Review of Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”.
Read it here
Tag: internet
Algeria and Iraq shut down internet to prevent exam cheating
Absurd, stupid, neanderthal.
Read it here
UK, US join “internet’s biggest enemies”
The US and the UK have made it onto RSF’s “enemies of internet freedom” annual list for the first time:
United States: This is the first time the US has made it onto RSF’s list. While the US government doesn’t censor online content, and pours money into promoting Internet freedom worldwide, the National Security Agency’s unapologetic dragnet surveillance and the government’s treatment of whistleblowers have earned it a spot on the index.
United Kingdom: The European nation has been dubbed by RSF as the “world champion of surveillance” for its recently-revealed depraved strategies for spying on individuals worldwide. The UK also joins countries like Ethiopia and Morocco in using terrorism laws to go after journalists. Not noted by RSF, but also important, is the fact that the UK is also cracking down on legal pornography, forcing Internet users to opt-in with their ISP if they wish to view it and creating a slippery slope toward overblocking. This is in addition to the government’s use of an opaque, shadowy NGO to identify child sexual abuse images, sometimes resulting instead in censorship of legitimate speech.
I have lost count of the ways what these two countries do with one hand completely undermines what they do with the other – and that applies to a whole range of policies aside from internet freedom.
Saudis like to share
For people whose society is organized into a rather extreme public/private divide, Saudis turn out to love sharing information about themselves online. It turns out they share the most of any country on earth.
From a slideshow by Mary Meeker, a renowned analyst on internet trends whose annual presentation at the D11 Conference is a geek favorite:
[via Daring Fireball]
Middle Eastern Telecom Accused of Working With Saudi Arabia to Spy on Citizens
Our occasional contributor Paul Mutter has a piece on the Mobily hacking scandal with tons of links and analysis over at Tech President. We rarely get so much detail about Middle Eastern net censorship.
Funny web
Why is it that I am finding it so difficult to access the sites of Yediot Ahronot and al-Hayat today?
Haaretz blocked in the UAE
Remember I was telling you about having a weird experience with the Haaretz website a few days ago, being occasionally blocked from accessing it?
Apparently the block is now official in the UAE. Here’s what a friend there got when he tried to access it:
Haaretz access banned from Egypt?
A friend wrote this morning saying he couldn’t access the Israeli newspaper Haaretz’s site. I check and could read the main page fine, but clicking on stories such as this one I came up with the same message he received:
Anyone having the same issue, or know what that message means? The problem appears intermittent.
Links January 29th and February 3rd
Automatically posted links for January 29th through February 3rd:
- Qatar reports new damage to Gulf undersea cables – Fourth time in a week – I think there’s a conspiracy afoot
- Libya Sovereign Wealth Fund to Shun U.S., Ghanem Says – Qadhafi puts his country’s money elsewhere
- Ezzedine Choukri: “?? ???? ????? ?? ????? ???? ??? ?” – Rafah episode shows current situation is losing one for all
- The path of centrist political Islam by Khalil Al-Anani – Al-Anani says MB hopeless, Wasat way forward
- Robert Fisk: The curious case of the forged biography – Fisk, hagiographer of Saddam Hussein
- Making a Great Arab City – I like this Rami Khouri piece on Dubai even though I am skeptical, because it praises the tradition of Arab cosmopolitan urbanism
- Arab Media Watch Arab Media Watch > Home – UK outfit combats anti-Arab bias in press
- Hamas explodes a giant hole in Egypt’s political cover – Op-ed takes Egypt’s hypocrisy on Palestine to task
- It’s time to herald the Arabic science that prefigured Darwin and Newton – Faraday prize winner defends historic Arab scholarship
- For sale: West?s deadly nuclear secrets – Whistleblower says top US officials sold nuke secrets to Pakistan (the person is not named in the article, but others say it’s Marc Grossman)
- Al-Jazeera Journalist Arrested in Egypt – Howeida Taha arrested, again
- AFP: Egypt censors book fair – Mohammed Choukri, Milan Kundera, Elias Khoury, Hanan al-Sheikh censored from Cairo Book Fair.