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After facing a DDoS attack, an activist group isnt backing down in its attempts to end Chinas Internet censorship.

I think that we are more confident than we were before that our successful execution of our strategy is going to lead us to achieve our mission, said the group via email on Tuesday.

GreatFire.org suffered a distributed denial of service attack last month that threatened to cripple its activities. The anonymous group, which is based out of China, believes the countrys government was behind the attack.

Although China has always denied any involvement in state-sponsored hacking, the country has been suspected of carrying out cyberattacks against U.S. companies and other activist groups.

GreatFire tries to offer ways to bypass Chinas censorship, including by hosting mirror websites to blocked destinations such as Google, the BBC and The New York Times.

Links to these mirror websites are hosted on GitHub, a software development platform China hasnt censored. But last month, GitHub also suffered a DDoS attack that was the largest in its history and appeared to target GreatFires page on the platform.

Both DDoS attacks have ended. During the attack against GreatFire, the group requested public support, and said that its bandwidth costs had reached up to US$30,000 a day, as a result.

We learned a lot from the attacks and there was a great outpouring of support and folks offering their financial and technical assistance, GreatFire said.

GitHub continues to host links to the mirror websites the group has created. But on Tuesday, the actual mirror websiteswhich are hosted through Amazon.com and othersappeared to be down.

We are experiencing minor hiccups but everything is moving forward on our end, the group added, without elaborating.

Excerpt from:
Group fighting 'Net censorship in China presses on despite DDoS attack

Big corporations have a history of bullying whistleblowers into submission. Photograph: Grant Faint/Getty Images

Corporations intent on blunting the whistleblower reforms embodied in the Dodd-Frank Act have long been muzzling their employees with non-disclosure agreements. Restrictive confidentiality agreements are nothing but corporate censorship - and it needs to end.

People working in big financial services industries need to be able to alert the public and the courts of questionable practices. Thats why President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act into law in July 2010: it was designed to address the fraud that contributed to the massive financial meltdown experienced in Europe, the United States and the rest of the world.

Its thanks to whistleblowers that we learned about illegal activity at Enron, Bernie Madoffs offices and Swiss banks like UBS and HSBC, resulting in the collection of billions of dollars in sanctions. Any doubt as to the importance of whistleblower protections in exposing corporate fraud was laid to rest in 2012 by the US Attorney General Eric Holder who described them as nothing short of profound.

No wonder that companies tried to undermine Dodd-Frank from the get go.

Numerous companies have developed broadly worded non-disclosure agreements that restrict the release of confidential information to the companys legal department as a condition of employment though the exact number is unknown. When leaving the company, employees who have threatened to file a whistleblower claims were also forced to accept non-disclosure requirements as a condition of a settlement or before they could obtain a severance payment after they were fired or laid off.

These agreements explicitly prohibit employees from communicating with anyone, except attorneys hired by the company. Some go as far as explicitly barring communication with regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission.

We have seen numerous companies require employees questioned by the government to secretly provide them with insights into the scope of the investigation. These employees can then be effectively turned into informers against the government itself.

Whats even more Kafkaesque is that almost every non-disclosure agreement strictly prohibits the employee from telling the government of the existence of these secrecy agreements, and the restrictions placed upon them.

But thats about to change. On 1 April, the US Securities and Exchange Commission fined the mammoth defense contractor, KBR, Inc. (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root), for requiring employees to sign restrictive non-disclosure agreements. It took the courage of a single whistleblower, Harry Barko, to get us to this point.

Continued here:
Corporations cannot muzzle whistleblowers with secrecy agreements any longer

Censorship is paralleling political turmoil in parts of the Middle East

Reuters is reporting that "a source in Turkey's telecoms industry" shares that Google Inc.'s (GOOG) video-sharing site YouTube and microblogging platfrom Twitter, Inc. (TWTR) were both blocked in Turkey on Monday, following a court decision. The crackdown comes after "individuals" complained to the court claiming that terrorists were posting political propoganda to the popular web services. The court agreed, and the services were ordered to be censored.

It's unclear how long the current censorship will last, but this isn't the first time Turkish courts have imposed such a ban. YouTube was banned for periods in 2007 and 2008 amid local unrest. Most recently in March 2014, Turkish courts temporarily ordered both Twitter and YouTube blocked to prevent the dissemination of supposed leaks ahead of Turkey's elections.

The leaked audio recordings were puportedly ofPrime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's inner circle. In the recordings officials appeared to be engaging in corrupt dealings. Erdogan's camp, however, claims the recordings were fakes generated by opposition leaders. His administration successfully petitioned the court to impose internet blockades to limit their impact.

The latest crackdown comes amid a fresh wave of violent political unrest.

Pro-communist/far left Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) stormed the office of a prosecutor in Istanbul whom they allege was corrupt. When police tried to storm the facility, the prosecutor was shot. He eventually died in surgery at a local hospital. Both gunmen were also shot dead by police commandos during the raid.

The U.S. callsDHKP-C a terrorist group and there's claims that it's backed by Putin's regime in Russia. The group claimed responsibility for a 2013 suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Istanbul. The DHKP-C is just one of several groups -- both pro- and anti-Erdogan that's been vying for public sentiment in the Turkish state. Earlier this year nationalist, pro-Erdogan hackers defaced a number of websites.

Source: Reuters

Read more:
Court Blocks Twitter and YouTube in Turkey After Pro-Communist Attack in Istanbul

Sometimes its censorship. Sometimes its unfortunate implications. And sometimes its straight-up unexplainable. But whatever the justification may be, games get renamed all the time when theyre released across different regions.

Lets look at ten particular cases of video game name changes:

Edited Title: Retitled to Canis Canem Edit in the United Kingdom.

The Reason? Bully, a game about high school life that was presumed prior to release to be all about, well, bullying, attracted a lot of controversy in both the U.S. and Europe. In the U.K., specifically, where Rockstar changed Bullys title to Canis Canem Edit, anti-bullying organizations campaigned against the games release, and even the countrys rating board came under fire for giving it a 15 rating.

Strangely, the games updated version for the 360 and the Wii, Bully: Scholarship Edition, was allowed to keep the Bully title when it came out two years later. It still caused controversy though.

[Image via Movie-censorship.com]

Edited Title: Gryzor, then Probotector in Europe and Oceania.

See more here:
10 Video Games That Got Weird Name Changes In Other Countries

Valkyria Chronicles - No Censorship - Part 11
Check out and support the game here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/294860/ Press the Like button below if you liked it! Subscribe if you wanna subscribe! Recorded with Bandicam. Edited...

By: Yukister

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Valkyria Chronicles - No Censorship - Part 11 - Video