libya

Google has found itself embroiled in a high-profile dispute pitting the traditional western value of free speech against Islam's strict proscription against blasphemy.

The company confirmed today that it "temporarily" blocked YouTube users in Libya and Egypt from accessing a YouTube video trailer from an amateur movie sharply critical of the Prophet Muhammad. And Afghanistan retaliated by unilaterally blocking all of YouTube for its citizens.

Those restrictions came less than a day after the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans were killed in an attack by Muslim protesters. Protesters also entered … Read more

President Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address, warned that the military-industrial complex could "endanger our liberties or democratic processes." Today WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange is warning that the surveillance-industrial complex is even more dangerous.

A set of nearly 300 documents that the document-leaking Web site published today reveals how extensive and privacy-invasive the secretive multi-billion dollar industry devoted to surveillance technology has become.

"We are in a world now where not only is it theoretically possible to record nearly all telecommunications traffic out of a country, all telephone calls, but where there is an international industry selling … Read more

I can't ever remember Catherine Zeta-Jones making political statements when she was T-Mobile's femme fatale. She might have said one or two things in favor of Welsh nationalism.

However, the rather fetching spokesperson for Telefonica Germany has managed to get herself fired by the company after uttering words that were rather supportive of the Gadhafi family.

ABC News offered that Vanessa Hessler, an Italian-American supermodel, was dismissed from her contract by Telefonica Germany, a subsidiary of the Spanish company, after she spoke of her "very beautiful love story" with Mutassim Gadhafi, 36-year-old son of the now … Read more

Officials in the Obama administration considered compromising Libya's government computer networks to block early-warning data gathering and missile launches on NATO war planes during the American-led strikes this spring but decided against it, according to The New York Times.

While the move would have lowered the risk to pilots, it could have opened up a can of worms, which is ultimately why it was nixed. In addition to worrying there wouldn't be enough time to find the holes in Libya's networks to exploit before the strikes, there was a question of whether Congress would have to be … Read more

Down for the past several months, local Internet access was finally restored for Libyan citizens early Sunday but was then taken offline again after a few brief hours, according to Internet intelligence company Renesys.

Detailing the volatile and often confusing situation in Libya, where rebel forces have been fighting to take control of the compound of Col. Moammar Gadhafi in Tripoli, a Renesys blog yesterday tried to make sense of the latest up-and-down nature of the country's Internet.

Since February, local Internet access has been disrupted for Libyan citizens by the government as Gadhafi has struggled to hang onto … Read more

On today's show, the increasingly scary security battleground that is our mobile phones (and how carriers could be making it worse), Sony's war against jailbreaking the PS3 goes nuclear, and Microsoft announces that IE6 needs to die. Plus, RIM's roadmap for 2011 doesn't inspire that much confidence, and the reason we're so tired on Monday (and every other) mornings. --Molly

Apple will announce the next iPad 2 today, so imagine our surprise when all Wilson wants to talk about is Charlie Sheen joining Twitter! There may be hope for our Apple suckling fanboy just yet...

The rumors fluttering around the next iPad are growing, with the latest batch wondering about a MobileMe update that will allow streaming media to iOS devices.

This isn't the first time we've predicted this upgrade, but a new rumor claims that an Apple employee has said today's update will indeed allow all media including music, TV shows, and iTunes-purchased movies to stream in the cloud. Since you still can't iTunes on multiple computer libraries without a clever workaround, this could be a huge boon for the next iPad.

But you just want an iPad to consume news and watch movies, it may make more sense to either wait a month for a first generation iPad price drop or wait until the end of a year, when a third generation iPad may surface with more significant upgrades. Either way, we're done with the Apple rumor mongering for today.

Moving onto the more important news of the day (to Wilson), @CharlieSheen has finally joined the Twitterverse and is adding friends at an astonishing rate of 2,000 followers a minute.

Business developers, marketing professional, and public relations experts should take note of his social media strategy: your first tweet better have porn stars, or… Read more

Libya's Internet links have been severely disrupted as chaos spreads across the country, with a defiant Col. Moammar Gadhafi today vowing to die a "martyr" rather than relinquish his grip on power.

As reports describe portions of Libya as a "war zone," and the country's deputy U.N. ambassador is saying "genocide" is under way, inbound and outbound Internet traffic has plummeted to a fraction of what's normal. Over the weekend, traffic appeared to be following a "curfew" pattern, with more restrictions imposed in the evenings, and YouTube is … Read more