censorship

The chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee has ordered an investigation into Yahoo's role in the arrest of a Chinese Internet journalist serving a 10-year sentence for allegedly distributing state secrets in e-mail, according to the Associated Press.

Shi Tao was arrested in 2004 by Chinese officials after Yahoo cooperated with a request to provide information about the Yahoo Mail customer. At a hearing last year, Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan said that Yahoo did not know what the nature of the investigation of Shi was when it handed over the information to the Chinese government. … Read more

It's time to add onetime presidential hopeful John Kerry to the long list of politicians who have scant understanding of free speech and the Internet.

Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a press release on Friday that he wants to make it "illegal to transmit images of dog fighting, to run websites that cater to dog fighting."

Such a law could, of course, imperil news organizations and animal rights Web sites that "transmit images of dog fighting" as part of reporting on or, alternatively, condemning the practice. It could even make this article, which includes … Read more

What could have prompted Yahoo to hire its first-ever chief compliance and ethics officer? Could it have been the criticism executives received at the annual shareholders meeting about two weeks ago over Yahoo's cooperation with the Chinese government on censorship?

Yahoo allegedly provided information about a Yahoo Mail user in China to the government that led to his arrest and subsequent 10-year sentence. That man, a journalist, recently joined a lawsuit filed against Yahoo in the U.S. in April by the World Organization for Human Rights USA and the wife of a Chinese dissident who claims Yahoo aided … Read more

Admist some of last week's hullaballoo regarding Flickr's censorship on some of the photos of its German language users, it's timely that the creators of The Pirate Bay, the popular BitTorrent tracking site, have recently launched their own censorship-free image-sharing service called BAYIMG. It's similar to other image-hosting services like ImageShack, TinyPic, and DivShare, with one exception--the only person who's able to remove uploaded photos is you. That is, assuming you don't forget the secret removal access code you picked when uploading.

Despite this well-advertised stance on free speech, the service claims that if … Read more

Flickr just found a downside to adding support for seven languages to its photo-sharing site: limits on photo sharing and resulting accusations of censorship.

Flickr launched sites in seven languages Wednesday, expanding beyond just English. But because of a German law, the company decided it had to restrict the photos German members could see to those that had been marked "safe" by members using Flickr's filtering ability that arrived in March. That restriction triggered a forum discussion thread, "Flickr now censoring all moderate and restricted photos from Germany," and an "Against Censorship at Flickr&… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The Chinese government has begun blocking access to Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site, but co-founder and general manager Stewart Butterfield has a tip on how to get around it.

China is blocking only Flickr's images, Butterfield said in an interview here Tuesday during a party to celebrate the company's expansion beyond the English-speaking world and the launch of the 24 Hours of Flickr book. The way in which the country is doing so means that the Firefox Web browser, augmented with the Greasemonkey plug-in, can automatically bypass the block.

Specifically, Greasemonkey needs to run a script that … Read more

Yahoo shareholders on Tuesday rejected proposals that link executive pay with the company?s financial performance; oppose Internet censorship demands from China; and establish a human rights committee.

Shareholders also re-elected all the board members, snubbing a request by three proxy advisory firms to protest Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel's $70 million compensation package by kicking several members off the board.

The company is struggling in the face of formidable competition from Google in the search advertising business. Yahoo also has been sued over the jailing of a Chinese journalist who was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in … Read more

The New York City Pension Fund wants shareholders to force Google and Yahoo to refuse Internet censorship requests by governments.

The fund, which owns nearly $280 million worth of Google shares and $110 million in Yahoo shares, filed resolutions for shareholders at the two Internet companies to vote on at the next shareholder meetings. The resolution states that U.S.-based technology companies "that operate in countries controlled by authoritarian governments have an obligation to comply with the principles of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights."

Specifically, the resolution calls for the companies to: refrain from hosting … Read more