As we’ve reported before, there’s strong evidence that forces with widespread access to Iran’s internet infrastructure have been engaged in large-scale surveillance of https traffic in July and August, certainly of Google traffic, and perhaps many more websites, including Facebook and Yahoo! If you used the Internet in Iran during this period you should, at…
President Assad gave his third public address on the unrest in Syria on Monday. Reporters described him as nervous. He, the reporters or perhaps both were thinking the of the recent significance of speech number three – both Ben Ali and Mubarrak were overthrown shortly after they reached that count. My interest, however, was on…
The popular blog, a Gay Girl in Damascus, was updated last week by its authors’ “cousin” to state that the blogger had been kidnapped by Syrian security forces. At the time, I was in Beirut in neighboring Lebanon, talking to real Syrians about the detentions of online journalists and the restricting of Internet access to…
Jennifer Preston in the New York Times reports on some stories that we also have been hearing from Syrian Internet use. She documents incidents of passwords extracted by force, and the deliberate defacing of social networking pages by security forces, apparently in order to sabotage reports of unrest from that country. A man in his…
Facebook has just rolled out a series of meetups and resources for news organizations and individual journalists using its services. As Mashable mentions, the social networking company has been taking the increased use of its service as a news publishing and sourcing tool increasingly seriously over the last year. The page itself has some good…
Some good news out of Samara. As we’ve reported previously, trumped-up piracy accusations have been frequently used in Russia to intimidate independent media. Sergei Kurt-Adzhiyev, a Russian editor, has spent years fighting piracy prosecutions against himself and his publications in the region. This week, he was declared not guilty. Russia’s Finance Ministry was ordered to…
Facebook is rolling out a a new feature starting today: its users now have an option in their account settings that will protectively encrypt all their Facebook activity as it travels over the Internet. Flipping the switch won’t change much about how you use Facebook, but you’ll see Facebook web addresses will always start with…
Watching the stream of reporting from Egypt today, I’ve noticed some unconfirmed reports that videos of the events uploaded to YouTube have been taken down by the company. I haven’t been able to find any concrete examples, so I can’t say whether this is true. YouTube takedowns did happen for a few of the more…
It’s my second link to a report by Hal Roberts (and others at the Berkman Center) in as many days, but I worry that this this detailed document on denial-of-service (DOS) and hacking attacks on independent media and human rights groups might get missed in the holiday season. The news headlines in the last few…
As I mentioned last Friday, local journalists in Belarus were preparing for targeted disruption to Internet communications during Sunday’s presidential elections. The online news site Charter ’97, which has experienced more than its fair share of denial-of-service (DOS) attacks and police raids in the past, was already warning its readers last week to use their…