FACT - Freedom Against Censorship Thailand

หนุ่มขอนแก่นฟ้องโชติศักดิ์-เว็บฟ้าเดียวกัน-ประชาไท หมิ่นพระบรมเดชานุภาพ
Prachatai: April 28, 2008

http://www.prachatai.com/05web/th/home/11993

เมื่อเวลาประมาณ 12.30 น. เว็บไซต์ผู้จัดการและไอเอ็นเอ็นรายงานข่าวกรณีนายสุนิมิต จิระสุข อายุ 36 ปี เจ้าของกิจการส่วนตัวชาวขอนแก่น เดินทางเข้าแจ้งความกับเจ้าหน้าที่ตำรวจสถานีตำรวจภูธรเมืองขอนแก่น เพื่อดำเนินคดีกับนายโชติศักดิ์ อ่อนสูง ข้อหาหมิ่นพระบรมเดชานุภาพ กรณีที่ไม่ยืนถวายความเคารพเมื่อได้ยินเพลงสรรเสริญพระบารมีในโรงภาพยนตร์ ตามประมวลกฎหมายอาญา ม.116 (2)…นอกจากนี้ยังแจ้งความดำเนินคดีกับเว็บไซต์ ‘ฟ้าเดียวกัน’ และเว็บไซต์ ‘ประชาไท’ ซึ่งมีกระทู้เกี่ยวกับกรณีของนายโชติศักดิ์ ซึ่งนายสุนิมิตระบุว่า มีการแสดงความเห็นกว่า 90 ความเห็น มีทั้งเห็นด้วยและไม่เห็นด้วยกับการกระทำของนายโชติศักดิ์ แต่ส่วนใหญ่จะเห็นด้วย และแสดงถึงการต่อต้านระบบกษัตริย์ ซึ่งเป็นเรื่องที่ไม่อาจยอมรับได้ในฐานะคนไทยที่เคารพรักสถาบันกษัตริย์  พร้อมกันนี้ยังเรียกร้องให้กระทรวงไอซีทีออกมาแสดงความรับผิดชอบต่อกรณีดังกล่าวด้วย

[FACT comments: It's all about money. We don't think such a fund could be large enough to protect Chinese victims of censorship without Yahoo!'s bankruptcy! Too little, too late. And how much will be used in administration and staff expences or eaten up by lawyers? If Yahoo! is serious, we expect to see transparency.]

Yahoo! fund aids ‘cyber dissidents’ in China
by Glenn Chapman
Agence France-Presse: April 2, 2008

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080403/tc_afp/uschinainternetrightscompanyyahoo

Yahoo! has set up a fund to atone for revealing “cyber dissidents” to Chinese officials to aid people jailed for human rights views posted on the Internet…The fund is administered by Harry Wu, a widely-known Chinese dissident who spent 19 years in labor camps for voicing his opinions. He declined to specify how much money is in the Yahoo Human Rights Fund.

[FACT comments: A little geeky but the truth is, we just don't know how much surveillance is happening.]

OPEN THOUGHT
Better to be safe than sorry when it comes to email security
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
Bangkok Post Database: February 27, 2008

Am I being paranoid, or is big brother finally waking up and keeping a watchful eye on our communications and how we use the Internet, especially email?

I received an email the other day from one of my favourite sources who pointed out that his home ISP had suddenly taken the rather dubious step of blocking access to other, in this case overseas, port 25 SMTP servers. My friend did a bit of digging around and apparently this move was to stop spam.

Many Thai ISPs (not that there are many left) now force the user to use only the authorised ISP email gateway for sending email. The problem is that many Thai ISP email servers are themselves blacklisted as spammers. Read the rest of this entry »

[FACT comments: It would seem our neighbours are leaps-and-bounds beyond Thailand’s poloyical incompetents.]

Malaysia’s Opposition Mounts Campaign in Cyberspace
By Ivy Sam
Agence France Presse: February 19, 2008

Malaysia goes to the polls next month and this time the campaign is going online, as opposition parties turn to blogs, SMS and YouTube to dodge a virtual blackout on mainstream media.

Major newspapers and television stations — many partly owned by parties in the ruling coalition — are awash with flattering stories on the government and its achievements ahead of March 8 general elections.

The opposition parties rate barely a mention, but thanks to the Internet they have begun campaigning feverishly in cyberspace with the aim of reaching young, urban, educated voters.

“They control the television but we’ve got YouTube now,” said 31-year-old Lee Sean Li, an accountant who avidly surfs the Net for alternative news and complains there are only negative glimpses of the opposition in the main media.

Lee was delighted to see parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang post a speech on the upcoming elections, just minutes after Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi dissolved parliament earlier this month.

“I was impressed at how professional he was and it is a clever use of technology,” Lee said, adding that 67-year-old Lim is one of the most “wired” politicians in the country.

While many of his generation may struggle to send an email, Lim runs three blogs which are meticulously updated with multiple posts every day, and many of the party’s other leaders follow suit.

“Blogging is one way to get word out and an opportunity to circumvent media control,” said Lim from the Democratic Action Party (DAP), which is aiming to dent the government’s thumping majority in the upcoming vote.

“We cannot neutralise the state-controlled media,” he told AFP.

“But Internet pick-up rates will keep getting higher. We will not be blacked out forever.”

Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranks Malaysia 124 out of 169 on its worldwide press freedom index, and says the main media are “often compelled to ignore or to play down the many events organised by the opposition”.

One of the alternative pioneers is Malaysiakini.com, an online news journal which since it began operating in 1999 has been raided by police and denied media passes for its reporters to cover government events.

Co-founder Steven Gan said the use of the Internet as a campaign tool was hampered by penetration rates which remain low in rural areas where the government enjoys strong support.

“But in urban areas, it is significant. They now have this alternative access to news and other views,” he said.

The Malaysiakini website receives about 100,000 daily hits and has struggled to cope with the volume since an unprecedented series of public protests against the government broke out in recent months.

“During this election period, I expect it to increase by tenfold and we are preparing for that kind of explosion in the coming weeks. We have upgraded the bandwidth for better access,” Gan said.

Malaysia’s Islamic opposition party PAS runs its own online journal HarakahDaily.net which features six different online television channels and original reporting on the election.

And political dissident and ex-deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim also writes his own blog which has news links and videos of his Keadilan party’s campaign activities.

Anwar last year used the site to release a video clip which allegedly showed a high-profile lawyer brokering top judicial appointments — a scandal which triggered a full royal commission of inquiry.

Well-known blogger Jeff Ooi, who is standing as a DAP candidate in the elections, said news and views on blogs appealed to a cross-section of people and was not limited to urban youth alone.

“It is not really restricted by age. We are attracting many concerned citizens who are above 45 years old and these are the people who are more interested in politics and the oppositions’ viewpoint,” he said.

“Our campaign videos will be transmitted through YouTube because it is unlikely for television stations to broadcast them, of course,” said Ooi, who is facing a defamation suit by the government-linked New Straits Times Press.

Malaysian bloggers have been heavily criticised by the government which accuses them of spreading lies, and threatened severe punishment and tighter controls on Internet use.

[FACT comments: Bet you thought it was just Thailand. In fact, Internet freedom is under threat in many ‘democratic’ countries. Governments, elsewhere as here, try to get ISPs to do their dirty work...for free...by using repressive laws such as Thailand’s cybercrime law. A bloc of ISPs could easily collectively refuse to filter for government. Money talks.]

Support grows to lock down the Internet with ISP filtering
MICHAEL GEIST
Bangkok Post Database: February 13, 2008

As digital technologies and the Internet began to emerge, many content companies responded by betting on the ability of technological protection measures to re-assert the control that was rapidly slipping from their grasp. The vision of control through technology required considerable coordination - the insertion of encryption on content distributed to consumers, cooperation from electronics makers to respect the technological limitations within their products, and new legal provisions to prohibit attempts to pick the new digital locks.

A decade later, the strategy lies in tatters. Many content owners have dropped digital locks after alienating disgruntled consumers fed up with their inability to freely use their personal property. Electronics manufacturers have similarly rebelled, frustrated at the imposition of artificial limitations that constrain their products and profitability. To top it off, the US architect of the legal strategy last year acknowledged that the legislative initiatives to support the digital lock approach have failed.

In recent months, a new strategy has begun to emerge. With the industry gradually admitting that locking-down content does not work, it has now dangerously shifted toward locking down the Internet. Read the rest of this entry »

A little Valentine’s heart
[FACT comments: We missed Valentine's Day (but Happy V.D. anyway!). This article reflects on the real meaning of technology and our future. Will the next generations have  anything we created to remember us by?]

OPEN THOUGHT
Putting pen to paper for posterity’s sake
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
Bangkok Post Database: February 6, 2008

As mankind progresses, technology makes things smaller, more efficient and more ethereal. Tracking the planets as they move through the heavens used to require massive feats of engineering and construction. Stonehenge was what the Druids of England used to look at the stars and many of its stones still remain standing today. Later we had sextants, then books. Today, we have software or even free websites that can track the stars with much more accuracy than what was available 6,500 years ago.

However, the mechanism, a temple of carefully-aligned monoliths and stones, that was used to track the planets 6,500 years ago is a UNESCO world heritage site. The sextants that early mariners used can still be dug up from the sea floor, rusted but intact. In the ’70s and ’80s I remember we had a 100 year ephemeris published by the US Navy. In another 100 years it might just about still be around, if the termites have not had it for dinner first.

But what of software, or worse, web sites? Will they exist next year, let alone in a century’s time? Read the rest of this entry »

[FACT comments: Some sense from government!]

EU declines to support censorship
OpenNet Initiative: January 26, 2008

EFF reported recently that the EU’s report on the Cultural Industries in Europe will go out without amendments recommending ISP filtering and copyright extensions. Language that was intended to push ISP-level filtering was introduced by the music industry last year, with an aim to curb copyright infringement. Protecting copyrights with filtering is difficult to do without overblocking. It is also hard to do without making it more difficult to use and share copyrighted material legally.