A new paper on Australia's proposed mandatory filtering plan in context of Australia's broader stance on child pornography. It uses the example the consumption of "Japanese Boys Love" manga by people (mainly girls) underage to explore issues around censorship and governance

my own

The European Parliament overwhelmingly voted to explicitly oppose any law or global agreement which would entail ISPs to punish customers for breaches of copyright. They have also demanded that documents surrounding the secret worldwide negotiations, which Australia is also involved in, be released publicly. 

Blog which keeps track of, amongst other issues,ICANN and domain name related topics. A good blog roll as well. 

This article discusses a report which looks at the possibilities of applying an open source model & culture which has been associated with building and proliferating the Mozilla browser to the Obama administration's initiatives to be "more transparent, participatory and collaborative".  

Blog which writes about issues relating to open access media and links to actual open/free media. 

Report demonstrating Microsoft Bing is filtering content in some "Arabian" (Arabic speaking?) countries. They are filtering largely sexual content but also non-sexual content relating to homosexuality and other taboo topics. 

The Chinese government is planning to engage mothers in an effort to apparently  "protect" children. A genuine concern or just legitimization of censorship?

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. )

Rudd will consider Xenaphon's idea of an online ombudsman to help in some unknown way people affected by social media issues such as cyberbullying. 

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

Describes how twitter is being used for citizen participation and "democracy" in various countries from Moldova, Iran and now China. The author proposes that the best way to reduce censorship and promote "democracy" is not political pressure, but to "flood the Chinese market, and those of other countries that restrict freedom of expression, with cutting-edge technology". My opinion: Although Twitter seems to be good at allowing citizens to organise and to create consensus, it does not seem to translate well to actual policy outcome. 

The US government is being encouraged by various committees and "experts" to increase regulation of the Internet. The Internet is compared industry to the car industry before regulation was introduced to make cars safer. Apparently the "Internet Wild West" is over!

Interview with Jason Lanierm, an apparent "digital guru" who has changed his view of open culture to that which promotes a "digital maoism". He proposes that we need to pay people for the brain work that they do instead of encouraging them to be labourers of sorts. 

Short blog post about the loss of privacy that social networks entail. It especially looks at the emergence of foursquare and the foursquare/twitter mashup pleaserobme.com 

The campaign strategy of the newly elected US Senator Scott Brown heavily used the web. Article about how he did this. 

Article from Fibreculture journal.