Manal and Alaa's bit bucket

Congratulations to my friend Rebecca MacKinnon for her excellent report for HRW on Internet censorship in China.Here’s the jist:China’s system of Internet censorship and surveillance is the most advanced in the world. While tens of thousands of people are employed by the Chinese government and security organs to implement a system of [...]

Tunisian blogger Sami Ben Gharbia has put together a nice Flash animation based on photographs I took on my last trip to Tunisia. If you’re outside of Tunisia, you can see what he did here (if you’re in Tunisia, you’ll first need to figure out how to get around the government’s attempts to censor the [...]

Ethan’s been trying to raise a ruckus about this for weeks. It’s time he had some help. If you blog, or better still, if you can get your writings published in a newspaper or broadcast on the air, please take this issue up. Particularly if you’re an Egyptian or a Tunisian blogger. It’d be a [...]

Blogger SaudiEve reports the Internet Services Unit of the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology has blocked her domain. She’s asking people to fill out this form to petition the ISU to unblock the page. Please consider filling out the form. It only takes a minute. If you have a blog, please consider using [...]

Amnesty has launched a brilliant campaign to foil Internet censorship. I’ve joined. If you have a Web site or a blog, so should you. Here’s how.Technorati Tags: online censorship, Amnesty, Irrepressible, censorship

It’s hard to think what constructive steps your average citizen could take to improve the situation here in Egypt now. So I’m taking heart from a fantastic post from Nart Villeneuve over at Internet Censorship Expolorer speculating on a deliciously subversive way to bust Google’s censorship of its Chinese Web results: through the same greed [...]

A sad correction to yesterday’s post. Apparently AP and AFP got it wrong. The ‘Youths’ are still in jail. UPDATE: Now the word is that they have been released, after all. Can’t stand this emotional roller-coaster. Comité international de soutien aux internautes de ZarzisPrésidente : Hélène Flautre, Parlementaire européenPorte Parole : Térésa Chopin, mère d’Omar [...]

Excellent news from Tunisia. President Ben Ali has pardoned 1,657 political prisoners, mostly members of the banned Islamist Nahdha (Renaissance) Party. The pardon extended to the “Youths of Zarzis.” I met with the Youths of Zarzis’ families in September and November 2005. I’ve posted their photos here. Now for Mohamed Abou… Grâce présidentielle en Tunisie: [...]

So asks Travoli, who normally posts witty reviews of gadgets large and small. Google Videos features short clips of improvised explosive devices exploding (those outside the United States can see them here and here). Travoli reports that friends in Canada and the South America were able to watch the videos, though he wasn’t. Friends [...]

Syrian expat friends tell me the appointment of Foreign Minister Farouq al-Shara as Syria’s new vice-president and the Cabinet reshuffle represent the removal of the last vestiges of Hafez’s clique. “The triumph of technocrats over Baathist dinosaurs,” one commenter on Josh Landis’ blog half-heartedly rejoiced. Though Al-Shara did serve as Hafez’s personal envoy to Arab [...]

Kudos to the OpenNet Initiative for putting together a fantastic tool that lets you compare search results from Google.com and the now famously censored Google.cn. Check out their sample searches in English and Chinese, and analysis from geniuses Ethan Zuckerman, Nart Villeneuve, and Rebecca MacKinnon.Technorati Tags: Google, China, Censorship, Internet

This is priceless…

Syrian blogger Ayman Hourieh reports that Syrian ISPs are censoring Wired magazine. Ayman’s account of his conversation with his ISP’s tech support asking why the site was blocked is worth the quick detour. SyriaMirror.net reports, and Syrian blog readers confirm, that the government has also censored its first blog, Al-Domari of Syria, which takes its [...]