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19 Nov 09 visit China isn't happy with the IGF On the final day of a four-day meeting, most government representatives expressed support for renewing the Internet Governance Forum's five-year mandate which ends next year. China did not. Chen Yin, the head of the Chinese delegation to the Internet...
18 Nov 09 visit Muzzled by the United Nations The Internet Governance Forum is winding down today in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. There have been a lot of very constructive conversations in workshops and panels over the past four days about how to advance security, privacy, child protection, AND...
13 Nov 09 visit Chinese BloggerCon 2009: Micro Power from the mouth of a cave Twitter is blocked in China. Even so, a large and growing community of Chinese people are using it every day to trade news, ideas, and increasingly first-hand information about things that people are experiencing or witnessing. Several people have...
10 Oct 09 visit Happy Internet Human Rights Day! Today is the 98th anniversary of the 1911 Wuchang Uprising which led to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and founding of the Republic of China in 1912. (I wonder how the 100th anniversary will be celebrated in the People's...
09 Oct 09 visit Obama administration disappoints on civil liberties On Thursday the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to renew all of the powers granted to the U.S. government by the USA PATRIOT act - passed hastily in 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks - that were set...
08 Oct 09 visit Is America getting more like China? NOTE: I just discovered that somehow the 2nd half of this post got erased after I published it. No idea how. Rewriting and re-posting shortly. Since Obama became President - and yes, I voted for him - there has been...
28 Sep 09 visit China's censorship arms race escalates Last week the China Digital Times reported that the photo above (click here to view full size original) has been making the rounds in Chinese blogs and chatrooms. It is an image of a "computer science float" for Thursday's National...
07 Sep 09 visit China's new real-name requirement: another global trend The New York Times' Jonathan Ansfield reported on Sunday that Chinese news websites have quietly implemented "secret government orders" requiring new users to register their true identities before they can post comments. His interviewees explained the...
07 Aug 09 visit Dark days for China's liberals (Photo by Zola, taken at Gongmeng's offices. Left-to-right: Teng Biao, Lin Zheng, Li Fangping, Xu Zhiyong, Zhang Lijun.) The people in this picture are not dissidents. They are civil rights lawyers who have been trying to work within the bounds...
27 Jul 09 visit ICANN, civil society, and free speech Gordon Crovitz's Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the relationship between ICANN and the future of free speech quotes me a couple of times. An extended excerpt: Rebecca MacKinnon, a Web researcher writing a book about lessons from China...
14 Jul 09 visit ICANN and Free Speech
13 Jul 09 visit Xinjiang Info-War The screenshot above comes from the Anti-cnn.com website as it appeared on Saturday. The item is titled "Rebiya Fakes It! Using a fake photo to twist the truth in the Urumqi incident" Click on the image to view an image...
12 Jul 09 visit Green Dam reincarnated in QQ? Pseudonymous blogger dafengqixi, writing on a Hong Kong-based blogging platform, has linked to this very interesting post published Saturday on the overseas Chinese news platform, Boxun.com (blocked in mainland China). It reports that QQ, China's largest...
03 Jul 09 visit China @ ICANN: thoughts from former CEO Paul Twomey Nobody else appears to have reported thi...
01 Jul 09 visit Green Dam is breached...Now what? As a number of China hands predicted, the Chinese government has postponed its mandate requiring that all computers sold in China must include the Green Dam -Youth Escort censorware by today. Yesterday after the news broke I told the Financial...
28 Jun 09 visit Some more Green Dam documents...
25 Jun 09 visit China's censorship blowback I'm not sure what the Chinese government...
25 Jun 09 visit Google's China problem: the larger problems
19 Jun 09 visit Green Dam's makers fail to fix problems Last week, computer scientists at the University of Michigan, The Open Net Initiative, and an independent group of Chinese programmers all found serious security flaws in the government-mandated Green Dam-Youth Escort software. Earlier this week a Chinese...
16 Jun 09 visit Green Damned Chinese netizens are certainly having fun mocking the government's mandate for PC manufacurers to install the Green Dam-Youth Escort software. Danwei posted some great pictures of cartoon "green dam girls," greated in the style of Japanese porno manga....
13 Jun 09 visit Open Net Initiative report on Green Dam The Open Net Initiative has released a detailed analysis of Green Dam. Executive summary (emphasis added): A recent directive by the Chinese government requires the installation of a specific filtering software product, Green Dam, with the publicly stated...
12 Jun 09 visit More Green Dam documents and statements
12 Jun 09 visit University of Michigan: Analysis of the Green Dam Censorware System A team of computer scientists at the University of Michigan have released this report about the Chinese government-mandated censorware, Green Dam. Here is the summary: We have discovered remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities in Green Dam, the censorship...
11 Jun 09 visit "All new computers are required to wear condoms...." This is the opening menu for "Green Dam - Youth Escort": Here is a spoof uploaded by somebody to a forum on Mop.com, also courtesy of ChinaSmack: Domestic Chinese critiques of the Green Dam censorware continue unabated in the domestic media as well on...
09 Jun 09 visit Green Dam filtering software scorned by many Chinese Some Chinese geeks have been playing with the new government-mandated Green Dam censorship software over the past couple days. People are reporting their findings on Twitter and on blogs. Eisen blog posted the screenshot above, taken after the software...
08 Jun 09 visit Original government document ordering "Green Dam" software installation An anonymous source has sent me a scan of this "notification" from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology requiring that PC manufacturers install the Green Dam Youth Escort filtering software in all PC's manufactured in China or imported...
08 Jun 09 visit China's "Green Dam Youth Escort" software Today's Wall Street Journal has a provocative story headlined China Squeezes PC Makers: Beijing Is Set to Require Web Filter That Would Block Government-Censored Sites. The picture above comes from the official website for "Green Dam Youth Escort," the...
02 Jun 09 visit China blocks Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Hotmail, Windows Live, etc. ahead of Tiananmen 20th anniversary This cartoon was created today by Chines...
01 Jun 09 visit Is the Global Network Initiative making a difference?
14 May 09 visit China calls for an end to the Internet Governance Forum There's been a global argument going on for some time now over how the Internet should be governed. Many governments, including China but also many others, are not happy that the "root" of the Internet is controlled by the Internet...
14 Apr 09 visit My chat with Anti-CNN.com On Monday afternoon I did an online chat with these patriotic young people who run Anti-CNN, a website launched in the wake of the Tibetan unrest and crackdown last year by a group of young Chinese who felt that the...
07 Apr 09 visit Cybertarianism: China and the Global Internet I have been silent for a full month, working on a book proposal, trying to avoid distractions and tangents. Below is a preview, just the opening paragraphs of a much longer overview that I am still working on: ------ A...
06 Mar 09 visit China and the Global Internet: my talk at Harvard On Tuesday I was back at my old stomping grounds, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where I gave a lunch talk. Ethan Zuckerman and David Weinberger both blogged it. Click on the image below to access the video...
27 Feb 09 visit From Red Guards to Cyber-vigilantism to where next? This is a 1976 Cultural Revolution poster from chineseposters.net. It celebrates Chairman Mao's 1966 call to arms: "bombard the headquarters." He egged on the Red Guards to go after corrupt and venal officials who: "...have stood facts on their head...
26 Feb 09 visit Internet control without "firewalls" Open Society Fellow Evgeny Morozov and I have written an Op-Ed for Project Syndicate about how the future of Internet control is not "firewall" censorship but more subtle forms of manipulation and pressure. Recognizing that censorship is too heavy...
24 Feb 09 visit "Eluding the Cat" - Bloggers investigate Yunnan prison death My friend and colleague gave a fabulous talk last year at O'Reilly E-tech titled The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism. The essence of his argument: The Web was invented so physicists could share research papers. Web 2.0 was invented...
22 Feb 09 visit Fifty Cent Party members in the flesh Most readers of this blog have probably ...
19 Feb 09 visit Beijing legal crusader gets "dealt with" This interview with lawyer-blogger Liu Xiaoyuan was shot by Danwei.org in November. Liu writes today that he is being forced by the Haidian District Justice Bureau to shut down his law firm for six months. This means, he says, that...
14 Feb 09 visit Cyber-ocracy or Cyber-tarianism? The Internet in China If you plan to be in Washington D.C. this coming Wednesday, please join me for an event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Cyber-ocracy: How the Internet is Changing China Date: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 Time: 10:00 a.m. to...
13 Feb 09 visit Chinese Censorship 2.0: How companies censor bloggers I've written about Chinese blog censorship before, most recently in December. In August I wrote an Op-Ed for the Asian Wall Street Journal, titled The Chinese Censorship that Foreigners Don't See, which was also based on my Chinese blog-censorship...
12 Feb 09 visit Obama's America to Hu Jintao's China on human rights: so far, deafening silence The two photos below were taken by Sharon Hom of Human Rights in China around 10:30 a.m. last Friday in Geneva. Diplomats from a wide range of countries lined up for hours for a chance to sign up that afternoon...
09 Feb 09 visit Live Webcast and Chat Tuesday/Wednesday: The Future of Freedom and Control in the Internet Age On Tuesday at 6pm EST / 2300 GMT / Wednesday 7am China I will be part of a very interesting conversation in New York. There will be very interesting people in the room who will add their expertise. If you...
08 Feb 09 visit UN Human Rights Council meets on China The UN Human Rights Council is offering a live webcast of its review of Chinese human rights at 9am Monday morning Geneva time. That's 4pm in Beijing, or 3am on the U.S. East Coast. I probably won't manage to be...
05 Feb 09 visit Have you subscribed to the Global Voices daily e-mail? If you haven't yet subscribed to the Global Voices daily digest, please consider doing so! Below is an example of today's offering. This succinct daily e-mail alerts you to our top feature posts from the global blogosphere.. with information and...
03 Feb 09 visit Live Blog and Live Chat: Media as Global Diplomat This is the live blog for Media as Global Diplomat, an event starting at 9am EST in Washington, D.C., organized by the U.S. Institute of Peace. Click here for the live webcast and to participate in a live chat. Be...
01 Feb 09 visit Media as Global Diplomat? Join a live webcast & chat on Tuesday President Obama says he intends to listen to others as he formulates U.S. foreign policy. I've proposed that as part of his China policy, the Obama administration should use the Internet to engage in conversation with the Chinese people, not...
28 Jan 09 visit The Future of Freedom and Control in the Internet Age For 2009 I am on leave from the University of Hong Kong. The Open Society Institute has generously granted me a fellowship to spend the year working on a book. The tentative title is "Internet Freedom and Control: Lessons from...
28 Jan 09 visit Dear President Obama: in talking to China, remember its people (Cross-posted from the Huffington Post) Dear President Obama, Welcome to U.S.-China relations! You didn't even mention China in your inaugural address, but the Chinese censors still took it personally. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's remarks in his...
23 Jan 09 visit Ai Weiwei: On taking individual responsibility On Tuesday January 13th I visited Ai Wei...
20 Jan 09 visit What does Charter 08 mean? Too soon to tell... When China's first Premier Zhou Enlai wa...

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