censorship

Various TypePad-hosted bloggers are rejoicing as their blogs become visible again in China.

As with any such event, we're not sure how long this will last, and we're not sure why it happened. Tim Johnson, a McClatchy Newspapers correspondent based in China, writes:

I'm celebrating, of sorts. For the first time in maybe a year, this blog and others on the typepad.com host can now be seen within China. They are no longer blocked.

Why did the blocking suddenly end? I have no idea. Someone just flicked a switch.

Coffee, tea, or porn? "I don't think so," say American Airline flight attendants.

Leaders of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represents some 19,000 workers including American Airlines flight attendants, asked American Airline's management this week to consider adding filters to its in-flight Wi-Fi access to prevent passengers from viewing porn and other inappropriate Web sites while in-flight.

A union representative told Bloomberg News that attendants and passengers have raised "a lot of complaints" over the issue.

American Airlines is one of several airlines testing in-flight Internet access as a way to … Read more

KUALA LUMPUR--The nation's vocal political bloggers and commentators are bracing for a government crackdown, even as Malaysia celebrates its 51st anniversary of independence this weekend.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission earlier this week ordered all 19 of the country's Internet service providers to block the controversial political portal Malaysia Today.

According to a report on Thursday by online news portal Malaysiakini, the MCMC chief operating officer, Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi, confirmed that the commission was behind the site blackout. "It is being blocked because we found that some of the comments on the Web site were insensitive, … Read more

q&a James Powderly didn't trek from New York City to Beijing during the 2008 Olympics to watch table tennis. The artist was plotting to laser-beam a billboard-size, pro-Tibet message at the Bird's Nest Stadium. Instead, he spent six days locked up and interrogated by Chinese police under conditions he likens to torture. He was joined by other American would-be protestors sentenced to prison without being charged of a crime, then released early following U.S. pressure.

The Graffiti Research Lab co-founder and former engineer has helped pioneer open source, digital graffiti techniques, like L.A.S.E.R. tag projections of words and icons onto public walls, as well as LED bulb "throwies" that stick to surfaces to spell out messages in light.

Originally Powderly was invited to participate in a show at the National Art Museum of China, until he says organizers, fearing political controversy, kicked him out. Instead, he collaborated with Students for a Free Tibet (SFT).

Powderly says his high-tech gear--including a cell phone, green laser, laser printer, laptop, camera, tripods--may have tipped off Chinese authorities. And he suspects that if Twitter stops working in China, you might blame him and his collaborators.

Q: The last time we were in touch, you'd mentioned the upcoming Green (Chinese) Lantern project, which you didn't detail for obvious reasons. What happened? How did Chinese authorities find out what you were planning to do? Powderly: When I entered the country on the 15th of August I had a cell phone that might have already been compromised. It had already been used by protesters in the country...We don't know. They weren't telling.

It's safe to say I'm much more like Dr. Strangelove than like James Bond. I stick out like a sore thumb in Beijing. I'm about a foot taller than everybody. I'm wearing a fedora, camos, and sleeveless vest...

These people were still kind of bumbling but resourced and numerically outnumbered adversaries, in terms of the Chinese secret police. There are just so many of them and they're working with so much citizen support, meaning there are 300,000 people in the city just looking constantly and reporting, from taxi drivers to people on the street, undercover cops, policemen in uniforms, soldiers.

Whatever clued them into us, by the afternoon of the 18th I was being tailed by a woman. I spotted her, but I'm in a city of 20 million people. No way they're on me, I hadn't done anything. I was literally at the Wal-Mart superstore buying supplies..I doubted what I was seeing...

What happened next? When did you know for sure? How were you arrested? Powderly: I spent the day of the 17th scouting locations, buying a new laser printer. I went to kind of a safe house to build this laser stencil thing...They'd snuck a new laser in to me and I'd snuck in LED throwies for the LED banner for another group of activists...

I went to Tiananmen Square to scout that location because we'd planned to do two projection events. If we got away with the first one at the Olympic stadium, then we were gonna do the second one in Tiananmen Square...We were gonna project "Free Tibet" or "Tibet will be free" or "6/4/1989."

What worked and what didn't go forward? Powderly: None of them worked. We did nothing. We were arrested and detained in China...for doing nothing except for thinking about it.

On the 18th...I did my one and only laser projection that evening out the window on some torn-down buildings...way out in the outskirts of Beijing, literally the last stop of the "One" line...It worked better than any had before, and I'd come up with a new technique for making the stencils to do transparencies with a normal laser printer.

I'd printed out one test message, a little computer inside joke, just the words: "Free Beer." It's a quote from a renowned hacker (Richard Stallman) that refers to free software...… Read more

The iTunes Store was blocked in China two weeks after an album released by Tibet activists appeared, but after the Olympics Games concluded, it was available once again.

Silicon Hutong has written a concise summary of what happened:

- The album was featured on the front page of the site - a choice I would wager was made by Apple, not by the activist organization that produced the album;

- The album went live in the days leading up to the Olympics;

- Pro-Tibetan activists have been attempting to leverage Beijing's hosting of the Olympics to draw attention to … Read more

GoDaddy, the world's leading domain name registrar, is inaccessible in China, writes Moonlight Blog. Possible reasons? Efforts to prevent people from registering Olympic winners' names, or the hope that Chinese users will register domains in China.

If the goal is to make it less convenient (though by no means impossible) for Chinese to register non-Chinese domain names, this may represent an effort to keep Chinese-published material under home control.

Moonlinght tells us more about the Olympic angle:

The current blocking may be related to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. China's sport authority has banned the issuing of Internet … Read more

An album supporting Tibetan freedom may have led China's government to sever access to Apple's iTunes Store.

This week, Chinese users of iTunes have found themselves unable to access the online store, something that Apple acknowledged but would not say whether it was a technical glitch or a move on the part of the censors.

"We are aware of the log-on problems but we have no comment at the moment," the company told the Associated Press.

The incident comes amid the 2008 Olympics, when all eyes are on China--a country well known for its censorship.

Songs … Read more

Tests at the main Olympic press center and on other connections around Beijing have shown that both journalists and regular Beijing Internet users are getting less restricted access than usual.

That's according to the OpenNet Initiative's assessment of online censorship after the first week of the Games.

After journalists spent a lot of energy complaining about their inability to reach many Web sites without the use of a proxy, the international and Beijing Olympic committees both seemed to respond, and many restrictions disappeared.

ONI notes that the bulk of the opening occurred for foreign-hosted Chinese-language Web sites, while &… Read more

There's a rich irony in Hollywood today. If you look at where Hollywood makes the most money, the vast majority of its cash comes from PG-13, PG, and G-rated films. R-rated films? It's hard to find any in a list of Hollywood's all-time highest grossing films at the box office.

Indeed, within the top-25 highest grossing films of all time, only one rated-R film even makes the list, The Matrix: Reloaded at number 28. If you include the top 50, only one other R-rated movie (two total) makes the list. In the top 100? Only 11 R-rated films.

So why are more and more movies (perhaps intentionally) laced with content that guarantees an R rating and poor attendance?

I don't know. I can't imagine it being anything other than a cynical, smug Hollywood attitude that insists on adding "that one scene" in the name of art, pretending that it knows what audiences really want.

For those interested in watching movies on their own terms, or who have children that you'd really like to see Saving Private Ryan, for example, but you think the gritty violence may be too much, you now have a choice.

It's called Clearplay, a 100-percent legal DVD player and software service that edits movies on the fly without actually altering the physical DVD. As such, it gets a free (but begrudging) free pass from the Directors Guild of America, which successfully sued into oblivion Cleanflicks and other DVD editing services (though it's still possible to buy edited DVDs online).

How does Clearplay work, and why would you want to use it?… Read more