22 Mar 2011 | Asia and Pacific, China
For the past few weeks Chinese users have been frequently struggling with access to Gmail and two days ago Google accused the government of disturbing its email service.
“This is a government blockage, carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail,” Google said in a statement on Sunday. The Chinese government has made no formal response to the service disruption.
The accusations follow pro-democracy calls in the Middle East and North Africa, with demand for similar protests in China intensifying during the National People’s Congress, China’s annual Parliament session.
Blocks on Facebook, Twitter and for a short time LinkedIn, are no longer considered news, but with increasing interference in cell phones and other technologies, it’s clear that the government are grappling with more channels, and trying harder than ever to monitor public opinion.
Gmail, Google’s email service, was relatively stable until about a month ago, when users found that Google chat was regularly disabled at certain times of the day, and that when sending or saving emails the service would disconnect.
Gmail itself as a web service often failed to load, and users were forced to try several methods including loading in HTML basic view, reloading repeatedly and using different URLs (mail.google.com or with https://) instead of the usual Gmail.com.
Typically, encountering problems within the Chinese cyberspace can be solved if a user routes their connection to other countries by using a free proxy or paid-for Virtual Private Network (VPN). Using free proxies such as Freegate or TOR had already become a hassle, but paid-for VPNs were still effective.
Since Gmail was targeted, however, one of the biggest paid-for VPN services, Witopia, has been the victim of attacks as well. It seems Google, even with its retreat from China, is facing pressures larger than ever.
21 Mar 2011 | Index Index, minipost
Google has blamed the Chinese government for disrupting its services after users experienced problems with accessing their emails. Some users have also claimed that their email accounts have been hacked into. Just over two weeks ago some Chinese Google email users were targets of hacking attempts that were described by Google as politically motivated, specifically aimed at activists.
8 Mar 2011 | Index Index, minipost
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.
26 Jan 2011 | Uncategorized
Blogs, chatrooms and comment pages are the perfect locations in cyberspace for those who wish to demean, harrass, and humiliate individuals. Hate speech has always been a problem for defenders of extensive liberty of expression, but the Internet provides open platforms, the cloak of anonymity, and Google-enhanced discoverability: a heady mix for any would-be vilifier.
Where once the foul thoughts of non-entities would fester in the obscurity of private diaries and ephemeral hand-printed flyers, today they can climb the Google rankings aided by the hidden hand of its impersonal algorithms. What floats to the surface via a search isn’t necessarily pleasant, and individuals are often powerless to take action against the taint of personal abuse.
The philosopher Brian Leiter has coined the term “cyber-cesspools” to describe these repositories of abuse. He argues in his contribution to The Offensive Internet (eds. Saul Levmore and Martha D Nussbaum) that US Constitutional law recognises limits to “low-value” speech, and penalises defamation in other contexts, yet fear of over-zealous self-censorship by website owners has discouraged extension of legal prohibitions into the virtual world.
What is special about Internet cyber-speech, he points out, is that it tends to be permanent, divorced from context, and available to anyone. The harms this can cause are real. His solution is to require Google to set up a panel of neutral arbitrators to investigate the claims of private individuals that they are being harmed by the search returns, and then to delist, offer the abused a right to reply, or require the site’s proprietor to offer evidence that neither course of action is merited.
Leiter’s identification of the problem is important, and his analysis of causes sound, but any solution should provide a better situation than the status quo. In many real cases the difficulty of sifting through vile abuse and counter-abuse, would make mucking out the Augean stables an attractive alternative. Who in their right minds would ever take on such a role? And as Leiter himself discovered, attempts to control cyber-cess often generate new and larger pools of abuse. Internet pollution won’t be going away soon, I fear. Perhaps our best hope is to develop greater tolerance.
