Protecting journalists from Firesheep
There’s been a great deal of coverage in the last day or so of Firesheep, a plugin for Firefox that lets you take over the Facebook and Twitter accounts of others on your local network. If you use Firesheep, you can pick one of the people on, say, the same open wireless at your nearby…
In South Africa, echoes of Black Wednesday
On October 19, 1977, South Africa’s government banned The World newspaper, along with Weekend World, the paper’s weekly magazine, and Pro Veritate, a Christian publication. Authorities also detained scores of activists and outlawed 17 anti-apartheid groups during the one-day crackdown, which came to be known as Black Wednesday.
Internet blotter
Computers belonging to South Korean government officials have been infiltrated by targeted malware in email. Chinese hackers are suspected. Contrary to what this article says, I’m betting that the attachments were PDFs, which are currently the document of choice when attempting to infect journalists’ machines. Another intriguing academic paper, this time on the structure of…
Use your Blackberry to map global surveillance
The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab has announced a research project to analyze the global infrastructure of Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry. It’s looking for BlackBerry users from any country to take part–especially those in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia, Russia and China. All of these countries have at some point…
South Africa weighs dropping media tribunal plan
For the first time in South Africa’s months-long debate over the proposal for a government-run media appeals tribunal, a top official from the African National Congress (ANC) indicated on Friday that the plan could be dropped altogether–under certain conditions.
Obiang prize suspended indefinitely
The Obiang prize, named for and funded by one of Africa’s most notorious dictators, was a very poor idea from the start and our goal, bluntly, was to kill it. We didn’t quite succeed in getting an outright cancellation, but the prize, while technically alive, is in a deep coma with virtually no chance of…
Internet blotter
CPJ protested the arrest of Bahrain blogger Ali Abdel Imam back in September — The Wall Street Journal has a story on his continuing detainment. Activism around the imprisonment of Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan continues: PEN Canada is focusing on his case and Canada and France’s foreign ministers have urged his release. Local Thai ISPs are…