Very Funny ~ Video Censorship Boards in myanmar
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By: Zomi Daily
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Very Funny ~ Video Censorship Boards in myanmar - Video
RT, Russias state-backed news organization, is crying foul after its website was banned from one of Reddits most popular forums.
In a blog post on Friday, RT blasted the popular vote-oriented message board, saying it had been kicked off the /r/news subreddit for alleged spamming and vote manipulation. The news outlet said it views the sanctions as an act of censorship.
Not so, says Reddit. Victoria Taylor, a spokeswoman for the website, told International Business Times in an email that subreddit moderators make their own decisions about what content is allowed on their forums. Reddit, she said, had no role in this particular decision.
[I]t is the prerogative of each individual subreddits moderators (like /r/news) to allow or ban domains, users, posts, comments, etc as they wish, Taylor said. As we are not moderators of /r/news, we were not involved or consulted on this decision.
On Thursday, Reddit user douglasmacarthur, a head moderator for /r/news, posted that RT had been banned for spam and vote manipulation. The post has since attracted almost 1,000 comments, many critical of the decision to ban a news site from a news forum.
Censorship amuck and fair reporting is gone from reddit, one user wrote.
Reddit is well known for its stringent, site-wide anti-spam guidelines, which are meant to prevent visitors from using the site to promote articles to which they have personal ties. The website has no exact definition of spam, but according to its guidelines, users who post links to sites they own or are affiliated with should consider themselves on thin ice.
That policy, combined with Reddits system of letting users vote articles up, has resulted in a relatively unfiltered exercise in online democracy, with mundane posts from everyday users often sharing prime real estate with articles about major news events. (The top article on the site as of Friday afternoon was from a user who posted photos of herself with chickenpox.)
The rules are not without their critics, however. Some bloggers have accused the Reddit system of being unfriendly to original content creators, as the Daily Dot noted earlier this month.
Reddit, which is owned by the privately held Advance Publications Inc., says in its guidelines that users who disagree with a moderators choices are free to start competing subreddits.
A graphical representation of a mesh network connected to the regular internet through several nodes.
Imagine accessing a new internet; an internet that is controlled and maintained by your neighbors instead of ISPs and the government. Does that sound appealing? That probably depends in large part on who you are and where you are, but the fact is, this isnt just a fantasy.
Old tech hands probably know all about wireless mesh networking, but Ill admit I wasnt too familiar with the concept before I read this recent article on Mother Jones. The basic idea is that any group of people in any geographic location can create their own network by linking together wireless routers and eschewing the physical cables that we use to connect to the real internet entirely.
Now obviously, how much you can do on that network depends very much on what the other users are willing to put into it. Since its essentially an intranet, you wont be able to access Google.com from it or anything like that (unless someone else on the network is willing to share their connection). But that doesnt mean its useless, and in fact big mesh networks have a lot to offer. The Mother Jones article describes one such network in Athens, Greece, which connects more than 1,000 members:
There are blogs, discussion forums, a Craigslist knockoff; theyve held movie nights where one member streams a flick and hundreds tune in to watch. Theres so much local culture that they even programmed their own mini-Google to help meshers find stuff.
Now imagine how much would be on offer if such a network caught on in Beijing or Tokyo.
Imagine every wifi router in this picture connected.
Of course, there are some obvious downsides to such an approach. In addition to the lack of content, your neighbors could ditch their routers, leaving you in the dark. Many older routers cant support mesh networks in the first place, and purchasing the right hardware can come with an up-front cost of $100 or more that might be too expensive for some (although of course, once youve got the hardware, connecting is free forever). Such networks do rely on geographical proximity; theyre probably not going to work well outside cities until the routers people are using have a much greater range (although with a little extra equipment it is possible to connect to other meshes that are miles away). And of course, the lack of any central control over the network could make it especially vulnerable to crime.
But the upsides are also compelling. Once youve got the hardware and some people already do without even knowing it mesh networks are cheap. Theyre also very fast. Theyre owned by you and the group collectively, rather than a corporation. The only physical aspect of them is the individual routers, so as long as most or all of them dont go down at once, the network stays up. And although its obviously not too difficult to listen in on a mesh network if one is so inclined, they arent beholden to any ISPs or governments and the only way to shut them down would be to physically disable every router in the network. Because of the impracticality of doing that in a city of millions like Beijing, a mesh network in China could (for example) serve as a censorship-free zone where political discussions can occur openly without risk of a government shutdown or of the users ISP turning their personal information over to police. In combination with the right anonymization tools, mesh networks could be a good way of circumventing the internet censorship in authoritarian countries like China and allowing people to have a real conversation.
And of course, since the internet is accessible by satellite, it would even be possible to set up an uncensored satellite internet connection anywhere with domestic internet censorship and then share that connection via a mesh network. Such a solution would be slow and probably extremely expensive today, but in ten or twenty years, it could be faster and more economical.
Originally posted here:
Mesh networks can help Asia avoid censorship and recover from disasters
Censorship rears its head in Myanmar By Roger Hamilton-Martin
UNITED NATIONS - One year after the government officially struck down laws obstructing free press in Myanmar, a parliamentary bill could allow previous censorship practices to re-emerge. When Thein Sein's Union Solidarity and Development party government ended the last of the censorship laws in August last year, many hailed a new era of free expression and an end to the pressures placed on journalists over the previous half century.
Still, many journalists are concerned by the state of media reform in the country. Currently, a publishing bill that critics say gives the Ministry of Information (MOI) overly broad powers to issue and revoke publication licenses has been passed by the lower house of parliament and is set for consideration by the upper house.
Myint Kyaw is secretary for the Myanmar Journalist Network
(MJN), which has been protesting the proposed bill, known as the Printing and Publishing Enterprise Bill. He told IPS that the MJN's main criticism of the bill was in its conception of a printer and publisher registry system, which would essentially allow a ministry-appointed registrar to issue or deny publication licenses and thus leave control over these licenses in the hands of the government.
This situation is reminiscent of when the ministry used to control journalists and editors through the threat of license revocation, Myint Kyaw described. Such a possibility, combined with the threat of imprisonment and aggression, would lead to self-censorship, particularly when speaking critically of the military or when investigating corruption, notably that of former dictators and their family businesses.
Myint Kyaw also spoke of the need for a law guaranteeing access to information and ensuring safety for journalists in conflict areas. Earlier in August, MJN also collected thousands of signatures from around Yangon, the country's former capital city, for a petition that demonstrated the public's discontent with the state of media reform.
The current parliamentary bill comes at a time when many human-rights groups remain critical of Myanmar's attitude towards the media. In June, the government banned Time magazine after it featured a piece on the radical Buddhist 969 movement.
"It's a disgraceful decision to ban the issue and indicates recidivism in official censorship in Burma [the former name for Myanmar]," David Mathieson, a senior Asia researcher with Human Rights Watch, told IPS.
Benjamin Ismail, head of Reporters Without Borders' Asia-Pacific desk, expressed a similar viewpoint. "The reflex of censoring news has not disappeared, but this is not a surprise since the government is composed in majority by the same persons who were already in power before 2011."
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