A leaked presentation from two media giants, Allot Communications and Openet, could mean some serious issues for the future of the internet. Were this devious plan to come to fruition, this could potentially be the end of net neutrality as we know it. Just a week ago, the idea of regulating the internet was in more »

A Facebook group dedicated to campaigning for the legalization of marijuana is accusing Facebook of censorship after the site approved of their use of a marijuana leaf in their advertising and changed course and blocked it. The group, Just Say Now, says the censorship has hurt their campaign. A spokesman for Facebook, Andrew Noyes, said more »

Everyone was shocked when Google took a stand against China’s censorship laws in early January for various reasons spanning from cyber attacks to stricter censorship laws. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has gone on record saying that Google will conclude talks with China soon over the search issue. If a compromise can not be made, Google more »

In yet another display of censorship, China has announced it will begin scanning all text messages. The messages will automatically be scanned for keywords provided by the police. Any messages flagged and found to contain the keywords will be deemed “unhealthy” and the government has ordered cell providers to cut off service to the senders. more »

North Korea is a country that likes to do things their own way and be totally separated from the outside world. However, with today’s current technology, it’s pretty hard to be completely isolated from people because of the abundance of communication tools. It was only a few years ago that North Korean citizens were allowed more »

China has begun blocking all access to YouTube, adding it to a the long list of sites it blocks. Other sites on that list include the Amazon, Flickr, GoDaddy, Google News, iTunes, and Wikipedia. While this latest block has been confirmed, Chinese officials have not offered any explanation for it. When asked if China fears the Internet, this is how a Chinese Foreign Ministry responded, “Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact it is just the opposite,” the official, Qin Gang, explains. “China’s Internet is open enough, but also needs to be regulated by law in order to prevent the spread of harmful information and for national security.”

Apparently it isn’t only pirates that do the attacking. At least not when it comes to Pirate Bay. They’ve found themselves under attack quite a bit as of late, and it doesn’t look like that is going to be abating any time soon.

Just last week, the trial kicked off in a landmark case against the four founders of the Pirate Bay site on accusations of breaking copyright law. The defendants, (Carl Lundström, Peter Sunde, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg), claimed that regardless of what happened in the case, the site would live on. They also didn’t seem too worried that their prosecutors would be successful. “What are they going to do? They have already failed to take the site down once. Let them fail again,” said Svartholm Warg in a quote from TorrentFreak.

Delta says it plans to block websites it deems “inappropriate” when it rolls out its new Wi-Fi service. The service will be available on selected planes later this year and on all of its flights in 2009. The airline’s original plan was to let flight attendants handle any issues, but they changed their mind and will now be using a software solution. Like American Airlines, they will also block VOIP service to avoid customer complaints of passengers making loud phone calls.

The Wi-Fi service will be provided by Aircell’s GoGo service, and they said they have no problem filtering content if requested. Privacy experts, not surprisingly are critical of the idea, fearing it could open the floodgates for outright censorship.

Researchers in Canada have discovered that Skype’s Chinese venture with Tom Online, called Tom-Skype, is filtering text chats and monitoring them. Chats are routinely scanned for politically censored keywords. If any are found, those chats and personal information are stored on insecure and publiclly accessible servers. They are encrypted, but the key needed to decrypt them is stored right alongside them!

Their report, called “Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s Tom-Skype platform,” stops short of implicating the Chinese government, but does suggest that Tom-Skype is cooperating with them. The filter appears to scan for usernames and certain keywords relating to Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong, and any political opposition of the government.

Chinese Internet users from Beijing and Shanghai are reporting that they can now access the English-language version of Wikipedia after it was blocked by the Chinese authorities a couple of months ago. However, the Chinese version and other sites which have politically sensitive topics such as Tibet and Tiananmen Square remained restricted at this time.

The decision to remove the restriction followed after an inspector from the International Olympic Committee (OIC) told the Beijing Olympic organizers that the Chinese government should remove the restriction even just for the duration of the 2008 Olympics. According to the inspector, continually blocking the access to Wikipedia might reflect a bad impression about the host country.