censorship

Denver airport censors free Wi-Fi network

Travelers using Denver International Airport's free Wi-Fi service may be shocked to learn that some popular Web sites with supposedly racy content is blocked from viewing.

That's right. Officials have blocked access to content they deem provocative on the airport's free Wi-Fi service.

The Denver Post points out that some of those questionable sites include, Vanity Fair, the gossip column perezhilton.com, the hipster-geek site boingboing.net, and photos from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Of course, hard copies of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue are displayed on newsstands in the airport along with issues of Penthouse … Read more

Bill Gates, on Yahoo's trail, says China's online restrictions won't succeed

Microsoft is not a beacon of free expression in the face of China's government restrictions on online speech. But in a talk at Stanford, he said no one can control free expression on the web.

"I don't see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet," Gates said, according to IDC news service. "You cannot control the Internet."

As the article notes, Microsoft has been complicit in Chinese censorship. In the most high-profile case, the company shut down a blog by Michael Anti, a blogger … Read more

Wikileaks domain name yanked in spat over leaked documents

A federal judge in California has pulled the plug on Wikileaks.org, a Web site that specializes in posting leaked documents often provided by whistleblowers.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White on Friday ordered that the domain name be disabled at the behest of a group of Swiss bankers who filed a lawsuit alleging that confidential information appeared on Wikileaks.org.

Read the full story on Declan McCullagh's Iconoclast blog.

Former Chinese professor to sue Google, Yahoo over censorship

From The Times of London:

A former Chinese university professor who was dismissed after he founded a democratic opposition party, plans to sue Yahoo and Google in the United States for blocking his name from search results in China.

Guo Quan, an expert on classical Chinese literature and the 1937 Nanjing massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops, last week issued an open letter pledging to bring a lawsuit against Google after he discovered that his name had been excised in searches of its Google.cn portal in China.

He told The Times that he had now found that the … Read more

China keeps information in, not just out, with Internet filtering

James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic and a blogging resident of Beijing's Chaoyang District, has written a good outline of how China's online filtering apparatus works: "The Connection Has Been Reset."

Aside from the fact that The Atlantic has made the lovely choice of freeing its content, the news to me was that China's filtering system is working in reverse:

Xiao Qiang, an expert on Chinese media at the University of California at Berkeley journalism school, told me that the authorities have recently begun applying this kind of filtering in reverse. As Chinese-speaking people … Read more

How to easily access BBC News from China

I mentioned this in my last post, but it deserves its own: there's an extraordinarily easy way to read BBC News from within China. All you need to do is use this URL: newsvote.bbc.co.uk.

As far as I can tell, this is the same site as news.bbc.co.uk, which is blocked in the mainland.

I don't know how long this has been around, but I caught it in the comments on The Peking Duck. Thanks, Liuzhou Laowai! Enjoy your pithy BBC write-ups, everyone!

China browsing restrictions may drop off during Olympics

Something was going to give.

As Beijing prepares for the Olympics and the attending flood of foreigners, many of them reporters, expected to arrive this summer, the government's controls over the Internet have become increasingly sophisticated. But would the Olympic organizers really be OK with dozens of stories about reporters and athletes unable to reach Wikipedia and BBC?

Apparently, decision makers are indeed worried about press regarding censorship. AFP quotes an Olympic organizing committee representative as saying, "I believe you will be able to (access banned sites such as the BBC), but I can't give you a … Read more

Democratic leader to Yahoo CEO: China policy is 'spineless'

Members of Congress on Tuesday showed almost no mercy for top Yahoo executives attempting to smooth over accusations about the company's role in the imprisonment of Chinese dissident journalists.

Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang and General Counsel Michael Callahan endured nearly four hours of tongue-lashing from Democrats and Republicans alike on the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.

The subject of the hearing: Allegations that Callahan provided "false information" to the panel last year regarding a case that landed 37-year-old Shi Tao a 10-year prison sentence. A related case involving an online writer named Wang … Read more

Google and the wrongly jailed Indian Net surfer

On August 31, Lakshmana Kailash K. was arrested in Bangalore, India, and charged with posting insulting images of a revered historical figure on the Internet. The police claimed that he had uploaded disrespectful images of Chhatrapati Shivaji, the Indian equivalent of George Washington. Free speech, it seems, does not extend to that sort of thing in India.

Normally, this wouldn't be a press-worthy story. After all, India is not the first country to take a hard line against Internet free speech. The Thai military regime blocked the entire YouTube Web site earlier this year after a single video posted … Read more