Group items tagged

Shutdown of large torrents site in Russia for allegedly distributing illegal content. Not read in detail.

"The government plans to enroll its officials in a range of courses, from stress-busting to the art of speaking persuasively." It seems that Russia is realising that a such clips as their president falling down due to drunkenness is no longer a quick news byte. Rather it is a viral video that will circulate the web for years to come. As a reaction, it seems Russia is becoming more self-conscious.

The article talks about "Access Controlled", a new book from the Open Net Initiative that examines the new second and third generation filtering techniques employed by governments such as Russia and Belarus that are far more subtle than China's 'Great Firewall' but can censor unwanted content as effectively.

Howard Schdmit, The Whitehouse's Cybersecurity coordinator has revealed the US Government's plans for tackling attacks on it's networks. He has promised transparency. The official announcement (this bookmark) is very vague in it's initiatives. It will be interesting to see whether their can really separate US government networks from other parts of the Internet.  Cyber attacks are definitely increasing and play a major part in conflicts between countries. China amongst others is said to have attacked & attempted to hack and launch DoS attacks on US government networks and Russia shut down the Georgian communications infrastructure during the last week between the two countries et. )

The article looks at the growing global trend for net regulation. Our interest is where Australia, as a result of our drafted internet filtering system, fits in this global picture of regulation. Reporters Without Borders has drawn up lists which groups nations in terms of their level of regulation. Appropriately as a democracy Australia is not listed under "Enemies of the Internet" which names China, North Korea, Egypt and Cuba. Yet disconcertingly we are given the label of "Under Surveillance" which lists us alongside Turkey, Russia, South Korea and the UAE.

The first domain names using the Cyrillic script are now available after Russia was assigned a new Cyrillic domain by ICANN. Ealier that month Arabic script was introduced in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. ICANN regards the new native-script domain names as a tool to make the web more global but critics fear that Russian authorities could be encouraged to follow China's example and introduce Internet censorship.

A politician, a political analyst and the editor of the Russian edition of Newsweek have been, supposedly, framed by the Kremlin in order to discredit them. Videos of them in compromising positions have been distributed in the Internet: the web as a channel through which public opinion can be molded by totalitarian states. Political campaigns could "learn" a lot from the Kremlin's actions... 

Increasing "probes" on US military networks has led to the appointment of a senior general to Cyber Command operations and approximately 30,000 troops have been re-assigned from IT support to "the frontlines of cyberwarfare". The US is increasingly anxious about the vulnerability of its networks to attack. Chinese, Russian and Korean hackers have been targeted as alleged attackers so far. There is concern that cyberwarfare techniques being used by the US are outpacing the ability to develop policy surrounding their use.

Interesting piece dissecting the Kremlin's Plan to Prevent Facebook Revolution (yes, that probably requires the comedy Russian accent) - the assumption that people who *currently* use the Internet apolitically will *always* use the Internet apolitically doesn't necessarily hold.