Internet

The Apple iTunes store Web site and all 8 million or so of its songs, (“Imagine an entertainment superstore that’s open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week” the site urges) are not available in China and haven’t been for more than a week. Not a great loss for iTunes in the very short…

Thanks to Greg Walton, the Asia editor for Infowar Monitor, for passing along this New Scientist article about the rapid commercialization of Internet and e-mail monitoring technology. You can access a preview of Laura Margottini’s piece, but you’ll need a subscription to the magazine or buy online access to get the full article. It’s worth…

Bob Dietz called attention to the Chinese propaganda department’s recent 21-point press directive, first reported by the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. The whole thing in English and Chinese is posted today at Berkeley’s China Digital Times. Among the orders given to the domestic media during the Olympic Games is that they are not to report on…

The self-described anarchist-activist seemed like an unlikely press freedom martyr. But a video blogger named Josh Wolf ended up serving more time in jail for defying a court order than any other journalist in U.S. history. Wolf, then 24, was held for 226 days at a federal penitentiary in Dublin, Calif., for refusing to testify…

Buried in the celebration of China’s now inevitable dominance of the Olympic Games, Xinhua News Agency today reported the death of a former national leader and Mao Zedong’s brief successor with these few words: The Chinese Communist Party’s outstanding party member, a warrior for Communism long tested in his loyalty, a revolutionary for the proletariat, who…

OpenNet Initiative is a go-to source for CPJ and anyone else who is interested in fact-based analysis of the Internet. Its academic approach–it’s a consortium of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the Advanced Network Research Group at…

First, a pointer to Rebecca Mackinnon’s Asia Wall Street Journal oped from yesterday, The Chinese Censorship Foreigners Don’t See . She makes many of the same points I did about how the Great Firewall is leaky, and the control of the Internet in China relies on much more than technology.

Kristin Jones has been doing a great job monitoring the Chinese media and the more unofficial online world. One of the realities she has pointed out is the similarity of coverage across China’s media when sensitive issues crop up. There is a reason for that. An interesting piece, “Screws tighten on mainland journalists,” ran in…

Bloggers in China know that certain words are easily picked out by censors’ keyword searches. So they don’t use them, and their posts stay up longer. But images are harder to detect, particularly if they aren’t labeled.Today, somebody calling himself Qian Tiexian started a thread at the blog aggregator Bullog with the title “Two children.”…

Before I bury them below today’s lengthy post, here are two quick items. If you are stuck behind someone’s filtering system, in China or anywhere else in the world, check out citizenlab’s guidebook in pdf. It tells you how to circumvent the restrictions. And today the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China updated its list of…