Daily Archives: March 12, 2013

MOSCOW, March 11 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) A Russian state watchdog accused of unfairly censoring thousands of websites defended its actions on Monday, claiming that censorship is an efficient way of preventing suicide among minors.

Figures for suicides and suicide attempts among Russian minors have grown 35 percent over the past few years, the Federal Consumer Protection Service said in a press release, without elaborating on the timeframe.

Online promotion of suicide is significantly influencing statistics of childrens suicides, the watchdog said, without providing any figures.

Some websites fail to support the campaign against suicide promotion, the service said. It named no names, but promised to publish, at an unspecified later date, a list of worst offenders.

Internet censorship became a topic of much online controversy in Russia after a new law that came into force last November allowed extrajudicial blacklisting of web content deemed to be promoting suicide, pedophilia or drug use.

About 4,500 websites are currently blacklisted by Russian governmental agencies, even though about 95 percent of them are not guilty of any wrongdoing, according to Rublacklist.net, a project of the unregistered Pirate Party of Russia that tracks online censorship.

Yhe Federal Consumer Protection Service, which runs the blacklist, blocks websites by their numeric IP address, which can be shared by hundreds of websites all of which are banned every time an offender gets targeted by the government.

Ban criteria have also been called into question: Websites blacklisted since November include a photo report about a political activists self-immolation in Tibet; a 15-year-old comic tune parodying Russian goth rock; and a YouTube manual of how to create slashed wrists make-up for Halloween. The make-up video prompted YouTubes owner Google to take the Federal Consumer Protection Service to court in February, the case currently pending review.

Sarcastic-minded bloggers have even produced a universal macros picture for blacklisting websites in Russian Federation, complete with innocent pictures of toddlers titled child porn and instructions on how to commit suicide by ramming a brick wall with ones head. The joke was lost on the authorities, which promptly blacklisted as many copies of the picture as they could.

The Federal Consumer Protection Service denounced online pranksters in a separate press release Monday, claiming that they undermine the governments authority. The agency also pledged to continue the blacklisting campaign in order to save childrens lives.

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Web Censorship Prevents Teen Suicide – Russian Watchdog

Ban makes it harder to use Facebook, Skype

While most industrialized nations today exercise a degree of online censorship, Iran has often been billedas among the worst. Much like China, Iran both blocksmaterial questioning the ruling party, and material it finds morally questionable (such as pornography).

I. Iran Bans Uncensored VPNs

In regimes like Iran, one common way to get around filters is to use an encrypted virtual proxy network (VPN), which funnels requests for forbidden content, encrypted, to servers outside of Iran, and then replies, encrypted, to the customer. But Iranian internet censorship ratcheted up this week as state authorities began blocking traffic from encrypted VPNs.

Ramezanali Sobhani-Fard, a Parliamentarian from Iran's ruling ABII party and the head of parliament's information and communications technology committee, calls VPN use"illegal" for most citizens. In comments to state news agency Mehr, he remarks, "Within the last few days illegal VPN ports in the country have been blocked. Only legal and registered VPNs can from now on be used."

The blockade inadvertently cut off access to Google Inc. (GOOG) and Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) search portals, which aretypically allowed in censored form. Mr.Sobhani-Fard said the government was looking into that unpleasant side effect of the new censorship rollout.

Reutersreports that an internet user inIsfahan, Iran's second largest city, confirms that VPNs are no longer working. The man, who went by "Mohamad", comments, "VPNs are cut off. They've shut all the ports."

The blockade bans popular internet telephony services such as Skype and Viber. It also blocks access to the world's most popular social network -- Facebook. Iran views Facebook, Inc.'s (FB) network as a portal to dissent and has banned it; yet despite that the network has been popular in Iran thanks to the use of VPNs.

II. Political Unrest is Boiling in Islamist Republic

The crackdown on VPNs coincides with a dangerous time for Iran's ruling regime.

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Iran Beefs up Internet Censorship With Proxy Crackdown

World Day Against Cyber Censorship today

World Day Against Cyber Censorship is being observed around the globe on Tuesday calling on activists, movements and organisations to remind their constituents of the importance of protecting free expression online.

The aim of the day is to defend human rights online, promote Internet accessibility for all, and expose enemies of Internet openness along with governments that are gradually becoming more controlling over how their citizens use the Internet , said Reporters Without Borders.

The rights group has named Bahrain, China, Iran, Syria and Vietnam "State Enemies of the Internet." Similarly it has categories countries such as Australia, Egypt, France, India, Malaysia Russia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates as countries under surveillance.

RSF said the five countries governments "are involved in active, intrusive surveillance of news providers, resulting in grave violations of freedom of information and human rights."

"Increasingly widespread cyber-censorship and cyber-surveillance are endangering the Internet model that the Nets founders envisaged: the Internet as place of freedom, a place for exchanging information, content and opinions, a place that transcended frontiers," the Paris-based NGO said in a statement. Nepalnews.com

Excerpt from:
World Day Against Cyber Censorship today