Sourceforge and Google Code are the biggest free Open Source hosting platforms and they deny access for users from certain countries.
Google Code for example denies Access from the following countries: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.
Sourceforge from: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria
Quote from wikipedia:
Wikileaks is a website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors. Within one year of its December 2006 launch, its database had grown to more than 1.2 million documents, leading to many front-page newspaper articles and political reforms. Due to financial constraints, the site has currently suspended all operations other than submission of material.
Wikileaks is important for our free internet so help to keep raising the funds necessary to keep them alive in 2010!
You can donate money at their homepage, check out http://www.wikileaks.org/
Country: South Korea
It seems that South Koreans have another layer of censorship other than the Ministry of Communication (MIC). Flickr has just created a new “Safesearch” policy that “prohibits users in these places from turning off content filters” thus censoring what one may see on flickr sites from South Korea. Apparently this idea was from Yahoo.com, which has steadily been in the process of becoming king “Tokebi” in Korea and has been a hand to censoring flickr in China as well. I guess this is all per the wishes of Yahoo shareholders who do not seem to care about censorship and do not care even when they wrongfully help put people in jail for the sake of censorship. There is more on the flickr censorship issue here.
Here are a few more blog discussion groups on this. and this synopsis and this explanation.
(source: The Marmot’s Hole)
From the Internet to the iPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990 — well before the Internet was on most people’s radar — and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today. From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.
Blending the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists, EFF achieves significant victories on behalf of consumers and the general public. EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations. By mobilizing more than 50,000 concerned citizens through our Action Center, EFF beats back bad legislation. In addition to advising policymakers, EFF educates the press and public.
EFF is a donor-funded nonprofit and depends on your support to continue successfully defending your digital rights. Litigation is particularly expensive; because two-thirds of our budget comes from individual donors, every contribution is critical to helping EFF fight — and win — more cases.
Country: Australia
“Hitler learns that plans for ISP filtering in Australia aren’t going very well.
He isn’t a happy man about it, so there is a lot of bad language.”
Country: China
One part of this system is known outside China as the Great Firewall of China (in reference both to its role as a network firewall and to the ancient Great Wall of China). The system blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at the Internet gateways. The government does not appear to be systematically examining Internet content, as this appears to be technically impractical.
This firewall is largely ineffective at preventing the flow of information and is rather easily circumvented by determined parties, most simply by using the cache for Google but also by using proxy servers outside the firewall.
Research into the Chinese Internet censorship has shown that blocked Web sites include:
The banning appears mostly uncoordinated and ad-hoc with some sites being blocked while other similar sites are allowed. The blocks are often lifted for special occasions. One example was the New York Times which was unblocked when reporters in a private interview with Jiang Zemin specifically asked about the block and replied that he would look into the matter. During the APEC summit in Shanghai during 2001, normally-blocked CNN, NBC, and the Washington Post were suddenly accessible.
Chinese agencies frequently issue regulations about the Internet, but these are often not enforced or ignored. One major problem in enforcement is determining who has jurisdiction over the Internet, causing many bureaucratic turf battles within the Chinese government among various ministries and between central and local officials. The State Council Information Office has the mandate to regulate the Internet, but other security agencies in China have a say as well.
Some legal scholars have pointed that the frequency at which the Chinese government issues new regulations on the Internet is a symptom of their ineffectiveness because the new regulations never make reference to the previous set of regulations, which appear to have been forgotten.
Although blocking foreign sites has received much attention in the West, this is actually only part of the Chinese effort to censor the Internet. Much more effective is the ability to censor content providers within China, as the government can physically seize the Web site and the operators
Although the government does not have the physical resources to monitor all Internet chat rooms and forums, the threat of being shut down has caused internet content providers to have internal staff, who are colloquially known as “big mamas” who stop and remove forum comments which may be politically sensitive.
However, Internet content providers have adopted some counterstrategies. One is to go forth posting political sensitive stories and removing them only when the government complains. In the hours or days in which the story is available online, people read it, and by the time the story is taken down, the information is already in the public. One notable case in which this occurred was in response to a school explosion in 2001, when local officials tried to suppress the fact the explosion resulted from children illegally producing fireworks. By the time local officials forced the story to be removed from the Internet, news was disseminated widely.
Also, Internet content providers also often replace censored forum comments with white space which allows the reader to know that comments were taken down and to often guess what they were.
One controversial issue is whether Western companies should supply equipment to the Chinese government which aids in the blocking of sites. Some argue that it is wrong for companies to profit from censorship, while others argue that equipment being supplied is standard Internet infrastructure equipment and that providing this sort of equipment actually aids the flow of information. Without the equipment, the Chinese government would not develop the Internet at all. A similar dilemma faces Western content providers such as Yahoo! and AOL who must abide by Chinese government wishes, including having internal content monitors, to operate within China.
Sites that host software that can be used to circumvent the censorship, such as Freenet and Peek-a-Booty, are also banned. (For some time, this included the entire open source software repository at SourceForge, as it hosts the Freenet project, among thousands of others.)
Contrary to general Western perceptions of Internet cafes, they generally are not inhabited by political subversives, but are frequented by teenagers playing online games against each other or downloading MP3s. Ironically, most such cafes would be prosecuted in the West, not by the government, but by copyright holders, because they maintain extensive caches of illegally copied software and MP3s.
Source:
http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/Internet_censorship_in_China/
http://securityandthe.net/2009/05/03/borders-in-cyberspace/
Just two weeks after the Swedish Pirate Party won a seat in the European Parliament, the German Pirate Party scored their own seat in the German government, too. Pirates are tiresome in movies, as a movement, in real life on the water, on the internet, and as any kind of fashion iconography of any sort, but in the actual for-real government…that’s maybe kind of interesting.
Sure, we all know that Germany has got their own history when it comes to political fuck-ups, but most of the weird parties that ever tried to establish themselves in German politics failed. Lucky us! Just imagine being ruled by people referring to themselves as the “Anarchist Pogo Party Germany” (these guys like wearing shirts that say, “WORK SUCKS” or even smarter, “AGAINST PEOPLE”).
Well, there was that one weird party that actually succeeded back in the 1930s but we all know how that went down. So since then Germany is blessed with a democratic system that’s actually worked out quite nicely for the last 60 years, even if our government passes insane laws like the Internet Censorship Law, which is designed to stop child pornography, but actually just makes it so we can’t watch or listen to anything online without fear of getting arrested.
That’s where the Pirate Party comes in and stands up for our right to use technology to ignore copyright and surf the grown-up porn and talk about people we love and hate—without being immediately thrown into some reincarnation of a Stasi dungeon. So politician Jörg Tauss left the SPD (Germany’s mainstream liberal party) a couple days ago over concerns about the Internet Censorship Law and boarded the Pirate Party. I could make a pirate joke here to end this story but I won’t. Instead I will just say that if pirates can make a comeback, there’s possibly hope for vampires too.
source: vice magazin
