
Try to blog "Falun Gong" in China's censored blogosphere and it is converted instantly to gibberish. Get something past the government filter and you get
a phone call telling you to remove it. China's two leading blog services Blogcn and Bokee are heavily censored by the government. Even Microsoft complies with Beijing's strict blogging rules. BusinessWeek reports on how Beijing is controlling what is blogged in cyberspace:
Both Blogcn and Bokee have filtering systems that prevent users from writing about taboo topics. A Blogcn user, for instance, who tries to write "Falun Gong" will find the term converted to gibberish on screen. If a forbidden phrase makes it past the filter, the company might get a call from the police demanding that the offending post be removed. "We can immediately fix it," says Hu, who adds that he has gotten only "four or five" such calls in the past two years. It's not just Chinese companies that cooperate with the censors. A joint venture operated in China by Microsoft Corp.'s MSN blocks words such as "democracy" in the subject lines of blogs on its site. Microsoft says it simply is complying with Chinese laws and norms. And China's censors can intercept traffic from overseas services such as the one that hosts Muzi Mei's blog. For instance, San Francisco-based Six Apart, which is home to some Chinese-language blogs, has been blocked from the mainland twice. "China would be an opportunity for us if a Western company could go in and have a dialogue, but right now that's not the case," says Anil Dash, a Six Apart vice-president.
The article says that China has about 3 million bloggers today.
Teenagers around the world have created pretty elaborate code
words for SMS messaging so it seems likely that some of these
3 million bloggers are doing the same thing in China to work
around the strict government controls -- we hope they are anyway. Microsoft continues to receive criticism for allowing its blogs to be censored by China's government.
Posted on July 30, 2005
Permalink | | | Comments (View)
| |
|
|
The Writers Write Lifestyle Network
|
|
