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 Governance Forum, said yesterday that the IGF's mandate should [...]
The Internet Governance Forum is winding down today in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. There have been a lot of very constructive conversations in workshops [...]
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 [...]
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 to expire [...]
Since Obama became President - and yes, I voted for him - there has been a great deal of optimism and energy around the idea that the Internet can be used to improve or "reboot" our democracy. The Administration has hired some great people to [...]
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 on Internet freedom, praises Icann for being influenced [...]
Upon being appointed as ICANN's new CEO in Sydney, Rod Beckstrom gave a rousing speech in which he stressed the vital importance of free expression on the Internet:
I believe in a world where every human being has the ability to communicate with other human beings openly [...]
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 of the full web page. I [...]
UPDATE (Monday 10am London time): Comments received to this post
so far indicate that the Boxun.com upon which this post is based may have significantly exaggerated the situation. I am be investigating further and
will report back. Clearly I posted prematurely and for that I apologize.
----
Pseudonymous blogger dafengqixi, writing on [...]
Nobody else appears to have reported this - at least not anywhere I can find - but last week marked a major turning point for China's engagement with ICANN. It was probably also a major turning point in China's strategy on Internet governance.
The Chinese government sent Cui Shutian, Deputy [...]
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 Times: "There's been this [...]
This photo, posted last week on Twitpic by a pseudonymous blogger claiming to be based in Hangzhou, shows a document included in the box of a new Sony Vaio computer. (Click to enlarge.)
It is titled: "Sony Disclaimer Notice Concerning the Green Dam - Youth Escort" [...]
I'm not sure what the Chinese government is thinking, or whether certain parts of certain ministries and party apparatus have gotten completely out of control.
Until recently, it had seemed to me that the Chinese government was managing its censorship system with surprising success: censoring enough (combined [...]
Facing widespread public mockery, industry opposition, and now U.S. government criticism of its mandate that PC vendors must pre-install the Green Dam-Youth Escort software, the Chinese government turned it sights on Google China late last week. Horror of horrors, when you type smutty words and phrases [...]
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 official told the China Daily "that all security problems reported [...]
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 intent of protecting children from harmful Internet content. The proposed implementation [...]
Several primary documents related to the government-mandated Green Dam censorware/malware - and the opposition to it - have emerged over the past 12 hours or so. Here are some of them:
In chatrooms like this one people have been posting scanned copies of the above [...]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 software reportedly mandated by the Chinese government. Any web site a Green Dam user [...]
...so reads one of the many sarcastic netizen comments translated by ChinaSmack. It's like being mandated to use only one brand, made by one company, and word from people who've used them is that they're very low quality....
(Note that the official government edict mandating Green Dam, along with background [...]
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 blocked his efforts to visit [...]
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 into China. The PDF [...]
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 software which according to the Journal, [...]
This cartoon was created today by Chinese Twitter user "junde" to protest China's censorship of Twitter: The bird bound and gagged represents Twitter. The crab catching the bird is a well-established symbol for censorship used by Chinese netizens. (For the full history of how [...]
This week's issue of Businessweek has a solid article about how Yahoo! is trying to avoid a repeat of its China mistakes in Vietnam. Yahoo! 360 is very popular among Vietnamese bloggers, but Yahoo! has decided not to host the service out of Vietnam, opting instead to [...]
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 Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which ultimately [...]
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 Western media [...]
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:
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A new form of highly networked authoritarianism is emerging in China. Call it [...]
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 [...]
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 handed and imperfect to be successful on its own, [...]
My friend and colleague Ethan Zuckerman 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 so we could share' [...]
Most readers of this blog have probably heard of the "fifty cent party" - people in China who are either paid or who volunteer to post pro-government opinions and information. If you are not familiar with the "fifty cent party" phenom, last year David Bandurski [...]
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 he and all of [...]
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:
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 research project funded by the University of Hong [...]
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 for speaking slots in the U.N. Human Rights Council's [...]
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 can't be in New York in person I hope you [...]
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 awake for it, but I look forward to' [...]
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 perspectives you're not going to get anywhere else! [...]
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 sure to log in if you want to [...]
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 just its leaders and elites. What do you [...]
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 China for the World." (I'm likely to change that [...]
(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 confirmation hearing about currency manipulation have got everyone in a tizzy. We're off to a [...]
On Tuesday January 13th I visited Ai Weiwei at his home on the outskirts of Beijing. We talked for a bit over an hour while he ate breakfast.
Despite having designed the Birds' Nest Olympic Stadium, Ai became a vocal critic of China's handling of the Olympics. He [...]
When China's first Premier Zhou Enlai was asked in the mid-20th century for his opinion on the historical significance of the 1789 French Revolution, he is said to have replied: "It's too soon to tell." I've started to give the same answer when people ask me about Charter [...]
On Friday Hal Roberts at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society wrote a blog post that has a lot of people rightly worried: Popular Chinese Filtering Circumvention Tools DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix Sell User Data.
Hal has spent quite a lot of time analyzing various circumvention [...]
I've been busy this weekend so it was 1am on Monday morning when I finally looked at the CNN.com "Q&A" interview with me, titled Analyst: China Internet move part of global trend - CNN.com posted at 5:41p.m. EST Saturday January 10. I was interviewed on Friday afternoon Hong Kong/Beijing [...]
China's edgiest blogging platform, Bullog.cn, was shut down this afternoon.
Authorities launched an anti-Internet smut crackdown on Monday. Bullog was not among the websites cited for failure to control "low and vulgar" content.
A line about today's shutdown has already been posted on [...]
I just heard from a Chinese friend who works in the web industry. He says the anti-smut crackdown announced on Monday has already taken three victims at the Guangzhou-based web portal, Netease (Wangyi). He says that this morning， "high ranking officials" were highly angered by some content featured [...]
Yesterday the government announced a crackdown on Internet smut.
Today, they annouced plans for "Netizen Day" on September 14th, which apparently marks 15 years since the first e-mail message was sent from China in 1987.
The new celebratory day (I don't [...]
Seven different government agencies, including the Ministry of Public Security and the State Council Information Office declared war on Internet smut today. 19 Internet companies, including Google, Baidu, Sina, and others, were cited for "violating public morality and harming the physical and mental health of youth [...] 
Holiday greetings 2008
Originally uploaded by RebeccaMacK.
Where else can you go to find out who are the most interesting bloggers in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, and discover what [...]
Jeffrey Rosen has a great article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend titled Google's Gatekeepers. In it he deals with the question of whether we are becoming too overly dependent on a few big web companies like Google - and whether it's wise over the long run [...]
On Thursday this past week, Beijing-based lawyer-blogger Liu Xiaoyuan won Deutsche Welle's annual prize for the Best Chinese Blog. Then on Friday he discovered that the parallel blog he keeps at Sohu.com had been taken down. Fortunately, being a famous blogger, he was able [...]
27 year-old blogger Zhou Shuguang goes by the nom-de-blog "Zola." The tagline of his blog says in English: "You never know what you can do till you try." He seems to be hitting up against the limits of what the Chinese authorities will let him do. [...]
We've got to do this!!
For my many globally-minded readers, note that global experts will be live-blogging the election from around the world. See Voices Without Votes for details.
For anybody who is on the fence who cares at all about technology policy, there's no contest between the [...]
After more than two years of work behind closed doors, the Global Network Initiative is launching this week. That's the corporate code of conduct on free speech and privacy I've been talking about in generalities for quite some time. By midnight Tuesday U.S. East Coast time, the full [...]
Creative Commons is getting hip in Hong Kong: Cantopop starlet and actress Ella Koon has released her photo gallery and desktop/mobile wallpaper under a Creative Commons Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Ella Koon has parked her website at a ".asia" domain. Edmon Chung, [...]
The Open Net Initiative's Information Warfare Monitor project has published a stunning report by "Hacktivist" Nart Villeneuve titled: "Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s TOM-Skype platform." It has been covered by both the New York Times and the Wall Street [...]
Last week, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had a meeting with Cai Mingzhao, Vice Director of China's State Council Information Office - the government body whose "Internet Management Division" is in charge of censoring online content. They discussed Jimmy's concerns about censorship. No deals or agreements [...]
After much work by many people over the past year, Creative Commons Hong Kong will officially launch on October 25th, with CEO Joi Ito and Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig as very special guests. The ceremony and [...]
I've changed my theme and my layout. I've done this for a couple of reasons.
One reason is that I've been using Twitter a great deal lately to post "breaking" stuff I find on the web and in my friends' Twitter streams, and to comment on it. I also post [...]
China's system of filtering websites by blocking web addresses and keywords of overseas websites has come to be known as the "Great Firewall." (No that is not it's official name - I believe the term was first coined by some frustrated bloggers.) But the GFW, for short, is only a [...]
Last week I wrote a post titled "Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorship," in which I challenged Hugh McLeod, a.k.a. "Gapingvoid" to draw a map illustrating the world as viewed from Silicon Valley. This is the result. (Click to see the original, larger version.) Brilliant. Thanks, Hugh!!
[...]This is the opposite of a live blog post, despite the fact that I was listed as a live-blogger at last week's Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay (near San Francisco). I am now at the iSummit in Sapporo, which I will write about soon. For [...]
I've just arrived in Half Moon Bay for Fortune Magazine's Technology Brainstorm conference. A couple months ago they asked us to submit the answers to three questions: 1) What is the most exciting technology innovation you've seen in the past 12 months? 2) What [...]
Ethan Zuckerman has done more startups than I have. I'm incredibly lucky that I launched my first one - the non-profit citizen media organization Global Voices - with Ethan nearly four years ago, and even luckier that it has so far been pretty successful. Quitting while I'm ahead, [...]
The most common method used by academics to map or track what bloggers are talking about in various countries is by counting the use of various keywords and putting them into categories, then figuring out how the various conversations - tagged by subject matter - seem to cluster. The Chinese [...]
Marcus Brauchli, who I first ran into on a boat going down the Yangtze doing a story about the Three Gorges Dam, and who threw some rather good parties in Shanghai in the late 90s (including a pajama party in the Peace Hotel), is now editor of the [...]
Photo by Neha Viswanathan: A small subset of the Global Voices bloggers who met in Budapest.
(Apologies in advance for the length of this post. I've decided to subject my readers to this even-longer-than-usual "brain dump" because at least a few people out there are [...]
An interview with me, talking about the role of multinational companies in Chinese Internet censorship, followed by a great exchange with Danwei.org's Jeremy Goldkorn, aired on On The Media last Friday. I was traveling and so I've only just listened to it. It's online here:
You can read the [...]
(Photo courtesy Patrick Philippe Meier)
The public part of the Global Voices Summit is over, and the blog posts about it are piling up around the web. But the meeting continues for GV project participants, website contributors, editors, and others who [...]
This slideshow is automatically generated from a feed of photos uploaded to Flickr from the Global Voices Summit in Budapest. If you're not in the room, see the webcast, liveblog, and twitter stream. You can also join the conversation on the #globalvoices IRC channel at [...]
The 2008 Global Voices Citizen Media Summit has now begun. If you're not in the room you can watch the live webcast here. A live IRC web chat is taking place on freenode.net at #globalvoices (join from mibbit.com if you aren't familiar [...]
