Tips on subverting China's censorship of Flickr
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Blog: Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield tells how to get around China's  blocking of Yahoo photo-sharing site.
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In an obvious effort to keep its citizens from seeing content that it hasn't already pre-approved, the Chinese government is about to block video sites it doesn't control.
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Internet search engine Google has been accused of censoring the Chinese news service that it launched two weeks ago. Web hosting company Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT) reported that Google&#39;s Chinese news
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By Bruce Einhorn and Ben Elgin  Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft endured a wave of public disapproval earlier this year over their compliance with Chinese censorship of their websites.
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Wikipedia's English site is again blocked in China--possibly due to upcoming Communist Party Congress.
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(InfoWorld) - U.S. Congressman Chris Smith said that top American technology companies are failing to prevent censorship and other human rights abuses in China, writing Saturday in a letter to The Wall Street Journal. "There is enormous profit potential, but entering the Chinese market means challenging a repressive regime on basic human rights tenets. Sadly, some of America's largest tech firms are currently failing this new test of corporate responsibility," wrote Smith, a Republican from New Jersey and a member of the Foreign Services Committee. Smith said that representatives from Yahoo, Google, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft appeared at an April, 2006 Congressional hearing he convened and "they all acknowledged that their companies have enabled dictatorships to censor democracy and human rights promotion on the Internet." He also said that "Yahoo and Cisco have evenÂ helped the Chinese government incarcerate Internet usersÂ for pro-democracy activity." Court documents and evidence from human rights groups have shown that Yahoo's Hong Kong subsidiary, Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong), cooperated with Chinese police in cases against journalist Shi Tao and political activist Li Zhi, and that material provided by the company may have led to their conviction. Shi was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment, Li to eight years. In January, Smith re-introduced "The Global Online Freedom Bill of 2007," would give individuals like Shi and Li the right to seek redress in U.S. courts, if they believe their freedom of expression was compromised by a U.S. company. Internet companies would be required to inform the Office of Global Internet Freedom -- to be created if the bill is signed into law -- of keywords and search parameters they are filtering. They must also notify the Office of any restrictions on Internet information access with which they must comply in order to do business in a foreign country. Companies can be fined up to $2 million for violation of these principles, with individuals liable for up to $100,000. The bill provides for $50 million to establish the Office of Global Internet Freedom. The bill cited nine countries, including China, Iran, and North Korea, for blocking, restricting, and monitoring the Internet and its citizens' use of it, according to a January 8 statement from Smith's office. Later in January, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Vodafone Group agreed to develop aÂ code of conductÂ with a coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to promote freedom of expression and privacy rights. The parties involved said that they would develop a framework that would hold signatories accountable for their actions in the areas of freedom of expression and privacy rights. Eighteen NGOs are participating in the guidelines' development, including: Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School; Business for Social Responsibility; Electronic Frontier Foundation; Human Rights Watch; and Reporters Without Borders. One observer felt the tech firms were now between a rock and a hard place. "Technology companies now have the unenviable position of moving into the media realm, which is tightly controlled in China," said Danny Levinson, publisher of BDL Media's ChinaCSR.com and the China CSR monthly magazine. "When dealing with corporate social responsibility in China, foreign technology companies are easier targets than firms in other sectors because they are much more high profile than, say, the mining companies providing poor labor oversight and textile companies polluting the environment," Levinson said.
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What? Protecting personal data, Beijing style? Google is recommending that global privacy regulators take a leaf out of Asia's book when they are drawing up the rules.â¦
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Stricter legislation Flickr's introduction of content filters in Germany last week has provoked protests in blogs and web forums globally.â¦
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China will intensify controls of the  growing numbers of bloggers using the Internet to lay bare  their thoughts, politics and even bodies, the country&#39;s chief  censor has announced.
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China's government has strategically deployed the Internet to economic advantage, while clamping down on undesirable content and use.
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China&#039;s Internet regulators are stepping up controls on blogs and search engines to block material it considers unlawful or immoral, the government said Friday.
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In a digital arms race, China's Internet controls might be used for more than censorship.
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Backed by &quot;armies&quot; of cyber-police, China is spearheading an increasingly sophisticated movement by repressive regimes to restrict the Internet, a global media watchdog said in its annual report.
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A new tool aimed at circumventing Internet filters used by some governments was released Friday, offering hopes for freer access to information for activists, journalists and others.
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I've been emailing today with photographers who use Flickr to manage their sets and collections. They like it that people can view their pictures publicly, but they want to control how they're used. RSS, used as a way to distribute pictures, is a new idea for many of them.  Based on these conversations I think it's important that they have a way to: 1. Turn off the RSS feed for their pictures. 2. To have their pictures not included in RSS feeds based on tags and searches. 3. To include their pictures in RSS feeds, but only links to them, and the titles and descriptions, but not as enclosures. Of course this recommendation isn't just for Flickr, it's a good idea for any photo-sharing site.
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Internet users in Beijing and Shanghai said attempts to access Google&#160;and other search engines were successful Friday, despite claims on a U.S. blog that traffic to these&#160;sites was redirected&#160;to Chinese search engine Baidu.com.The claim first surfaced on TechCrunch, a U.S. blog that largely covers Internet startups before being picked up by other sites. The headline of that post alleged &quot;Baidu hijacking Google traffic In China,&quot; but offered no evidence to prove the claim apart from an undated, modified screenshot showing Baidu&#39;s Web page below the URL for Google Blogsearch.In a follow-up post, TechCrunch said &quot;new reports have surfaced that would indicate that China has unilaterally blocked all three major search engines in China and is redirecting all requests to Baidu.&quot; That report cited posts on other blogs, where users claimed to have been redirected from U.S. search sites to Baidu.A Google spokeswoman in Beijing did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.However, several Internet users -- four in Beijing and two in Shanghai -- reported on Friday morning that search engines operated by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, including Google Blogsearch, one of the sites reportedly most affected, were accessible. Attempts to reach these sites had not been redirected to Baidu, they said.Internet censorship is a serious problem in China, and regulators routinely&#160;block access to sites&#160;with content they don&#39;t like. But Chinese officials very rarely comment on censorship efforts, making it difficult for users to determine when a site has been blocked or is inaccessible for other reasons.Timing can be an important factor, with Chinese censors blocking access to some Web sites around politically sensitive dates, such as the June 4 anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre and the Chinese Communist Party Congress, a political confab held once every five years to choose top leaders and set policy that is now underway in Beijing.Access to a search engine can also be blocked if a user searches for a politically sensitive word, such as a search for information on the banned Falungong religious sect.Tracking the ebb and flow of censorship efforts can be a challenge, as access to sites can be blocked and opened, seemingly by whim. On Wednesday, Wikipedia remained blocked in China and access to YouTube was shut off. But censors eased off on other sites, opening up access to Google&#39;s Blogspot blogging service and permitting users to view pictures on Flickr, which had been blocked even though the site was accessible in China.Even when Web sites are accessible in China, there can be moments when sites cannot be reached. For example, one of the Chinese Internet users in Beijing contacted for this story said he was unable to reach Google.com three days ago. Attempts to reach the site were not redirected to Baidu, and Google has been accessible during the last couple of days, he said.While the Chinese government may not be redirecting search-engine traffic to Baidu, censors did this in 2002, just before the previous Party Congress opened in Beijing. At that time, censors cut off access to Google and redirected traffic to several local search engines, including Baidu. However, the rerouting did not affect all users and did not appear to be done at a national level, analysts said at that time.&#160;
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Bloggers have used the Internet to force Chinese officials into investigating what appears to have been a brutal beating by other government officials.