Game’s up. Google has shut down its web search on the mainland. Google blog post; NYT story. The company is attempting to route Chinese users to a simplified Chinese* Hong Kong site, where local legislation does not require them to censor their results. A clever attempt at an elegant face-saving solution, considering the fulmination about the necessity […]
Iran is playing for keeps on Internet censorship. More details have emerged on the activists arrested in conjunction with the hacking of US servers that took place last week. Via InsideIran: [T]he group arrested by Iranian authorities was the committee against censorship in Iran that goes by the name Iran Proxy. This group is composed […]
There’s a new Global Internet Freedom caucus in Congress. This is not necessarily a big deal – there are a lot of caucuses. Some are extremely active, and others, not so much. (Congressional Ski and Snowboard Caucus?) Considering their name, this one will likely be focused on issues raised by the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, […]
The unstoppable force and immovable object may have begun their tango: it looks like China and Google are heading for a collision. Reports from the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal (sorry, lame-o subscription) say that talks between the Chinese government and the search giant are at an impasse. The Chinese, meanwhile, have insisted […]
Bombshell from Iran, on a couple of metaphorical levels: the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, everyone’s favorite bad guys these days, hacked a couple dozen web sites of human rights activists working in Iran, claiming they were agents for American intelligence services. In Farsi, “rights defender” apparently translates as “American spy”. Then the regime’s increasingly brazen goons arrested 30 […]
Online criminals stole waaay more money from e-banking accounts than they did from brick-and-mortar analogues. As more and more of our life is online, keep expecting to see somewhat shocking statistics like this. For instance, the iTunes store became the largest music vendor in the world years ago. (‘Cuz that’s where the money is, right?)
Birds of a political feather flock together. That’s the takeaway from a political science study that shows that people with a partisan slant get their news from partisan sources that reinforce their pre-existing views – e.g., moonbats follow DailyKos and the Huffington Post, wingnuts read Free Republic and the Drudge Report while watching Fox. As Evgeny Morozov has argued, […]
Wired reports that China and Google are close to wrapping up talks over the search giant’s threat to withdraw from the country if it is forced to continuing censorship of results. In the piece our old friend Mr. Anonymous Source suggests that Google would be willing to step up censorship of gambling and porn if […]
Anonymity on social networks is difficult. Sounds like a contradiction in terms, right? But what you choose to share with some is not what should be available to all. If you’re posting your Federalist Papers, you might want an alias. If you are planning a high school reunion, you’ll need your real name. Thanks to some clever browser […]
A hilarious example of new media blowing up entirely fictional stories into a feeding frenzy which then is debunked, becomes the butt of jokes, and now lives on as a cautionary tale – in under an hour. I give you the 35-Minute John Roberts Retirement. Clearly the Feiler Faster Thesis is only getting, er, faster. Erroneous […]
The Pentagon just opened the floodgates to social networking in the military. (Wired writeup; DOD policy memo.) Given the ubiquity of Facebook today and the average age of active-duty military, this is inevitable. The increase of such technologies goes a long way to make home feel closer. A friend on a Fulbright in Bulgaria has […]
We talk a lot about cyberwar – trying to affect real-world outcomes with electronic attacks. Here’s the opposite: America’s Army, a videogame developed by the military over the past few years to serve as a recruiting and training tool, where you use computers to virtually make things go boom. Great writeup in Foreign Policy. Also […]
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