brad brace

The international journalists’ organisation, Reporters Without Borders, has condemned two cases of Fiji journalists being arrested and questioned for several hours by police in the past 10 days.

The latest was that of Fiji Times reporter Serafina Salaitoga, who was arrested at her home in the presence of her children, after writing a story that quoted a businessman Charan Jeath Singh as commenting about Suva politics.

Isaac Lal of the Daily Post was arrested and interrogated about an article linking a convict, Josefa Baleiloa, to an alleged plot to assassinate national leaders.

Mr Lal was picked up after the police spokeswoman complained about being quoted in the report.

Reporters Without Borders says these arrests will foster a climate of fear among journalists and harm news coverage.

The FBI has agreed to drop its demand that a San Francisco-based Internet library turn over subscriber information, according to court documents unsealed Monday. As part of a settlement, the FBI also agreed that its previously secret efforts could be publicized.

The bureau served the Internet Archive — whose Wayback Machine page allows viewers to see old versions of millions of Web pages — with a national security letter in November 2007, but under the terms of a settlement reached between the two in April, the FBI has withdrawn the letter and agreed to make most of its contents public.

Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney with San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation who helped represent the archive, said he believes the victory is only the fourth successful challenge to a national security letter.

The FBI said the letter to the archive was part of a national security investigation and that they “permit the FBI to gather the basic building blocks for our counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations,” according to a statement by Assistant Director John Miller.

The letters, often compared to subpoenas, don’t need approval from a judge and contain gag orders prohibiting their recipients from even speaking of their existence. The settlement in the Northern District federal court comes less than a year after New York District Court Judge Victor Marrero found national security letters unconstitutional, though his decision is under appeal.

“One of the most important victories here is that we can even say this letter was received,” said Opsahl.

The Internet Archive sued the FBI in December, arguing that the gag orders in the letters violate the First and Fifth amendments. The suit asked the court to find the letters unconstitutional and order the FBI to stop sending them.

After four months of negotiating, the FBI decided to settle, Opsahl said.

“The consequences [of litigating] would be that a second court would find that the statute was unconstitutional and that it was not applicable to libraries under this circumstance,” he said.

The use of national security letters has skyrocketed since 2001, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. A March 2007 report by the Department of Justice’s inspector general said the FBI issued more than 192,000 requests between 2003 and 2006.

In the letter served on the Internet Archive, the FBI sought the name, address and e-mail exchanges of a subscriber to the archive’s services. Opsahl said the archive only gave agents public information that they could have gotten themselves from the nonprofit’s Web site. He said the archive keeps a record only of registered patrons’ e-mail addresses.

Opsahl said that although the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is reviewing Marrero’s decision, will now have the most say over the constitutionality of national security letters, he hopes the Internet Archive’s challenge will encourage other groups to take on the FBI.

The archive agreed to redact portions of the letter, but the FBI must prove to Judge Claudia Wilken by Dec. 1 that those sections pose a national security threat, otherwise the entire document will become public. Among the still-secret contents are the name of the targeted subscriber, the name of the FBI agent pursuing the target and more specifics about the kind of information the agent was seeking.

More expatriates will be deported and Fiji’s military has threatened to close down the Pacific nation’s news media.

But military strongman Voreqe Bainimarama - who has installed himself as prime minister - says he did not want to close media down.

Bainimarama has confronted Fiji’s media bosses after last week deporting Fiji Times publisher Evan Hannah, three months after Fiji Sun publisher Russell Hunter was also kicked out.

Regional news agency Pacnews said Bainimarama told the meeting that Hannah will not be the last of the expatriates to be deported.

He told the executives he could not reveal why Hannah had been deported but said that others are likely to follow.

He said the news media were publishing “inciteful” articles and called for balance and fair reporting.

Pacnews said Bainimarama added the last thing he would want to do is close down the media and his government should not be likened to Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

The Fiji Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd.

The Australian, owned by the same stable, reported this morning that the Fiji Times editor Netani Rika described how Bainimarama claimed that local journalists hate him.

Bainimarama claimed that shutting down the country’s media would be the worst-case scenario.

“He told us that he can shut the media down, but in his quotes, ‘I don’t want to do that’,” Rika told The Australian.

“He told us today that he did not want us to go down the path of Zimbabwe, but he was quite clear … while he did not want to close the media down, that would be an option if we did not take on board the concerns that he raised today.”

During the meeting, Bainimarama became agitated when the media representatives made it clear they would not “roll over and do what he wanted”, Rika said.

Bainimarama refused to explain how Hannah had breached his work permit, he said.

“The actual words he said was: ‘There’s no use discussing that matter. This person, Russell Hunter, and the other, Hannah whatever-his-name is, are not coming back’.”

More than 100 journalists have been killed in 2007, the World Association of Newspapers said in its half-year report on press freedom worldwide, published today.

One hundred and six journalists died on duty in 28 countries, 45 of them killed in Iraq, where 150 media workers have lost their lives since 2003.

The number of journalists killed in 2007 is approaching the record 110 deaths last year.

The full report can be read here. The list of journalists killed, with details about their cases, can be found here.

The report also said:

- Journalists in Latin America continue to be the victims of murder, threats and harassment when investigating sensitive subjects such as corruption and drug trafficking. Government persecution and legal actions also hinder the work of the press, which nevertheless continues its unyielding battle for freedom of information.

- In the Middle East and North Africa, there are a growing number of independent newspapers that do not shy away from criticising the authorities and questioning the lack of democracy. Nonetheless, the general media scene is plagued by strict government control and legal action taken against anyone who dares question those in power.

- More and more journalists in sub-Saharan Africa are prosecuted and jailed on charges of “endangering state security,” whereas harsh repression through “insult laws” and criminal defamation continues. These repressive measures are the target of a new initiative from WAN and the World Editors Forum to improve conditions for journalists on the continent: the Declaration of Table Mountain, www.declarationoftablemountain.org/….

- Hostility toward independent and opposition media and attempts to silence them can again be seen in parts of Europe and Central Asia. Spurious charges of “extremism” and “anti-state” criminal charges remained an effective tool to hinder critical reporting.

- Asia is home to some of the most repressive regimes in the world, which suppress all dissident voices and forbid any form of independent media. Simmering ethnic, political and religious tensions exist in a number of countries.

The Paris-based WAN, the global organisation for the newspaper industry, defends and promotes press freedom and the professional and business interests of newspapers world-wide. Representing 18,000 newspapers, its membership includes 76 national newspaper associations, newspaper companies and individual newspaper executives in 102 countries, 12 news agencies and 10 regional and world-wide press groups.

DHAKA, Nov. 7 — Bangladesh has been found to have a software piracy rate of 92 percent, which is number one in the Asian Pacific region and the fourth highest in the world, local newspaper The Daily Star reported Wednesday.

A report, Global Software Piracy Study 2006, conducted by IDC, the IT industry’s leading global market research and forecasting firm, warned that the software piracy in Bangladesh is crippling the local industry and costing local retailers 90 million U.S. dollars a year.

The report shows that 92 percent of software used on personal computers in Bangladesh had been pirated in 2006. This means that for every dollar worth of software purchased legitimately, nine dollars worth was obtained illegally.

The high software piracy rate has resulted in 90 million dollars in retail revenue losses to the local Bangladesh software economy.

However the report says that the broader economic impact of software piracy is significantly greater.

“Among the many negative consequences of software piracy is the crippling of local software industries because of competition with pirated software, lost tax revenues and decreased business productivity from using unwarranted software,” the report said.

Bangladesh has a Copyright Act, under which piracy is a punishable with imprisonment for a term, which may be extended to five years and may be imposed a penalty of 500,000 taka (about 7,143 dollars)

The IDC global software piracy study covers piracy of all packaged software that runs on personal computers, including desktops, laptops and ultra-portables. This includes operating system, system software, business applications and consumers applications.

NEW YORK — A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars on Thursday formally asked the Federal Communications Commission to stop Comcast Corp. from interfering with its subscribers’ file sharing.

Two of the groups are also asking the FCC to fine Comcast $195,000 for every affected subscriber.

The petitions will be the first real test of the FCC’s stance on “Net Neutrality,” the long-standing principle that Internet traffic be treated equally by carriers. The agency has a policy supporting the concept but its position hasn’t been tested in a real-world case.

Last month, Comcast reportedly hindered file sharing by subscribers who used BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing program. Tests confirmed claims by users who also noticed interference with some file-sharing applications.

Comcast is the country’s largest cable company and has 12.9 million Internet subscribers, making it the second-largest Internet service provider.

Comcast denies that it blocks file sharing, but acknowledged last week that it was “delaying” some of the traffic between computers that share files.

In practice, the company blocks requests from users who are trying to retrieve files from a Comcast subscriber’s computer for a period of time. But it eventually lets the requests through if they are repeated.

In one test, a request went through after 10 minutes of trying. The technology does not directly affect downloads of BitTorrent files by Comcast subscribers, only uploads.

Comcast has said the interference is intended to improve the Internet experience for all its subscribers, noting that a relatively small number of file sharers is enough to slow down its network.

In response to the filings, David Cohen, an executive vice president at Comcast, said that the FCC’s policies recognize that ISPs need to manage the traffic on their networks.

But if other ISPs follow in Comcast’s footsteps, file sharing would essentially crawl to a halt. While the technology is a popular way to illegally share copyright movies and music, legal uses are proliferating, particularly in movie distribution.

“They’re blocking an innovative application that could be a competitor to cable TV,” said Marvin Ammori, general counsel at Free Press, one of the advocacy groups behind the petition to the FCC.

The petition asks the commission to immediately declare that Comcast is violating the FCC’s policy. The co-signers are Consumer Federation of America; Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports; Media Access Project; Public Knowledge; and professors at the Internet practices of the Yale, Harvard and Stanford law schools.

Free Press and Public Knowledge are separately filing a formal complaint that asks the FCC to demand a “forfeiture” from Comcast of $195,000 per affected subscriber.

The number is based on the statutory maximum of $97,500 for a single continuing violation, doubled by what the groups see as deception on the company’s part. Comcast kept its practice secret until publicized, saying that it couldn’t divulge the inner workings of its network for security reasons.

Its filtering technique also involves the company forging network messages so that they appear to come from subscriber and non-subscriber computers.

The complaint includes affidavits from three Comcast subscribers who say they have been affected by Comcast’s interference. The complaint asks the FCC to determine the total number of affected subscribers.

It’s not clear how quickly the FCC would act on the filings.

“The FCC should be aggressively reviewing these cases because they go to ensuring the freedom and openness of the Internet which is so vital to our communications future and to our civic dialogue,” FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said in a statement.

Comcast’s Cohen noted that the FCC’s policy statement, which says that consumers are allowed to run the Internet applications of their choice, makes that “subject to reasonable network management” by ISPs.

“If Comcast is right — that what it’s doing meets the policy statement — then anyone can start blocking BitTorrent tomorrow,” Ammori said.

A ruling against Comcast could cause problems for other Internet service providers. Many of them acknowledge managing traffic to improve flow, which likely includes slowing down file-sharing traffic by means less drastic than Comcast’s.

The Net Neutrality debate erupted in 2005, when the FCC abolished the obligation of providers of Internet service via digital subscriber lines, or DSL, to carry all traffic nondiscriminately (that obligation had been abolished for cable broadband in 2002). The obligation was replaced with the policy statement.

Phone companies started suggesting that they would like to be able to charge large Web companies more for guaranteed delivery of their traffic as a way to finance the build-out of their networks.

Web anchors like Google Inc. and Amazon Inc., joined by consumer groups, opposed the notion, saying it would make Internet service providers the toll keepers of the Internet and enable them to stifle competition and innovation.

The debate was stilled when AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. agreed to shelve their plans temporarily to get their respective plans to acquire BellSouth and MCI approved by the FCC.

Ammori said it appeared that the “nightmare scenario” portrayed by Net Neutrality proponents like his own group, Free Press, had been averted.

“Then suddenly, out of nowhere, Comcast is doing exactly what we most feared … secretly degrading an application,” Ammori said. “We didn’t expect the first violation to be so blatant.”

MUMBAI: Thai authorities are tightening the noose on piracy by handing out jail sentences to pirates arrested during joint raids conducted by the Thai authorities and the Motion Picture Association (MPA).

In 2007 alone, 12 cases have resulted in distributors and retailers being sentenced to jail (without suspension) for up to two years and fines of up to $22,000 imposed. In one case, even possession of as little as 78 infringing CD-Rs gained the pirate a three month jail sentence.

This is unprecedented as the Central Intellectual Property and International Trade Court of Thailand has until 2006 only sentenced a Taiwanese national to jail for two years for owning a factory that produced pirated discs.

Mike Ellis, Senior Vice President and Regional Director, Asia-Pacific for the Motion Picture Association said: “We are encouraged by the Thai authorities’ tougher stance in meting out jail terms and stiff fines to pirates. We have found in our experience elsewhere that deterrent sentences are essential for effective enforcement. To the pirates, being fined is just a cost of doing business.”

“While this is a first step, we look forward to more deterrent sentences. After all, these are but only 12 out of the over 200 cases in which MPA are involved. I’m certain there are more cases that involve Thai films that deserve equally severe punishment,” Ellis continued.

In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas though our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

BANGKOK, Thailand — Women in several countries have begun sending their panties to Myanmar embassies in a culturally insulting gesture of protest against the recent brutal crackdown there, a campaign supporter said Friday.

“It’s an extremely strong message in Burmese and in all Southeast Asian culture,” said Liz Hilton, who supports an activist group that launched the “Panties for Peace” drive earlier this week.

The group, Lanna Action for Burma, says the country’s superstitious generals, especially junta leader Gen. Than Shwe, also believe that contact with women’s underwear saps them of power.

To widespread international condemnation, the military in Myanmar, also known as Burma, crushed mass anti-regime demonstrations recently and continues to hunt down and imprison those who took part.

Hilton said women in Thailand, Australia, Singapore, England and other European countries have started sending or delivering their underwear to Myanmar missions following informal coordination among activist organizations and individuals.

“You can post, deliver or fling your panties at the closest Burmese Embassy any day from today. Send early, send often!” the Lanna Action for Burma Web site urges.

“So far we have had no response from Burmese officials,” Hilton said.
On the Net:

* http://lannaactionforumburma.blogspot.com

SLUM-TV was started in Mathare, Kenya, in 2006. On their site they state that Mathare is the largest slum in the country with an estimated 700,000 residents, but this would put it at almost 1 million less than Kibera, which is in Nairobi. Nonetheless, their project is a really terrific idea. SLUM-TV was started by Austrian artists working with local Kenyan artists and photographers. They make newsreels in the slums for the slums and then project them for people there to see. Here is more from their web site:

The foundation of SLUM-TV

SLUM-TV wants to documents the lives of the people in the slum and to reevaluate these lives through the camera. A camera always attracts attention. Our partners from the slum film and document the life in Mathare. The small movies are then shown in public places in Mathare, like a newsreel. In Mathare, there exist a variety of self-established cinemas. Mostly American and African films and European football is shown there.

Almost one million Chinese computers were hit by viruses during last week’s national holidays, state media has reported.

Three different types of viruses attacked computers during the holiday week, Xinhua news agency said.

It is not the first time China’s web users have faced problems recently.

A Pacific earthquake damaged undersea cables earlier this year, slowing down internet lines and forcing many people to start using their old fax machines.

China has more than 130 million internet users - and last week should have been a perfect time for them to catch up with their web surfing.

There was an entire week of national holidays - known as the Golden Week - so most people were off work with plenty of time to spend at home online.

But for some internet users, there were real problems. Nearly one million computers crashed as a result of the viruses.

But in other ways, experts suggest that parts of China’s computer system are working extremely well.

Recently, there have been repeated allegations that the Chinese army has hacked its way into sensitive government systems in the US and Europe.

It is a charge that China has denied.

Hackers in Turkey have attacked more than 5,000 Swedish Web sites in the past week,
and at least some of the sabotage appears linked to Muslim anger over a Swedish
newspaper drawing that depicted the Prophet Muhammad’s head on a dog’s body. Around
1,600 Web sites hosted by server-provider Proinet and 3,800 sites hosted by another
company have been targeted, Proinet spokesman Kjetil Jensen said Sunday. Jensen said
hackers, operating on a Turkish network, at times replaced files on the sites with
messages. According to Swedish news agency TT, the Web site of a children’s cartoon
called Bamse was replaced by a message saying Islam’s prophet had been insulted. The
incidents have been reported to the police. The Swedish newspaper Nerikes Allehanda
published the drawing by artist Lars Vilks in an Aug. 19 editorial. It triggered
protests from Swedish Muslim groups and formal complaints from Muslim countries,
including Pakistan and Iran. An insurgent leader in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, put a
USD 100,000 bounty on Vilks’ head.

Inside Raghav FM Mansoorpur, a village FM radio station in India:

It may well be the only village FM radio station on the Asian sub-continent. It is certainly illegal.

The transmission equipment, costing just over $1, may be the cheapest in the world.

But the local people definitely love it.

On a balmy morning in India’s northern state of Bihar, young Raghav Mahato gets ready to fire up his home-grown FM radio station.

Thousands of villagers, living in a 20km (12 miles) radius of Raghav’s small repair shop and radio station in Mansoorpur village in Vaishali district, tune their $5 radio sets to catch their favourite station.

After the crackle of static, a young, confident voice floats up the radio waves.

“Good morning! Welcome to Raghav FM Mansoorpur 1! Now listen to your favourite songs,” announces anchor and friend Sambhu into a sellotape-plastered microphone surrounded by racks of local music tapes.

For the next 12 hours, Raghav Mahato’s outback FM radio station plays films songs and broadcasts public interest messages on HIV and polio, and even snappy local news, including alerts on missing children and the opening of local shops.

Raghav and his friend run the indigenous radio station out of Raghav’s thatched-roof Priya Electronics Shop.

Ingenious

The place is a cramped $4-a-month rented shack stacked with music tapes and rusty electrical appliances which doubles up as Raghav’s radio station and repair shop.

I just did it out of curiosity and increased its area of transmission every year
Raghav Mahato
He may not be literate, but Raghav’s ingenuous FM station has made him more popular than local politicians.

Raghav’s love affair with the radio began in 1997 when he started out as a mechanic in a local repair shop. When the shop owner left the area, Raghav, son of a cancer-ridden farm worker, took over the shack with his friend.

Sometime in 2003, Raghav, who by now had learned much about radio mechanics, thought up the idea of launching an FM station.

It was a perfect idea. In impoverished Bihar state, where many areas lack power supplies, the cheap battery-powered transistor remains the most popular source of entertainment.

“It took a long time to come up with the idea and make the kit which could transmit my programmes at a fixed radio frequency. The kit cost me 50 rupees (just over $1),” says Raghav.

The transmission kit is fitted on to an antenna attached to a bamboo pole on a neighbouring three-storey hospital.

A long wire connects the contraption to a creaky, old homemade stereo cassette player in Raghav’s radio shack. Three other rusty, locally made battery-powered tape recorders are connected to it with colourful wires and a cordless microphone.

Raghav FM Mansoorpur station in Bihar
The radio station is a repair shop and studio rolled into one
The shack has some 200 tapes of local Bhojpuri, Bollywood and devotional songs which Raghav plays for his listeners.

Raghav’s station is truly a labour of love - he does not earn anything from it. His electronic repair shop work brings him some two thousand rupees ($45) a month.

The young man, who continues to live in a shack with his family, doesn’t know that running a FM station requires a government licence.

“I don’t know about this. I just began this out of curiosity and expanded its area of transmission every year,” he says.

Local hero

So when some people told him sometime ago that his station was illegal, he actually shut it down. But local villagers thronged his shack and persuaded him to resume services again.

It hardly matters for the locals that Raghav FM Mansoorpur 1 does not have a government license - they just love it.

Raghav Mahato
Raghav makes his living from repairing electronic goods
“Women listen to my station more than men,” he says. “Though Bollywood and local Bhojpuri songs are staple diet, I air devotional songs at dawn and dusk for women and old people.”

Since there’s no phone-in facility, people send their requests for songs through couriers carrying handwritten messages and phone calls to a neighbouring public telephone office.

Raghav’s fame as the ‘promoter’ of a radio station has spread far and wide in Bihar.

People have written to him, wanting work at his station, and evinced interest in buying his ‘technology’.

“But I will never share the secret of my technology with anyone. This is my creation. How can I share it with somebody who might misuse it?” he asks.

“With more powerful and advanced chips and equipment I can make a kit which could be transmitted up to 100km or even more.”

A government radio engineer in Bihar’s capital, Patna, says it is possible to use a homemade kit to run a FM radio station.

Radio listener in Bihar village
The station is a rage with listeners in the area
“All it needs is an antenna and transmitting equipment. But such stations offer no security. Anyone can invade and encroach such locally made transmitters,” says HK Sinha of India’s state-run broadcaster All India Radio (AIR).

But people in Mansoorpur are in awe of Raghav’s radio station and say it gives their village an identity.

“The boy has intense potential, but he is very poor. If the government lends him some support, he would go far,” says Sanjay Kumar, an ardent fan of his station.

But for the moment Raghav FM Mansoorpur 1 rocks on the local airwaves, bring joy into the lives of the locals.

Yangon - Myanmar’s main Internet link remained shut for a third straight day on Sunday, as the ruling regime tried to curb the flow of information on a bloody crackdown against protesters.

“I tried on Sunday morning again but it’s failed again. I haven’t been able to check my email since Friday,” said one Yangon resident.

Internet cafes in Yangon also remained closed. Over the past week, tech-savvy citizens used the cybercafes to transmit pictures and video clips of the regime’s clampdown taken on mobile phones and digital cameras.

“People inside Myanmar can’t send emails or news to outside organisations,” said Kho Win Aung from activist group Shwe Gas Movement.

“So they are losing their chance to express what’s happening in Myanmar,” the Thailand-based activist told reporters in Bangkok.

The government cracked down on protesters last week, killing at least 13 people and injuring hundreds more, in a campaign that has also intensified pressure on media operating in the country.

In the main city of Yangon, soldiers shot dead a Japanese video-journalist Thursday and beat people found with cell phones or cameras, witnesses said.

Myanmar’s military rulers always keep a tight grip on information, heavily censoring newspapers, blocking much of the Internet and rarely allowing foreign journalists into the country.

Paris-based media rights group Reporters Without Borders said that by cutting Internet access, the regime was trying to operate “behind closed doors”.

It has condemned Myanmar as a “paradise for censors” and listed the country as one of the world’s most restrictive for press freedoms.

Sylhet - Bangladesh has been put on the USA’s watch list of countries that allow operations of some Pakistani companies producing pirated versions of multi-media compact disks (CDs), and digital video disks (DVDs) violating intellectual property rights (IPR). Due to the inclusion of Bangladesh on the list, the United States Trade Representatives (USTR) can now suggest its entrepreneurs to withdraw their investments from the country or to impose a trade embargo on the country. According to a report titled ‘Special 301′ on the adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights (IPR), published by the Office of the US Trade Representatives, some pirate optical disk manufacturing plants migrated to Bangladesh from Pakistan due to the latter’s crackdown on those.

The report released on April 30, 2007 said currently six optical disc plants producing pirated products are operating in Bangladesh and are exporting to India and Europe, as well as saturating the local market. The USTR report suggested Bangladesh to introduce regulations controlling optical disc manufacturing so that the Bangladeshi authorities can issue licenses to manufacturers, and law enforcers can inspect the plants. It also suggested if any plant is found guilty of piracy, it should be closed down and its owners should be prosecuted.

The report said the harm from the practice of piracy in Bangladesh is not only to the US and other countries that have similar businesses, but is also felt keenly by Bangladeshi genuine entrepreneurs. It said the Bangladesh government’s response to the problem is inadequate in terms of results from enforcement actions taken. A high official of the commerce ministry said the country’s name had been first included on the watch list in 2004, but later USTR dropped Bangladesh from the list following the erstwhile government’s negotiation with USTR.

The official said the commerce ministry requested the home ministry and the cultural affairs ministry to investigate the allegation. Following the request, National Security Intelligence (NSI) carried out an investigation and found that two companies mainly owned by Pakistani entrepreneurs in fact did set up optical disk plants in the country. The companies are AKA World Com situated at 189/B Tejgaon, which is owned by a Pakistani citizen Solaiman Azami, and Sonic Enterprise Bangladesh Limited at Konabari of Gazipur, also owned by a Pakistani citizen Sayed Ashraf Ali. The NSI investigation found that the first company set up a Tk 2 crore worth plant which can produce 50,000 discs a day.

When asked, a joint secretary to the commerce ministry said the ministry decided to initiate lobbying with the US government in an attempt to keep Bangladesh off the ‘watch list’ for copyright violations. The decision was taken in a meeting held at the commerce ministry with additional secretary of the ministry, Golam Mustakim, in the chair on August 26. He said the ministry decided to start discussions with the US government through its embassy in Washington to make its counterpart understand that as a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) the country is exempt from any kind of IPR obligation until 2013.

Advertisers aiming to reach high-flyers with no alternative distraction will soon
have a new method: adverts the size of three football pitches seen by plane
passengers coming in to land. UK-based Ad-Air launched its new service in London on
Tuesday, offering brands the chance to place huge adverts near the runways of some
of the world’s busiest runways. Ad-Air, backed by GBP 5m (EUR 7m) of private equity
finance, said it had spent five years securing sites around the world’s busiest
airports including London Heathrow, Paris, Geneva, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Tokyo and
Abu Dhabi. The first advert will appear in Dubai next month. Paul Jenkins, managing
director of Ad-Air, said the adverts would appear in ‚”clutter-free environments
and moments free of any other commercial messages.” Operations Director Haakon
Dewing said that the adverts could develop to produce a moving image that starts
each time a plane comes into sight. The adverts, which are low to the ground and
20,000 square meters in size, will only be illuminated where local legislation
allows.

YANGON - Myanmar maintains some of the world’s most restrictive Internet controls, including government-administered blocks on foreign news sites and the use of popular e-mail services. But when politically sensitive fuel-price protests broke out last month in the old capital city Yangon, government censors proved powerless to stop the outflow of information and images over the Internet to the outside world.

State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) authorities have increased their efforts to curb local and foreign media coverage of the protests and their heavy-handed response against demonstrators. Pro-government thugs have been deployed to harass and intimidate local journalists and camera-carriers, some of whom have had their mobile-phone services cut.

Authorities initially ordered a blackout on all local media coverage of the protests and have since crafted and placed articles in mouthpiece media criticizing the protest leaders they have detained. But the government is losing decidedly its most crucial censorship battle: over the Internet. Despite government bans, journalists and dissidents continue to send information and video clips of the protests over the Internet to foreign-based news organizations.

Exile-run media have published detailed blow-by-blow accounts and explicit video clips of government crackdowns. Popular video-sharing website YouTube is flush with footage of the protests posted by citizen journalists under Burmese names, including one posting by a user who apparently uses the same name as SPDC leader General Than Shwe. The Thailand-based, exile-run Irrawaddy - a la CNN - has called on the Myanmar population to play the role of citizen journalists and send information to their newsdesk.

So why have the Myanmar authorities, who had apparently deployed some of the most restrictive cyber-controls anywhere in the world, so utterly failed to stem the outflow of sensitive information? Myanmar’s military government deploys various software-based filtering techniques aimed at severely limiting the content the country’s citizens can access online.

Most Internet accounts in Myanmar are designed to provide access only to the limited Myanmar intranet, and the authorities block access to popular e-mail services such as Gmail and Hotmail. According to the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a joint research project on Internet censorship issues headed by Harvard University, Myanmar’s Internet-censorship regime as of 2005 was among the “most extensive” in the world.

The research noted that the Myanmar government “maintains the capability to conduct surveillance of communication methods such as e-mail, and to block users from viewing websites of political opposition groups and organizations working for democratic change in Burma”. An ONI-conducted survey of websites containing material known to be sensitive to the regime found in 2005 that 84% of the pages they tested were blocked. The regime also maintained an 85% filtration rate of well-known e-mail service providers, in line with, as ONI put it, the government’s “well-documented efforts to monitor communication by its citizens and to control political dissent and opposition movements”.

Myanmar’s technical censorship capabilities were also reputedly bolstered by the regime’s procurement and implementation of filtering software produced and sold by US technology company Fortinet. According to ONI’s research, the regime was as of 2005 continuing to seek to refine its censorship regime, which showed no signs of lessening and could worsen as it moves to more sophisticated software products.

Eschewing the censors

Two years later, thanks to the growing global proliferation of proxy servers, proxy sites, encrypted e-mail accounts, http tunnels and other creative workarounds, the cyber-reality in Myanmar is actually much less restricted than ONI’s research indicated.

To be sure, official Internet penetration rates are abysmally low in Myanmar, because of the prohibitive cost and bureaucratic hassle, including the provision of a signed letter from the relevant porter warden that the applicant is not “politically dangerous”, to secure a domestic connection.

However, those low figures mask the explosion of usage at public Internet cafes, particularly in Yangon, where a growing number are situated in nondescript, hard-to-find locales. All of the cafes visited in recent months by this correspondent were equipped with foreign-hosted proxy sites or servers, which with the help of the cafe attendant allowed customers to bypass government firewalls and connect freely to the World Wide Web - including access to otherwise blocked critical news sources.

One particularly popular proxy site in Myanmar’s cyber-cafes is Glite.sayni.net, popularly known as Glite. According to the site’s India-based administrator, the Glite program has been downloaded by tens of thousands of Internet surfers and resides on hundreds of private and public servers in Myanmar, allowing its users to access Gmail accounts that the government has tried to block.

The authorities have so far moved to block three particular Glite versions, but the program’s administrator says he has in response designed and set up more sites, of which he estimates there are currently 11 unblocked versions, some of which are housed in support site forums in a format that is difficult to search and block.

He says Glite is also designed not to be indexed by search sites, which gives Myanmar’s Internet cafes their own private and secure access and makes censor search-engine results for its site seem deceptively sparse. Although the site’s administrator says he is “apolitical”, he believes Myanmar’s junta is “fighting a losing battle” in trying to censor the Internet.

Other popular proxy servers in Yangon’s cafes are Your-freedom.net and Yeehart.com, both of which similarly maintain new, updated versions to bypass government firewalls. The same is true for various encrypted e-mail services, including the hyper-secure Hushmail.com, which many local and exile-based journalists have been trained to use and technology experts say the junta lacks the expertise to crack.

The proliferation of evasive small-scale technologies, some like Glite maintained by private individuals with a penchant for programming, have in these restive times left Myanmar’s junta with few viable censorship options but to unplug the Internet altogether. Indeed, there have been recent reports of rolling Internet blackouts across Yangon’s cyber-cafes, particularly during the late afternoons, when journalists would normally file their stories.

So far the authorities seem reluctant to make yet another policy decision, on top of last month’s hyper-inflationary fuel-price hikes, that would impinge on national livelihoods, particularly the urban-based business class, who judging by their numbers in Yangon’s cyber-cafes have grown increasingly reliant on the Internet for cheap communications. That, of course, could change in the weeks ahead if the street protests mount and the government cracks down more forcefully.

Yet the comprehensive news coverage that has leaked out of Myanmar represents an important victory for the global forces fighting to keep the Internet free from government censorship. And when the dust finally clears on Myanmar’s popular protests, depending on the eventual outcome, the information-driven movement could one day be known as Myanmar’s Glite revolution.

Almost half of the articles published by daily newspapers in the US contain one or more factual errors, and less than two per cent end up being corrected.

The findings are from a forthcoming research paper by an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. The findings challenge how well journalism’s “corrections box” sets the record straight or serves as a safety valve for the venting of frustrations by wronged news sources.
The average US newspaper should expand by a factor of 50 the amount of space given to corrections, says Scott R Maier’s research. Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, describes in a research paper his findings that fewer than 2 per cent of factually flawed articles are corrected at dailies.

The study’s central finding is sobering: 98 per cent of the 1,220 factual newspapers errors examined went uncorrected. The correction rate was uniformly low for each of the 10 newspapers studied, with none correcting even 5 per cent of the mistakes identified by news sources. While it is not plausible or arguably even desirable for every newspaper error to be detected and corrected, Maier noted, the study shows that the corrections box represents the “tip of the iceberg” of mistakes made in a newspaper, therefore providing only a limited mechanism for setting the record straight.

Maier’s findings also challenge journalists’ widely held perception that errors, when detected, are commonly corrected. Previous research showed that news sources brought errors to the attention of newspapers in only about 11 per cent of stories in which errors were identified. Newspapers can hardly be expected to correct errors they do not know were made.

This study, however, shows that even when errors were reported by news sources, the vast majority – 98 per cent – remained uncorrected. In fact, the corrections rate for reported errors is only slightly higher than for errant stories apparently found in error by someone other than the story’s primary source. This suggests that news managers should not rely on corrections as safety valve for the venting of frustrations by wronged news sources, Maier has argued.

Further study is needed to understand why errors, even when reported, go uncorrected. Perhaps news sources didn’t know to whom or how to properly report errors, Maier felt. Reporters and editors, understandably reluctant to make a public mea culpa with published corrections, may have ignored reported errors. Though the study examined only factual errors, differences also may exist between a journalist and a new source as to what constitutes inaccuracy, he pointed out.

Considering that over 60% of all news stories used by the press are actually U.S. government agency press releases, doesn’t this mean that the printed media in this country are fulfilling the same function as Pravda in the former Soviet Union?

BEIJING — Police in China’s capital said Tuesday they will start patrolling the Web using animated beat officers that pop up on a user’s browser and walk, bike or drive across the screen warning them to stay away from illegal Internet content.

Starting Sept. 1, the cartoon alerts will appear every half hour on 13 of China’s top portals, including Sohu and Sina, and by the end of the year will appear on all Web sites registered with Beijing servers, the Beijing Public Security Ministry said in a statement.

China stringently polices the Internet for material and content that the ruling Communist Party finds politically or morally threatening. Despite the controls, nudity, profanity, illegal gambling and pirated music, books and film have proliferated on Chinese Internet servers.

The animated police appeared designed to startle Web surfers and remind them that authorities closely monitor Web activity. However, the statement did not say whether there were plans to boost monitoring further.

The male and female cartoon officers, designed for the ministry by Sohu, will offer a text warning to surfers to abide by the law and tips on Internet security as they move across the screen in a virtual car, motorcycle or on foot, it said.

If Internet users need police help they can click on the cartoon images and will be redirected to the authority’s Web site, it said.

“We will continue to promote new images of the virtual police and update our Internet security tips in an effort to make the image of the virtual police more user friendly and more in tune with how web surfers use the Internet,” it said.

China has the world’s second-largest population of Internet users, with 137 million people online, and is on track to surpass the United States as the largest online population in two years.

The government routinely blocks surfers from accessing overseas sites and closes down domestic Web sites deemed obscene or subversive.

According to the watchdog website Don’t Block This Blog (DBTB.org), the nations of Thailand and Turkey just recently blocked the entire Wordpress.com domain for all Internet users.

In Thailand, visitors to the blocked websites will see a message in Thai which translates as follows.

“Sorry. TOT Plc., as an organization of Thai people, has restrained the access to this website as it contains content, text, and/or picture that is unappropriated which affects the mind of Thai people all over the country and cannot be accepted.”

Therefore, the government has determined that the “mind of Thai people” is affected by “unappropriated” material at Wordpress.com. It’s not clear what “unappropriated” means.

Regarding Wordpress being blocked in Turkey, it appears that one blog owned by a proponent of creationism prompted a court order to block the entire Wordpress domain. However, an effort has been launched to collect signature on a petition to unblock blogs in Turkey.

Meanwhile, it appears that all Blogspot blogs are still banned in Pakistan. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority initially instituted the ban in March 2006 on Blogspot as a result of one blog carrying the infamous cartoons of Muhammad. However, a savvy blogger block workaround for determined bloggers has been developed using Google Docs.