Mostly American software companies are competing for a contract
worth millions to help Saudi Arabia block access to Web sites
the Saudi government deems inappropriate for 1/2 a million
users, and want to sell similar contracts to other governments.
Other governments in Muslim nations, Pakistan and the United
Arab Emirates, have interest in the same Internet filtering
companies.
Saudi Arabia, by royal decree, filters virtually all public
Internet traffic to and from Saudi Arabia funneled through a
single control center outside Riyadh since the Internet was
introduced to the kingdom in 1997 and spent two years designing
a centralized control system before gingerly opening the spigot
to the Internet in February 1999.
Dr. Eyas S. al-Hajery, directs the Information Security Center
at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, the
institution that serves as Saudi Arabia's Internet control
valve, and decides what software to buy. Dr. Hajery says his
staff of a dozen employees receives more than 500 suggestions a
day from the public to block sites that the authorities have
missed. The requests are reviewed by the staff and about half of
them are ultimately added to the blacklist up to 7,000 URL's
monthly. Many of the sites forbidden on religious grounds are
gleaned through this process, since the staff members are
primarily focused on ferreting out pornography sites, Dr. Hajery
said. The center also receives more than 100 requests a day to
remove specific sites from the blacklist many because they have
been wrongfully characterized by the SmartFilter software, he
said.
Sites Blocked - Pornography,
SmartFilter came with ready-made categories like pornography and
gambling and was customized to include specific sites the
Anti-Islam orAnti-royal family,
Political and Religious -- Saudi security agencies blacklist
Banned sites are the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights
in the Arabian Peninsula was http://www.cdrhap.com/ and the
Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia
. Also some sites that recount the history of Saudi Arabia.
Riyadh center blocks a site, user sees a warning screen in
English and Arabic, "Access to the requested URL is not
allowed!"
Saudi Arabia is one of the countries with the most centralized
control of Internet content of various types, according to a
report by the advocacy group
Reporters Without Borders
,
Reporters Sans Frontieres
FIGHTING BACK
Saudis dial up foreign Internet service providers, use Web sites
that protect the user's identity or engage in a cat-and-mouse
game with Web sites that frequently change their addresses to
elude filters.
Islah.org
, users send e-mail to a fixed address and receive the new Web
address.
Saudi Arabia is in contract with 10 companies from the United
States, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.
Secure Computing
, of San Jose, Calif.,
Matthew Holt, oversees sales operations in the Middle East for
that currently provides Internet-filtering software to the Saudi
government under a contract that expires in 2003 and wants to
renew that contract.
Websense
, San Diego which sells to half of the Fortune 500 companies,
the United States Army and Saudi Aramco, the large Saudi oil
company
Surf Control
, London
N2H2
, Seattle, Washington
Symantec
, a Cupertino, Calif.
Approximately 95% of american public schools have abdicated all
decision-making to these companies. These companies are not
blocking based on educational standards, they protect all
information about their blocking process and their criteria as
confidential trade secrets, whose mangament is not held publicly
accountable, and who are clearly engaging in viewpoint
discrimination.
See CIPA Requirements
Iran
U.S. Sponsors Anti-Censorship Web Service August 26, 2003
The US government is paying electronic privacy company
Anonymizer Inc
. an undisclosed amount of money to establish and maintain an
anonymizing web proxy service to allow Iranian citizens to
circumvent the country's Internet censorship rules.
The Iranian Anonymizer proxy
will provide access to some of the 15,000 "immoral" websites that
the Iranian government had blocked in May 2003. The sites include
western news services, the Voice of America broadcast service and
the site for Radio Farda, both of which are run by the US
International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB). Pornographic websites
will remain blocked for Iranian surfers. The proxy may result in
an arms race between the Iranian government and the anonymizer
service.
Global Internet Freedom
aimed at combating Internet censorship.
China
, blocks foreign media and human rights web sites using domestic
software.
The United States government establish a computer network to
help
Chinese residents
circumvent their government's fire wall.
Washington does NOT do this for Saudi Arabia and treats this
Middle Eastern Muslim nation differently.
Help the Chinese people out by submitting the Peacefire URL
http://www.peacefire.org/circumventor/simple-circumventor-instructions.html
into the baidu search engine so they can find the software that
disables the filter. Copy and paste this baidu search engine url
into your browser.
http://post.baidu.com/f?kw=root%2Fip%2Fip%2Fipdata%2F255%2Etxt
CHINA, CUBA AND THE INTERNET COUNTERREVOLUTION
www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=728&prog=zgp
A new Carnegie Endowment working paper finds that, contrary to
conventional wisdom, the Internet does not necessarily spell the
demise of authoritarian rule. {
1
}
Yahoo apparently born in Year of the Rat
By JOHN PACZKOWSKI Sure, Yahoo signed China's "Public Pledge on
Self-discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry," a voluntary
agreement to monitor and restrict information deemed "harmful"
by Beijing, but no one thought the company would follow it to
the letter. Reporters Without Borders this week accused the
Internet giant of helping Chinese state security officials catch
and prosecute a journalist who "leaked state secrets,"Beijing's
shorthand for criticizing the government. According to the media
watchdog group, Yahoo willingly handed over information that
enabled officials to link the IP address of the journalist's
computer to a state secret he'd forwarded to foreign media via
e-mail. In this case, the "state secret" was a message warning
Chinese journalists of the dangers of social destabilization and
risks resulting from the return of certain dissidents on the
15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. "We already
knew that Yahoo collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese
regime in questions of censorship, and now we know it is a
Chinese police informant as well," Reporters Without Borders
said in a statement. "Yahoo obviously complied with requests
from the Chinese authorities to furnish information regarding an
IP address that linked Shi Tao to materials posted online, and
the company will yet again simply state that they just conform
to the laws of the countries in which they operate," the
organization said. "But does the fact that this corporation
operates under Chinese law free it from all ethical
considerations? How far will it go to please Beijing? ... It is
one thing to turn a blind eye to the Chinese government's abuses
and it is quite another thing to collaborate." The accusations
highlight the conundrum facing Internet companies battling it
out for a piece of the lucrative Chinese marketplace. How does
one do business in China without supporting a government known
for its censorship of online information?
How China filters Google and is Keeping the information out
Slashdot
points to an interesting collaboration between Harvard Law
School and the University of Toronto - exploring how China
blocks parts of Google to keep the information out. The
OpeNet Intiative
's latest
bulletin
explores how the government first blocked the search engine,
but now simply
blocks
access to the Google cache, and
filters out
content based on a list of keywords. The group does note that
the filter technology is easy to defeat via the use of the
ampersand symbol (&).
CHINA ADDS MORE WEB REGULATIONS
7/15/02 [SOURCE:
CNET
, AUTHOR: Reuters]
The Chinese government has announced new regulations to increase
monitoring and control over text and audio-visual material
published on the Internet. The regulations, effective August 1,
will require Web portals and other Internet publishers to follow
the new rules or face unspecified punishments. Beijing's new
regulations will limit the number and structure of Web
publishers. Chinese newspapers reported that the rules apply to
formal publishers on the Web of books, newspapers, periodicals,
audio-visual products and edited works of literature, art,
natural or social sciences and technical engineering. The new
rules closely follow an announcement by a group of hackers that
they plan on offering free software to bypass Internet
censorship.
Yahoo's China Concession
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34015-2002Aug18.html
Monday, August 19, 2002; Page A12
Yahoo has recently signed a voluntary pledge to purge its
Chinese Web site of material that China's communist
dictatorship might deem subversive.
Yahoo promises to avoid "producing, posting or disseminating
pernicious information that may jeopardize state security and
disrupt social stability." It pledges to monitor information
posted by users on its site and to "remove the harmful
information promptly." It even undertakes to avoid offering
links to sites whose content might not be "healthy." In sum,
Yahoo is promising to become part of the regime's strategy:
Allow the Internet to spread so that China reaps its commercial
potential, but prevent it from nurturing free expression. Yahoo
says that it is obliged to follow local law and that the
voluntary pledge does not add much to what Chinese law requires
anyway. It points out that the French suit targeted Yahoo's
American Web site, which is different from China's policy of
squeezing Chinese-based Internet operations. But both cases
involve countries trying to enforce domestic law, and it's
strange that Yahoo cooperates more eagerly with China's
dictators than it does with a European democracy. If the firm
actually does the things the pledge implies, it may become
complicit in the oppression of Chinese whose crime is to have a
political idea or to espouse an unpopular religion.
HACKERS TARGET WEB CENSORSHIP
7/15/02 [SOURCE:
BBC
News]
A group of technology experts have produced two programs that
will help people in highly restrictive countries bypass
traditional web censorship systems. Both programs are the work
of a group of hackers calling itself Hactivismo.
The first program, called Camera Shy, was unveiled in New York
this weekend. Camera Shy allows people to hide messages inside
images. The second program, still in development, has potential
for far wider effects. Named Six/Four, in honor of the date of
the Tiananmen Square massacre, the software works like
peer-to-peer systems that let users share material.
Six/Four
allows users to build a virtual network that should be invisible
to the firewalls and filtering systems used by many regimes to
block access to parts of the web they consider objectionable.
Six/Four is due to be released in late 2003. The pro-democracy
is a potentially valuable step to protect political dissidents
and other people who have the quaint idea that their access to
information shouldn't be thwarted by government-run firewalls in
places like China and Saudi Arabia.
China Hijacks Google's Domain Name 9/10/02
Chinese government is not allowing some Web surfers to access
the popular search site.Try to access Google's search engine
from inside China and there's a good chance you'll instead be
sent to Tianwang Search, a search engine operated by China's
prestigious Peking University. Internet users looking to reach
Google from inside China are being rerouted to Tianwang, and
several other sites like it, after Internet service providers in
China hijacked the domain name for the Mountain View,
California, Internet search company.
Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society Harvard Law School
Coverage on news.com
9/13/02 and elsewhere reflects that requests for Google in China
are now met with pages other than the genuine Google site. With
my ability to access the Chinese network,
I have prepared a series of screenshots
showing the other services that, in my testing, were provided in
response to requests for Google. They're quite striking -- it's
incredibly odd to see other pages below the Google heading in
the Address Bar!
Here
Safesearch users unable to access "White House Free Live
Webcam": Google's SafeSearch, a feature designed to shield
children from porn sites, may be preventing children from
viewing a number of harmless Web sites as well. This according
to a new report from
Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society
, which notes that SafeSearch blocks sites created by the White
House, IBM, the American Library Association, and Nashville
Public Library's teen health issues page.
Ben Edelman Mon, 15 July 25 2002
New Project: Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia
Professor Jonathan Zittrain and I have been studying Internet
filtering in multiple countries worldwide ([1]), and we released
today our first investigation in this series.
In recent testing, we designed software to connect to the
Internet through proxy servers in Saudi Arabia, and we
subsequently attempted to access approximately 60,000 Web pages
as a means of empirically determining the scope and
pervasiveness of Internet filtering there. Saudi-installed
filtering systems prevented access to certain requested Web
pages; we tracked a total of 2,038 blocked pages. Such pages
contained information about religion, health, education,
reference, humor, and entertainment. Specific blocked sites
include the Women in American History section of Encyclopedia
Britannica Online (women.eb.com), the Rolling Stone Magazine
(rollingstone.com), Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
(religioustolerance.org), and the ivillage.com Women's Network,
among hundreds of others.
We conclude that the Saudi government maintains an active
interest in filtering non-sexually explicit Web content for
users within the Kingdom. We also find that substantial amounts
of non-sexually explicit Web content is in fact effectively
inaccessible to most Saudi Arabians. Finally, we note that much
of this content consists of sites that are popular elsewhere in
the world. Our full report, along with a listing of specific
blocked web pages, is available at
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/saudiarabia/
Jack Balkin
, a professor at the Yale Law School who studies the politics of
Internet filtering.
Many of these university DNS servers are the same ones used for
recursive queries by the university's client hosts. While this is
the default for the widely deployed BIND nameserver, it is a poor
security practice. My professional advice to the system
administrators would be to run resolving DNS servers on different
hosts than their authoritative nameservers, which would not only
alleviate the symptoms described but also reduce the vulnerability
of the authoritative nameservers from exposure to the systems
authorised to use them as resolvers. (For example, DoS and cache
poisoning attacks.) Furthermore, this may eliminate the
requirement to connect the authoritative nameservers to the
internal network at all, thus also reducing the risk of exposure
to external attacks against the nameservers - as indeed resulted
in security breaches at many sites some years ago.
Toby J. Arquette, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, New Technologies
Purdue University Department of Communication
1366 Beering Hall of Liberal Arts & Education 2166 West
Lafayette, IN 47907
Office: (765) 494-3313
http://www.sla.purdue.edu/people/comm/arquette/
Feel free to contact me (), if you would like more information.
Northwestern University and Purdue University have now completed a
two year study for the National Science Foundation on global
digital inequality using 60+ variables, various data sources, and
research methodologies. Below is the abstract from the study. In
addition, an executive summary and the full report (my
dissertation) is available for download at
http://www.sla.purdue.edu/people/comm/arquette/dissertation.htm
.
ABSTRACT:
Social Discourse, Scientific Method, and the Digital Divide: Using
the Information Intelligence Quotient (IIQ) to Generate a
Multi-Layered Empirical Analysis of Digital Division [Toby James
Arquette, (c) 2002]
This study empirically assesses social discourse, scientific
method, and the digital divide between nations. The study reports
the results of a meta-analysis of digital divide research
conversations from a wide variety of sources. The study reports
heterogeneity and multiple configurations of digital division
between nations. First, as a case, digital division is
contextualized in development communication, sociology,
international studies, political science, economics, and science
and technology studies. While digital divide research at the
sub-national level identifies the diverse and multidimensional
nature of this phenomenon, no such differentiation in discourse is
made at the international level. The results support the
proposition that research on international digital division is
hampered by a lack of a unifying analytic tool for
coordinatingdigital divide discourse.
This study proposes the Information Intelligence Quotient (IIQ) as
a multi-layered instrument for coordinating the meaning digital
divide conversations. Comparative empirical analysis identifies
the implications of changing the language and methods when
researching digital division. Synthesizing research conversations
from over 60 sources, a content scheme of 18 discursive frameworks
for inter-nation digital division (using 69 variables) is
constructed to assess relative degrees of digital divide in terms
of infrastructure (supply), access (capabilities), and use
(demand). A sample of 172 nations is used to compare the digital
divide outcomes (in terms of both GDP and UNDP Human Development)
between the 18 discursive frameworks. Data analysis is
triangulated using descriptive and inferential statistical
analysis. The results support the IIQ as a framework for the
differentiation of "the" digital divide into many types of
"digital divides" between nations. The empirical analysis of
digital divide conversations supports the need for a linguistic
framework in conceptually and operationally defining the object of
research, digital division. Absent such a framework, the internal
and external validity of inter-nation digital divide research is
open to a critique of the conceptual fit.
The study concludes with a conceptual digression regarding the
importance of language when constructing definition frameworks for
research, using digital division as a case for reflection on the
intersection of social scientific and humanistic theories and
methods.
UN: DIGITAL DIVIDE IN ARAB WORLD 'STAGGERING'
A United Nations study released Monday says the divide between the
Arab and advanced world is "staggering." According to the report,
only one percent of the 280 million people in the Arab world use
the Internet. Although improving infrastructure is critical, the
study found that slow reforms in the Arab telecom sectors, poor
access to information resources, limited personnel and economic
difficulties all aggravate the digital divide.
According to Dr. Saneya Saleh, a sociology professor at American
University in Cairo, another factor is reluctance of parents to
introduce children to the Internet. Saleh says that many families
do not want their children to have unsupervised access to the
Internet. "There are certain things on the Internet we do not want
young people to see. There are horrible things you can get on the
Internet." The United Nations Development Program (UNDP)
iscurrently working with Arab states to create strategies for
upgrading their information technology systems.
[SOURCE: Voice of America News, AUTHOR: Greg LaMotte]
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/34458
IP 212.138.47.0 - 212.138.47.255 Saudi Arabia
193.188.96.0 - 193.188.97.255
netname: BATELCO
descr: Bahrain Telecommunication Company
10:00:19 Tue May 14th, 2002 (Server Time)
IP Address 212.138.47.15
Reverse DNS cache5-0.ruh.isu.net.sa
From / Via Bondhelicoptersltd
Origin Location United Kingdom
Time Spent 11 min
Hits / Kilobytes 4 / 49.45Kb
Browser Tag Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)
Referring URL
Date and Time URL
2002-05-14 09:46:38
/Technology/securitycrisiscensorship.html
inetnum: 212.138.47.0 - 212.138.47.255
netname: ISU-5
descr: Internet Service Unit ISU
country: SA
admin-c: KR6046-RIPE
tech-c: KR6046-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by: KACST-ISU-MNT
mnt-lower: KACST-ISU-MNT
remarks:
Part of this IP block has been used for proxy/cache service
at the National level in Saudi Arabia. All Saudi Arabia web
traffic will come from this IP block.
NOTE: If you experience high volume of traffic from IP in
this block it is because your site is very popular/famous
of Saudi Arabia community.
address:
Saudi Network Information Center, ISU
King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology,
P.O.Box 6086, Riyadh 11442, Saudi Arabia.
phone: +9661 481 3932
fax-no: +9661 481 3254
e-mail: ipreg@saudinic.net.sa
DNS records
213.in-addr.arpa IN SOA server: ns.ripe.net
email: ops@ripe.net
serial: 2002050103
refresh: 43200
retry: 7200
expire: 1209600
minimum ttl: 7200
.ir - Iran (Islamic Republic of)
IRANET
, the networking unit of the Institute for Studies in
Theoretical Physics and Mathematics (IPM), acts as the offical
NIC of Iran.Services offered by NIC include Domain Name
Registration under .ir, and Name Hosting.
Sponsoring Organization:
Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics & Mathematics
(IPM)
Shahid Bahonar Square
P.O. Box 19395-1795
Tehran 19589
Iran
Administrative Contact:
Siavash Shahshahani
Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics &
Mathematics (IPM)
Shahid Bahonar Square
P.O. Box 19395-1795
Tehran 19589
Iran
Email: shahshah@iranet.ir
Voice: +98 21 229 1812
Fax: +98 21 229 8656
Technical Contact:
Akbar Behzadi
Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics &
Mathematics (IPM)
Shahid Bahonar Square
P.O. Box 19395-1795
Tehran 19589
Iran
Email: akbar@iranet.ir
Voice: +98 21 229 1812
Fax: +98 21 229 8656
URL for registration services: http://www.nic.ir
Record last updated - 02-February-2002
Record created - 06-April-1994
