Archive for the 'Technology' 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 [...]

• 3.19.08 Youtube & Tibet posted in Geolocation

  Since all of Youtube is currently blocked in China, I wondered if Youtube might start tagging videos of the protests in Tibet in order to have Youtube unblocked with the specific videos being blocked for users in China. But after running a few (definitely not comprehensive) Tibet related search terms all I found so far [...]

• 3.16.08 YouTube,Geolocation & China posted in Blockpage.com, Filtering Technology, Geolocation

  After reading this great post on the ONI blog, did a bit of testing myself. As Youtomb discovered There is a tag available through the YouTube API the indicates the country (or countries in some cases) to which YouTube will restrict access to the video. These videos are not (necessarily) blocked by the country itself, [...]

• 3.5.08 ISP Filtering posted in Blockpage.com, Filtering Technology, Protecting Children

  After reading this great enumeration of various efforts to block accidental access to images of child sexual abuse I updated updated blockpage.com to include the blockpages from Sweden, Switzerland and Denmark.
  This document notes many of the unintended consequences of filtering, especially overblocking, and it challenges the wisdom of making the blocking [...]

• 2.27.08 Australia: Filtering in Test Phase posted in Filtering Technology, International

  The Australian government is moving ahead with plans to introduce filtering at the ISP level. They’ll block content that is deemed to be harmful to children.
  ISP-based filters will block inappropriate web pages at service provider level and automatically relay a clean feed to households.
  To be exempted, users will have to individually contact their ISPs.

  The [...]