flickering pictures

Just a quickie…
For a week now, the world has been Googling Egypt like never before. But not in China, where search engines are blocking search terms like “Egypt” and “Cairo,” keeping people in China from staying up to date on Egypt’s mass revolt. Terms related to the protest are also blocked on Sina, […]

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As it was in Tunisia and Iran, Twitter is a major organizing tool for dissidents in Egypt, and it was certainly one of the sites the government was most concerned about when it took the unprecedented step of shutting down all Internet access across the country a few days ago.
Back on Saturday, I posted a […]

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From Slashdot:

“Law prof Eugene Volokh blogs about a US House of Representatives bill proposed by Rep. Linda T. Sanchez and 14 others that could make it a federal felony to use your blog, social media like MySpace and Facebook, or any other Web media ‘to cause substantial emotional distress through “severe, repeated, and hostile” speech.’ […]

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Writing for an awesome-sounding newspaper called the Tulane Hullabaloo, Jeff Silberman has put together a fine op-ed piece on the silliness of a media culture that bombards us with violent music, TV shows and video games but gets squeamish when somebody says the word “nipple.”
Here’s an excerpt:

On television, for every 10,000 murders, we see one […]

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From the inspirational self-authored obituary of Lasantha Wickramatunge, editor-in-chief of Sri Lanka’s Sunday Leader newspaper, written shortly before he was shot and killed on his way to work:

It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government’s sanctimonious assurances, there […]

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Unless you haven’t turned on a television lately, you know that ten days ago the Israeli army launched a full-scale attack on Hamas forces in Gaza, with the stated aim of halting the barrage of homemade rockets that have been launched into Israeli towns since 2000. As I write this, the fight has left […]

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There are more than 210 million Internet users in China, and according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly all of them want Big Brother watching over their shoulders when they surf.
From the report:

Many Americans assume that China’s internet users are both aware of and unhappy about their government’s oversight and control of […]

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An update on the story of the court-ordered injunction forcing Wikileaks’s U.S. site to shut down. The Swiss-based Julius Baer bank had argued that documents leaked on Wikileaks were stolen and confidential, while Wikileaks said the documents offered insight into the bank’s shady dealings in the Cayman Islands. Now the bank is backing […]

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