<IT WORLD> Web
police show their power By
Martin J Young
HUA HIN, Thailand - Internet
services across Iran were disrupted this week as
the government stepped up its offensive against
online activity prior to national elections in
early March. Iran, no stranger to Internet
censorship, rendered email services and social
networking websites inaccessible.
Secure
browsing and virtual private networking (VPN)
software vendors were also blocked as they are
often used to circumvent government web filters.
The heavy handedness prompted an
outcry from media
organizations, businesses, education institutions,
and private web users, but no communication from
the government has been forthcoming.
Foreign websites using the https secure
protocol were not available, which rendered
thousands of people without email, banking or
finance services. Enterprise users relying on VPN
technology to access computers on networks in
other countries were also stifled.
Internet usage in Iran has expanded to
around 30 million people during the past decade.
Government officials intend to create a "pure"
national system that would comprise a closed
intranet for the Islamic Republic isolating it
from the rest of the world.
Thailand has
also been tightening its grip on web activity. It
was the first country to publicly endorse
Twitter's country by country content filters, and
is employing more methods of tracking and
monitoring its citizens. Internet services within
the kingdom have been facing bottlenecks and
service outages recently as the government ramps
up the sophistication of its Internet filtration
technology.
According to local news
organizations, a high-tech nerve center in the
Bangkok suburbs manned by hundreds of technicians
has blocked an estimated half a million websites
over the past couple of years. Many requests from
within the country are now redirected through the
website of the Ministry of Information and
Communication Thailand (w3.mict.go.th) which
causes slow loading - if the pages are accessible
at all.
The targets are primarily websites
with content that insults the monarchy under
strict lese majeste laws, and pornography, but
thousands of unrelated sites are getting caught in
the digital trawling net as many need to pass
through it to be checked for whether they are on
any government blacklists.
Local and expat
forums and social sites in Thailand have been
flooded with complaints from web users within the
country trying to access innocent international
websites such as email providers, news, and
technology portals and getting instead only white
pages and browser hang-ups. A decrease in Internet
reliability and productivity does not bode well
for a country trying to attract foreign
investment.
The government has also
introduced a scheme called "Cyber Scouts", calling
on public volunteers to trawl the web and report
incidents of monarchy defamation on Thai social
networking websites.
In India, Google was
forced to remove "objectionable content" from one
of its India portals following complaints from
politicians this week and an ongoing court case
involving Facebook, Yahoo and Google could result
in more web censorship in the world's largest
democracy.
Kapil Sibal, India's telecoms
and IT minister, aims to increase web monitoring
for social media in an effort to clamp down on
what he and other politicians consider offensive
and blasphemous material. His suggested that
companies would be asked for information even on
content posted outside India and that the ministry
would evolve guidelines and mechanisms to deal
with the issue.
Meanwhile China keeps
adding bricks to its firewall with no sign of
change in the foreseeable future and Myanmar,
which seems to be slowly awakening from its
military induced slumber, still has a long way to
go to drag itself out of the digital dark ages.
Security Following last week's
revelations that Google has been circumventing
security settings in Apple's Safari browser,
Microsoft accused the search company of doing the
same thing with Internet Explorer (IE). The
software giant has stepped up its offensive
against Google, which has suffered a week of bad
press over data harvesting and privacy issues.
It has been discovered that Google
bypasses IE's P3P privacy protection feature,
which demands that websites present a statement of
intent to the user before placing potentially
malicious or data mining cookies on their
computer. P3P is an official recommendation of the
W3C Web standards body; Google has manipulated its
own policy by adjusting its format and indicating
a benign cookie so that it is automatically
accepted by browsers such as IE that use this
standard.
Microsoft executives are urging
concerned consumers to use IE9, which has a
feature called Tracking Protection that cannot be
bypassed with spurious P3P policies from websites
gathering personal data.
Google responded
by stating that P3P is "impractical" and widely
"non-operational" in addition to "The reality is
that consumers don't, by and large, use the P3P
framework to make decisions about personal
information disclosure". Nowhere was a denial that
they are bypassing this dated protocol to gather
information on web users' browsing habits.
Google is not alone; Facebook, which also
employs data harvesting methods, also stated "the
P3P standard is now out of date and does not
reflect technologies that are currently in use on
the web" on its web page regarding privacy
policies.
Gadgets Google's
gadget gurus have been developing futuristic
glasses that will stream information to the wearer
in real time. The "smart glasses", due to go on
sale at the end of the year, will feature a
heads-up display and will cost around the same as
a smart-phone.
According to the New York
Times, the glasses would be Android powered with a
small screen positioned a few inches from the eye
streaming data over a 3G or 4G connection. The
sci-fi specs would also include a built-in camera
and a GPS-based navigation system that is
manipulated by subtle head tilts.
Naturally the Google goggles would
integrate with the rest of the software in the
Google ecosystem such as Maps and Latitude, a
location-sharing service, and all of the data
therein. The team is already working on the
privacy issues, the primary one being that people
are made aware that they are being recorded by
someone wearing a set of tech specs.
Google has yet to make an official
statement and has not mentioned any advertising
aspects of the project but, given the company's
revenue base, ads are probably not too far behind.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times
Online correspondent based in Thailand.
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