Mediaboss Marketing

Arthit Suriyawongkul, a researcher at Thai Netizen Network - a civil society group, said the controversial bills appeared to focus more on national cyber security than economic policy.

Arthit pointed out that some key details inside the bills were linked to the National Council for Peace and Order's declarations related to media censorship. If the bills came into effect, the result would be another form of state censorship through cyber and broadcasting services.

He expressed and shared this opinion in an academic seminar called "The digital economy policy and media reform", organised yesterday by Chulalongkorn University's Communications Arts faculty.

Arthit offered the cyber-security bill as an example. Under this draft law, the authorities would be allowed to set up committees able to access and survey the personal data of people across all forms and formats - without court orders.

A similar point between the NCPO's announcement and the new bills was that the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology would be placed under state sovereignty for national security reasons.

Also, panellist Prasong Lertratanawisute, director of the Isra Institute, suggested that to get access and collect personal data, the state authority should be permitted only by the court to ensure and guarantee people's rights were protected, plus freedom of information.

"Any bills involved with this issue must place more concern on privacy and rights of the people," Prasong suggested.

Pirongrong Ramasoota, a lecturer at Chulalongkorn University, said such bills would send the media reform process back to the past. She said another problem was the potential for abuse of power. So, the new bills should be amended to protect people's rights. "Under the bills, it seems the government needs to address public notification if they want to access personal data. This is not enough," she stressed and added that many developed countries in Europe emphasised consent in data collection and fair information practices. This was the point on which the Thai government must be concerned.

Apart from the public surveillance issue, media experts and scholars also expressed anxiety over media development once the laws were in place.

The panellists pointed to the NBTC's fund which is reserved for public research and development, disabled and disadvantaged people, benefits for the elderly and media development for public and community service. It would soon be used to fund government interests once the bills received endorsement by the National Legislative Assembly, they said.

Read more from the original source:
Digital bills a 'new level of censorship'

CNN News - #39;Face-sitting #39; protest held over UK porn censorship law -
Dozens of protesters gathered outside the Houses of Parliament to participate in a mass face-sitting demonstration on 12 December to express their dismay at ...

By: sextape

See the article here:
CNN News -'Face-sitting' protest held over UK porn censorship law - - Video

Little Big Planet CENSORED - Swinging Safari Level #39;s Music Theme/Song - Video Game Censorship
Did you know later versions of Little Big Planet censor the Swinging Safari level #39;s music theme? In the first edition of LBP1, the song (Tapha Niang) actually has vocals which quote lines from...

By: Censored Gaming

Read more:
Little Big Planet CENSORED - Swinging Safari Level's Music Theme/Song - Video Game Censorship - Video

Topic: "self-censorship" can also be found in scientific
Look today on new interesting topic - "self-censorship" can also be found in scientific. *---*---*---*---*---*---*---*---*---*--*---*---*---* Check out more exciting topics: https://www.yo...

By: Funnypedia

More here:
Topic: "self-censorship" can also be found in scientific - Video

On 20 January, Craig Hockenberry saw a graph that made him utter the words: Holy shit. The data he was looking at showed a massive spike in traffic hitting the email server of his software and graphic design company, Iconfactory. Because the data was coming in at such volume and at high speed, peaking at at 52 Mbps thanks tomillions of requests, the email server was rendered useless.

After the initial shock, an investigation revealed the massive influx was caused by a significant number of requests that were supposed to go to other sites, from Facebook to YouTube, but ended up being routed to Iconfactory. And those requests were all coming from China, home to the Great Firewall censorship machine that decides which pieces of the web the countrys citizens can visit.

Hockenberry wasnt the only one to have suffered as a result. Dynamic Internet Technology, a company that helps people view blocked content, was another victim (though the firms everyday operations might lead one to believe otherwise), the Wall Street Journalreported. According to aReddit post, in one case, Chinese mobile games were making requests for completely unrelated IP addresses, which are basically seeing a DDoS from Chinese mobile devices.

It would appear the Chinese governments use of the Domain Name System (DNS), which converts website nameslike Forbes.com to a numerical IP address so PCs and serverscan talk with one another, had gone awry. China carries out much of its censorship by tweaking DNS to stop people accessing non-approved websites. In security parlance, this is called DNS poisoning ashackers often use it to direct people to malicious sites. But throughout this month, something has gone wrong with Chinas own poisoning efforts. Instead of timing out users connections to banned sites, the DNS system took citizens to seemingly random websites, like those named above. Those online services that werent ready for what would amount to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks flatlined.

Heres whats concerning: if Chinas censorship machine either screws up, or is hacked, it could redirect hundreds of millions of connections to online services and subsequently wipe out bits of the web. Hockenberry said the national government could exploit this control over the DNS system to use every machine in China for a massive DDoS attack on innocent sites. As my colleague Sean quipped, They have weaponized their entire population.

But Roland Dobbins, senior analyst at anti-DDoS vendor Arbor Networks, told me it would be unwise to carry out such an attack. For starters, China would start to clog up some of its internet pipes out to the wider world. And such a brazen move would hardly bestealthy. Theres no deniability, Dobbins added. China has never admitted to carrying out any kind of online attack, despite claims it is one of the more active offensive players.

More worrisome, and possibly more likely, would be an attack following a compromise of Chinas censorship machine, Dobbins added. There were some indications this monthsblackouts were actually caused not by a glitch in the Great Firewall, but by an attack on the Domain Name System (DNS) in China, which converts URLs like Forbes.com to a numerical IP address so machines can talk with one another. DNSPod, a DNS provider, said it had suffered an attack, but little more has been forthcoming.

So opaque are Chinas technical efforts to block large chunks of the internet, its impossible to say how vulnerable the Great Firewall is, Dobbins noted. Sometimes the censorship systems themselves arent very secure. Is it possible that someone could find an exploit to do some DNS poisoning to use it as a botnet? We dont really know because those systems are not open to evaluation.

If the outages last week were caused by errors in updating the Great Firewall, it points to another possibility: human mistakes causing serious disruption to the internet. Any administrator of any large DNS service can make a mistake and it can cause significant collateral damage, Dobbins said. According to reports, the Firewall is currently getting a refresh to block VPNs, which offer a way around censorship by routing traffic through different servers and encrypting connections.

The power to cause epic attacks by using DNS poisoning is not unique to China, however. Any country or body with control over the DNS system could abuse their position to launch huge DDoS attacks. But they couldnt take advantage of as many connections as China, which invests vast sums on its web control mechanisms.

See more here:
Accidental DDoS? How China's Censorship Machine Can Cause Unintended Web Blackouts