media coverage

GulfNews.com Report on ONI

There is a story in GulfNews about the ONI’s country report on Internet Filtering in the United Arab Emirates. Thanks to Neil Hrab for forwarding and pointing that out.

I must say, though, that we certainly do not “praise” the UAE, that’s
for sure. I don’t know where the guy got that from. All we said is that
there is only slight blocking of political material (including by the
way, the entire .il domain, which is all of Israel). That’s pretty bad
as far as I’m concerned. I’m certainly not going to praise a regime
that does that, let alone uses Smartfilter to censor.

Makes you wonder what type of editorial controls go into stories like that in UAE, eh?

BBC, BBC5, and BBC Persian Interview

Among all of the press coverage of our recent Iran report, I thought I’d post this one from BBCPersian, which has an interview with me translated into Farsi. You can listen to the realaudio package here.
As an addendum, here is a nice BBC story by Clark Boyd, with a great interview with Nart Villeneuve, Director of Technical Research at the Citizen Lab. Additionally, I recently did an interview with the BBC5 program Up All Night. Here is a locally archived MP3 file for downloading and listening.

CNN, China Internet Filtering, Tunisia, and the ONI

CNN has a news item that is making the rounds about China’s new policy of shutting down unregistered websites and blogs. The story mentions our ONI report on China’s filtering of the Internet. Nart’s blog has an extended analysis of the issue that includes some speculation on the so called “night crawler” that China is reportedly using to track unregistered websites and blogs that should be read as well.
I have also just stumbled across a news item on Tunisia that mentions the ONI’s research on this country and has a lengthy interview with Nart.

Washington Post story on our ONI Report

A solid story by Jonathan Krim of the Washington Post on our China Internet Filtering Study, which will be posted here tomorrow AM.

Web Censors In China Find Success

Falun Gong, Dalai Lama Among Blocked Topics

By Jonathan Krim

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 14, 2005; Page A20

The Chinese government is succeeding in broadly censoring what its citizens can read on the Internet, surprising many experts and denting U.S. government hopes that online access would be a quick catalyst for democratic political reform.

Internet users in the world’s most populous country are routinely blocked from sites featuring information on subjects such as Taiwanese independence, the Falun Gong movement, the Dalai Lama and the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, according to a study to be released today by a consortium of researchers from Harvard University, the University of Toronto and Cambridge University in England.

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