Archive for the 'Free Expression' Category

• 4.6.08 U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks ‘Abortion’ posted in Internet Censorship, Search Engines

  Wired reports that a health services search engine funded by the US Government blocks searches for the word “abortion” because of the possibilty that funding could be denied for project that “actively promote abortion”:
  Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It’s funded by the [...]

• 3.8.08 US: Airforce Blocks Blogs posted in International, Internet Censorship

  Wired reports that the USAF is blocking any URLs with “blog” in them.
  AFNOC has imposed bans on all sites with “blog” in their URLs, thus cutting off any sites hosted by Blogspot. Other blogs, and sites in general, are blocked based on content reviews performed at the base, command and AFNOC [...]

• 2.28.08 Framing Censorship posted in Internet Censorship

  Recently, Microsoft’s Bill Gates stated that in the end Internet censorship will not work. He suggested that resistance to Internet censorship will be “driven by business requirements” because “[r]estrictions on free speech will curtail business activity, and so commercial forces will work against censorship.” This is interesting because on one hand companies such as Microsoft [...]

• 2.23.08 Pakistan & YouTube posted in Blockpage.com, Internet Censorship

  UPDATE — In attempting to block access to YouTube, Pakistan ended up making YouTube inaccessible to everyone — not just everyone in Pakistan, but everyone! Martin A. Brown provides some of the technical details and a time line here (Thanks Steven!):
  Just before 18:48 UTC, Pakistan Telecom, in response to government order (thanks nsp-sec-d) to block [...]

• 2.21.08 Democracy “Magnified” posted in Internet Censorship, Search Engines, Search Monitor

  The “magnify” component of the Search Monitor project attempts to match the top ten results from Google/Yahoo with the top ten results form the China-specific versions of Google/Yahoo in order to note the similarities and differences in terms of censored, returned (the website is in the top ten of the both the .com and .cn [...]