April 30th, 2012
The
UK High Court has ruled that file-sharing website The Pirate Bay must be
blocked by internet service providers. The Swedish site, which provides links to download free music and video, which critics claim are are mostly pirated, will be blocked by Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media. BT requested “a few more weeks” to consider their position on blocking the site. The same group of ISP’s were asked by the British Phonographic Industry to voluntarily block access to the site in 2011, but they refused to do so, unless a court order was made.
April 27th, 2012
Access to the website of
Ethiopia’s leading weekly newspaper
has been blocked within the country. The website of privately-owned weekly,
The Reporter, has been inaccessible since 21 April, other than through a proxy server. Though the reason for the blocking is unclear, it has been speculated that the block is being carried out by the state-owned company Ethio-Telecom, the only ISP in the country. The site usually has 30,000 visitors per day.
March 5th, 2012
Local access to Facebook and two Russian-language websites has been blocked in
Tajikistan, following articles critical of the country’s long serving president. Users attempting to access Facebook, tjknews.com or zvezda.ru are automatically re-directed to the home page of their provider. The shutdown was ordered by the state-run communications service after the two websites published articles critical of President Imomali Rakhmon. Several Facebook groups openly discuss politics and some users have been critical of the authorities.
March 8th, 2011
Two journalists, Nedem Sener and Ahmet Sik, were
sentenced to prison on Sunday pending an investigation into allegations that the military attempted to overthrow the Turkish government in 2003. About 60 journalists are currently imprisoned and thousands face prosecution for their work, reported the Turkish Journalists’ Association.
Meanwhile, there are other concerns about
press freedom in Turkey; 600,000 bloggers cannot access their blogs, after Google’s blogging service, Blogspot, was
blocked in the country, for example. The site was banned by a Turkish court after users showed football matches on their blogs. Digiturk, a satellite TV firm, has exclusive rights to broadcast the matches in Turkey and approached the courts when it became aware of the matches being shown on the blogs.
