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BEIJING At a rare public forum on cyberissues Tuesday featuring American and Chinese government officials, U.S. diplomats and business leaders tried using economic arguments to persuade China to stop its cyberattacks and Internet censorship.

Chinas heavy-handed Web restrictions not only slow Internet speeds and make company data less secure, but they also have tangible economic effects on the country, said Gary Locke, the U.S. ambassador to China.

Undersecretary of State Robert Hormats was even more blunt in calling out China for its actions.

I ask my Chinese friends to question whether this kind of activity serves Chinas real interests as it seeks to attract high-end investment, aims to develop international markets for its innovative products, and wants its companies welcomed and respected as they increasingly invest around the world, Hormats said.

In recent months, after news reports publicly tied cyberattacks originating from China to the Chinese military, U.S. officials have taken a harsher and more direct tone in confronting China on the issue.

Tuesdays comments were made during an Internet forum sponsored by Microsoft, which carefully featured an equal number of Chinese and U.S. officials.

Chinese officials stuck mostly to previous boilerplate responses to such accusations: China is in the early stages of its development; far from perpetrating cyberattacks, China is among the most frequent targets; andChina opposes the actions of rogue hackers.

One Chinese official, however, went on the offensive.

Recently some people have cooked up this theory of a Chinese cybersecurity threat, said Qian Xiaoqian, vice minister of Chinas State Council Information Office. It is a variation on the popular theory of a rising China threat.

China has long opposed hacking, he said, and thinks we shouldnt militarize the cyberspace and attack other countries in violation of laws and regulations and also in violation of moral standards.

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U.S. government, business leaders push China on cyberattacks, Internet censorship

The word censorship evokes Communist Russia or North Koreanot exactly sleepy, friendly Santa Fe.

Yet according to Tiffany Shackelford, the executive director for the national Association for Alternative Newsmedia (of which SFR is a member), thats exactly what happened to SFR last week.

In case you missed the breathless TV newscasts (A provocative cover for an unconventional paper! KOAT proclaimed), last Wednesday, a disgruntled reader confiscated some 400 copies of SFR shortly after the most recent issue hit newsstands.

People who steal papers just to keep information from getting out to the public are actively engaging in acts of censorship, Shackelford says. Thats an act of censorship.

It started with an anonymous call around 10 am. The caller said the paper was filthy and said he planned to remove copies of SFR from newsstands around town. Although he didnt specify what, exactly, he considered filthy, the cover of the paper featured the headline Nuts to Buttsa reference to a controversial prison shakedown technique, and the topic of that weeks cover story. The image showed the backs of a mans bare legs (actually, the legs of SFR staff writer Joey Peters), with an orange prison jumpsuit around his ankles.

Here at SFR, angry calls about less-than-G-rated material arent exactly uncommonbut rarely do they turn into acts of censorship.

Ultimately, it probably did less harm than good. By the end of the day, we had ordered 1,000 additional copies of the Nuts to Butts issue and taped two TV interviews for that nights 10 pm broadcast. Only around 400 of the 19,500 papers wed printed were actually taken, and the rest were flying off the stands.

When theres something in there that someone doesnt want people to read, they wanna read it, you know? says Brian Clarey, the editor of the Greensboro, NC-based YES! Weekly, an alternative weekly paper that experienced a similar incident in 2009. There really is no such thing as bad publicity. Ive had to repeat that to myself over and over and over again, but something like this is great.

But to Shackelford and others, the ease with which free papers like SFR can be suppressedand the lack of recourse when it comes to prosecuting censorshippoint to more worrisome trends.

When the government doesnt fully prosecute people, theyre aiding and abetting censorship, Shackelford says. Were talking a lot about transparency these days, and how the government is getting allegedly better on things like freedom of information, yet theres a major, major issue with censorship.

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The Censorship Issue

Popular video sharing site Vimeo was blocked by Indonesias largest telco Telkomsel for a short while. And while it was still being blocked, the only reasonable answer that the companys customer service and staff had was that Vimeo was somehow associated with the only thing that is being widely censored in Indonesia: porn.

As the third largest democratic country in the world, the news media here can still talk about anything that they want (albeit with a few discouragements), even when it is related to the first familys dodgy tax returns. One of the reporters of the above article tweeted about his experience being contacted time and time again by the presidents staff. And The Jakarta Post office was heavily discouraged from publishing the article. But still, the government couldnt do anything other than that, and the article was published, putting the president in the spotlight.

But as the second largest Muslim populated country in the world, it is still very sensitive about pornographic material. The ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring (being also a representative of an Islamic-oriented political party, the PKS) has vowed to curb porn in Indonesia. This is the same minister who has blocked more than one million porn sites, and was even able to force RIM (now known as Blackberry) to filter porn on its Blackberry handsets two years ago.

Just last week Tifatul also made a request to Twitter to see if the US-based company can censor porn-related tweets to protect Indonesian children from accessing those sites. Twitters new country-by-country censorship policy might be able to grant that request, but so far there is no update about the enquiry.

While porn sites are definitely being blocked by the Indonesian government, interestingly porn site Xvideos is sitting securely at the 48th spot in Indonesia according to Alexas rankings. There are indeed ways to overcome the censorship like changing the DNS address, using proxy servers, or using VPN services. And you could do those on your mobile phones too.

Though sometimes the government and telcos get it right concerning which sites should indeed be blocked under the nations anti-porn laws, there are times when they get it wrong. Vimeo is one such example - its an artistic site crucial for young filmmakers in the country to get global, creative exposure.

Indonesia is still a democratic country which respects your freedom of speech - but with a religious twist. But when an unfair block happens, young web users know that there are ways to still access whatever is being censored.

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Censorship in Indonesia: No Porn Please!

iDCLOAK's unblock proxy list is specially designed for censorship circumvention and is constantly updated with fresh proxies.

Dallas, Texas (PRWEB) April 07, 2013

We have a full schedule of service releases for 2013, says iDCLOAKs Director of Marketing, Gill-Chris Welles, and the free proxy servers list is an important first. For one, it is a calling card for our companys entrance into the existing proxy market so those who already use proxies know we are here and that we are a serious player. Perhaps even more important is that the free list is helping us raise public awareness on the advantages of using a proxy as a buffer for your internet privacy were saying Never used a proxy before? Well, here, have a try. And internet censorship circumvention is of course going to be the main reason people do try proxies out.

The iDCLOAK proxy database contains some 2,500 open proxies from over 70 countries and is managed by an online proxy checker bot which verifies that proxies are live and provides important data about the proxy to the user. The selection menus embedded in the list allow users to filter the proxy database according to specific preferences, such as: country, port, proxy protocol and even speed or level of anonymity.

We want users to move away from the idea that a proxy is a single-state service it neednt be so fixed in its operations. Regular unblock proxy sites offer very little choice regarding performance or IP location you just punch in a URL and see what happens. To bypass censors successfully at acceptable speeds you need to know where you are routing your connection to and what speeds the proxy is running at. Our proxy list gives you that data up front and lets you search for proxies according to a whole range of specific criteria you set. Later this year we are releasing our Smart VPN, a much more advanced cross-platform product that will streamline the proxy bypassing process while providing even more choice than our list offers now. For users to get the most out of the iDCLOAK Smart VPN, we need to raise consumer expectations of circumvention technologies. The iDCLOAK proxy list is doing just that.

The iDCLOAK Smart VPN software-based proxy is due for release in the coming months. For those interested in learning about forthcoming products, or looking for an education in web anonymity, security or internet censorship circumvention, visit http://www.idcloak.com.

Gill-Chris Welles idcloak Technologies Inc. 7862109230 Email Information

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iDCLOAK Technologies Releases a Proxy Servers List Designed Specifically for Web Censorship Circumvention

With over 500 million YouTube views, TED Talks have attracted guest speakers such as Bill Gates, Richard Dawkins and Julian Assange and in the process, made conferences cool again.

But in recent weeks TED Talks with their mantra - ideas worth sharing - have been accused of censorship after two British speakers had their talks removed from TEDs official website.

The row involves two British speakers, the journalist and author Graham Hancock and Cambridge and Harvard University lecturer Rupert Sheldrake. Both speakers have been deemed as provocative amid accusations of pseudoscience at lectures they gave at a TEDx talk a franchised spin-off of the main TED Talk brand. Hancock describes a war on consciousness that prevents the world from gaining a higher state of awareness through shamanic principles and psychoactives like the South American potion, ayahuasca.

Rupert Sheldrake, a biochemist gave a speech which was loosely based on his book, The Science Delusion in which he refutes enduring dogmas which he claims are holding back legitimate scientific enquiry.

Both speakers who spoke at the TEDx conference in east London last month had their speeches pulled from its YouTube channel. After complaints from Sheldrake and Hancock and many TED viewers, their videos were reinstalled, but not on the main website in the naughty corner as Mr Hancock described it.

Hancock and Sheldrake have also called for the anonymous science board which advises TED on the legitimacy of speakers, to be revealed something which TED is refusing to do, citing they are unpaid volunteers.

At the talks, speakers are given 18 minutes to present their ideas, which range from a mixture of science and culture through to storytelling.

But in recent months, a series of controversies dogged the not-for-profit organisation and whose acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, leading many to question the integrity of the organisation which charges audiences several thousands of pounds to watch a speech, yet pays its speakers nothing. In 2009, TED decided to license its brand allowing anyone, around the world to stage TEDx events.

Last week in California, officials withdrew the license awarded to organisers of TEDx West Hollywood. Organisers said the conference theme who were talking about the reality of ESP, was pseudoscience.

Graham Hancock, said: I think it comes down to the management of popular culture, rather than leaving people to make up their own minds.

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TED conference censorship row