A quick follow on to my post from last week trying to summarize my friend Rebecca MacKinnon’s wide ranging and fascinating talk on Chinese internet culture. OxfamUnwrapped.com: Alpaca One of the commenters on my blog - Tumshie - was kind enough to point out that the video used by Chinese activ...

I mentioned two days ago that Zimbabwean authorities were holding a two-year old child prisoner, along with his activist parents. Denford Magora drew my attention to the situation, and has been orchestrating an online campaign to seek the child’s release. The AP reports today that Nigel Mutema...

During the conflict between Russia and Georgia this past summer, my friend Evgeny Morozov decided to study the dynamics of “cyberwar” by becoming a partisan. He lurked on Russian-language bulletin boards and followed instructions to download software that would allow him to participate i...

Folks who study internet filtering found their phones ringing yesterday as reporters sought comment on the news that Chinese internet authorities were warning a number of major websites to clean up “large amounts of low and vulgar content that violates social morality and damages the physical ...

Tech blogs in the UK and US are reporting that users of six British ISPs are being prevented from editing Wikipedia. Looking at why this is the case offers some revealing insights about just how dificult it is to censor the Internet without breaking important pieces of it. Several British ISPs - rep...

I’ve been in Dubai for the past three days at a World Economic Forum event. WEF is starting a new project called “Global Agenda Councils”, and they’ve invited people to participate in conversations on 68 topics, ranging from the very broad (”Faith”), the very scar...

Another day, another book chapter. No, not the book I’m hoping to write over the next n months - a book on citizen media in crisis situations being put together by a pair of academics in Britain. Given that some of the folks mentioned in this piece periodically read this blog, and that lots of...

Hundreds of Pakistani lawyers are protesting Pervez Musharraf’s attacks on the judiciary - and the failure of Pakistan’s new government to overturn Musharraf’s actions - with a series of marches from Karachi to Islamabad, referred to as “the long march“. There’s n...

The IPKat has come across a privacy case in which Max Mosley attempted to enjoin the News of the World from showing video footage of his allegedly Nazi-themed orgy with five prostitutes. The footage was posted on the News of the World’s website at the end of March. It was then voluntarily taken do...

At ETech, a few weeks back, I had the pleasure of doing a video interview with Xeni Jardin. Xeni’s one of my very favorite journalists, in part because she’s passionate about both technology and the developing world - she’s travelled and reported extensively in Latin America and We...