Censorship

Pakistan blocks Twitter over 'blasphemous' images, report says

The Pakistani government blocked access to Twitter over potential "blasphemous" caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, according to several reports.

Twitter was asked by the government to stop a discussion about a contest over Muhammad caricatures, something it refused to do. As a result, access to the site has been blocked, according to the Express Tribune. The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority passed down the directive to Internet service providers in the country, and said it couldn't say how long the site would be blocked.

Access to Twitter in Pakistan was later restored on orders from Prime Minister Yousaf Raza … Read more

MPAA's former tech policy chief turns SOPA foe

A senior executive that Hollywood hired last year to be its chief technology policy officer has undergone a remarkable about-face: he now opposes the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Paul Brigner, who was until last month a senior vice president at the Motion Picture Association of America, has emerged as SOPA's latest critic. "I firmly believe that we should not be legislating technological mandates to protect copyright -- including SOPA and Protect IP," he says.

In a statement posted on CNET.com, Brigner says that his time at the MPAA -- which, more than any other advocacy group, … Read more

No 'Arab Spring' in Saudi Arabia anytime soon

SAN FRANCISCO -- The autocratic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia doesn't have much to worry about, at least not yet, from democracy activists and the Internet, one of the country's best known bloggers predicts.

"It is very unlikely that we will see any change in the country in the short and medium term," Ahmed Al Omran, creator of SaudiJeans.org, said at an event in CNET's offices in downtown San Francisco yesterday evening. Al Omran left Saudi Arabia to study at Columbia University and now lives in Washington, D.C.

A so-called Day of Rage protest … Read more

MPAA chief: SOPA and Protect IP back from the grave?

The Motion Picture Association of America believes there's still hope for the controversy-plagued Stop Online Piracy Act.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that was published online today, MPAA chief Christopher Dodd said he was "confident" that President Obama was using his "good relationships in both communities" -- that is, Silicon Valley and Hollywood -- to advance SOPA.

When asked whether there are negotiations going on now, Dodd replied: "I'm confident that's the case, but I'm not going to go into more detail because obviously if I do, it becomes … Read more

White House calls for new law targeting 'offshore' Web sites

Only weeks after protests over two digital copyright bills demonstrated the political muscle of Internet users, the White House is publicly endorsing new copyright legislation that also would target suspected pirate Web sites.

After the unprecedented outcry against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act -- designed to target offshore copyright-infringing Web sites -- supporters of the bills on Capitol Hill backed down and moved on to other topics.

But the White House today reignited the congressional debate by throwing its weight behind legislation targeting offshore Web sites. "We believe that new legislative and non-legislative tools … Read more

Boston admits it: Cell phone photography is not a crime

The City of Boston tacitly acknowledged today that arresting a man for recording a police officer in public may not exactly have been the wisest -- or most constitutional -- choice.

That acknowledgement comes in the form of a $170,000 payment to Simon Glik, a Boston attorney who was prosecuted under criminal wiretap laws for using his cell phone to record police arresting someone on the Boston Common. They prosecuted the wrong fellow: Glik himself specializes in criminal defense.

A spokeswoman for the Boston Police Department told CNET this afternoon that the city has taken steps to ensure arrests-for-recording … Read more

Anti-SOPA Internet Society under fire for hiring MPAA executive

The Internet Society is hardly a fan of the Stop Online Piracy Act or the Protect IP Act. The venerable non-profit, which acts as the umbrella organization for the Internet's key standards bodies, bluntly warns that the pair of copyright laws would end the "viability of the Internet."

Which is why ISOC's decision this month to hire a senior executive from the Motion Picture Association of America -- a lawyer who has championed the wildly controversial legislation that would blacklist Web sites that supposedly violate copyright -- is raising eyebrows.

ISOC announced last week that it had hired Paul Brigner, … Read more

How U.S. sanctions hurt Iranian Internet activists

analysis President Bill Clinton's 1997 electronic embargo against Iran, which curbed its citizens' access to U.S.-based software and Web sites, continues to create legal hassles for American Web companies.

In August 1997, Clinton signed an executive order saying U.S. companies and individuals could not provide "goods, technology, or services to Iran" -- a decree that led to unintended consequences such as Utah-based Bluehost giving the boot to Iranian bloggers and opensource software site SourceForge.net denying access to Iranians.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's announcement yesterday, which was designed to complement … Read more

Pakistan's Internet filter has the Valley buzzing over who's bidding

It's the bid that dares not (publicly) speak its name.

Friday was the deadline for companies to file their applications to win a piece of a Pakistani project that has stoked controversy stretching from to South Asia to Silicon Valley.

In late February, Pakistan's National ICT R&D Fund, which represents the government, began inviting bids to help create a "national-level URL filtering and blocking system." The system was described as a way to protect the public from "undesirable content."

Many countries have deployed web filtering and blocking systems at the Internet backbones … Read more