Censorship

Google has experienced a precipitous drop in traffic from China, which a Web-monitoring group attributed to the search engine being "blocked" by the government.

Data provided by Google's Transparency Report shows a sharp drop off in traffic -- to roughly half the normal amount -- to Google's Web sites as of early this morning California time.

GreatFire.org, which performs real-time monitoring, suggested that the drop meant the Chinese government is "one step closer to fully separating the Chinanet from the Internet."

It wasn't immediately clear whether the block was intended to be … Read more

A 15-year-old juvenile delinquent can't be completely prohibited from using Facebook, Twitter, or other social-media sites, a California state appeals court says.

The San Diego court ruled that a teenage boy who molested a toddler and grabbed and detained a teenage girl has a First Amendment right to use social media and chat rooms -- in part, the justices said, because his offenses didn't involve the Internet.

Those restrictions "are not tailored to Andre's convictions for violating another's personal liberty, willfully annoying and molesting another, unlawful use of force, and lewd and lascivious conduct, or … Read more

Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army soldier accused of providing WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified documents, has offered to plead guilty. Sort of.

During a pre-trial hearing in military court today, Manning's attorney, David Coombs, proposed a partial guilty plea covering a subset of the slew of criminal charges that the U.S. Army has lodged against him.

"Manning is attempting to accept responsibility for offenses that are encapsulated within, or are a subset of, the charged offenses," Coombs wrote on his blog this evening. "The court will consider whether this is a permissible … Read more

California voters yesterday approved a new law billed as curbing human trafficking. A lesser-known section of Proposition 35, however, requires residents convicted of indecent exposure and other sex-related crimes to register their social-networking profiles and e-mail addresses with police.

That violates the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech, including anonymous speech, the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a lawsuit (PDF) filed today.

Prop 35 takes effect immediately and sweeps broadly. It says that California residents convicted of crimes since 1944 including misdemeanor indecent exposure -- courts have included in that category nude dancing on a … Read more

The most controversial technology topics in President Obama's second term are likely to be two political flashpoints: piracy and privacy.

When Internet activists allied with an hastily assembled coalition of Silicon Valley companies blocked votes on a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright bills early this year, they didn't end efforts to slap stiffer anti-piracy sanctions on the Internet. They merely postponed the fight.

The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are dead, of course. Those names have become radioactive on Capitol Hill, thanks to a broad public outcry that involved millions of Internet users and actually … Read more

Technology topics can mark a rare bipartisan area of political agreement: Both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama say they would make cybersecurity a priority, and both like to talk up government funding of basic research.

If you look a bit more closely, however, differences emerge. They're perhaps most marked over federal regulation, where the two major parties have long-standing disagreements, but also exist on topics like WikiLeaks, copyright legislation, and whether to levy a new tax on broadband providers.

Keep reading for CNET's 2012 Tech Voters' Guide, in which we highlight where the four candidates -- we've … Read more

The U.K.'s top broadband providers have been asked by a British music trade association to stop their customers from accessing three file-sharing sites, months after a court order forced the same ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), which acts on behalf of the music industry in the U.K., has asked ISPs to block their subscribers' access to Fenopy, H33t, and Kickass Torrents -- sites which act in a similar way to Magnet link sharing site The Pirate Bay.

BT, Sky Broadband, Virgin Media, O2 Broadband, EE -- formerly known as … Read more

The United Nations is calling for more surveillance of Internet users, saying it would help to investigate and prosecute terrorists.

A 148-page report (PDF) released today titled "The Use of the Internet for Terrorist Purposes" warns that terrorists are using social networks and other sharing sites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Dropbox, to spread "propaganda."

"Potential terrorists use advanced communications technology often involving the Internet to reach a worldwide audience with relative anonymity and at a low cost," said Yury Fedotov, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The … Read more

A right-wing political figure in Great Britain has stirred up trouble for tweeting the address of a gay couple denied a single room in a bed and breakfast.

The Twitter account belongs to the controversial Nick Griffin, Chairman for the British National Party Chairman and Member of the European Parliament for the North West region. Griffin and other members of the extreme right-wing British National Party have ruffled feathers in the past with their open hostility toward gays, Muslims, and immigrants.

This time around, Griffin expressed his outrage over a case in which two men requested a single room with … Read more