Danny O’Brien

Russian federal law doesn’t include Internet censorship provisions, but there’s been a recent rash of cases of court-ordered blocking in individual Russian regions. Even though these are usually narrow blocks of particular sites and are quickly unblocked after media exposure, they can still cover a great deal of ground. The Republic of Ingushetia blocked the…

The New York Times reports on a new decision in the liability of internet intermediaries, this time in Argentia. It’s often hard to pick apart exactly what’s been going on in jurisdictions where this issue still evolving. Generally, you get a flurry of conflicting court decision in favour of absolute liability for Net middle-men, usually…

For that tiny subset of journalists who use PGP (or its free equivalent, GPG) and have a Mac and use Apple’s Mail client, good news! After a distinct lack of updates, new coding team has taken over, and has just shipped a version that’s compatible with the latest OS X.

Georgia Tech researchers have developed a tool called Collage that will allow Internet dissidents to insert hidden messages into Twitter posts and Flickr images in order to circumvent the censorship measures imposed by oppressive governments. The details of this technique (which you can find in Georgia Tech’s netops website) contain some detailed thinking about how…

Occasionally, one stumbles on a piece that isn’t absolutely germane to the areas one covers, but makes you think. Ian Bicking (a well-known developer at Mozilla, the non-profit that makes the Firefox browser) explicitly says his ponderings about the nature of online security and privacy aren’t about China or other explicitly free-speech-unfriendly regimes, but it’s…

Obviously all of these assumptions are mere speculations. This is an effort on our part to try to better understand one of the most secretive system of repression in Tunisia and to help demystify its processes. And obviously, we invite anyone with further information to make them public, and a fortiori, it may be that…

Google is asking for video clips that explore this question for their conference on free expression in Budapest in September. I have a feeling this initiative might be swamped with protests about Google’s recent proposed compromise on network neutrality.

Hu Yong’s writes on the rise of microblogs (like Twitter, which is blocked) on the Chinese Internet. Recently, when a newspaper reporter exposed related-party transactions by a listed company, local police authorities issued a warrant for his arrest. Tens of thousands of microblog posts were sent out about this incident. Users expressed their views and…