The Information Warfare Monitor/ (Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and the SecDev Group, Ottawa) and the Shadowserver Foundation announce the release of Shadows in the Cloud: An investigation into cyber espionage 2.0.FULL REPORT. The report documents a complex ecosystem of cyber espionage that systematically targeted and compromised computer systems in… Read more »
When Youtube went down for a few hours, many people speculated that it may be China seeking to punish Google for their recent actions. Ron Deibert suggests this is not likely the case, and that the Youtube outage is likely independent of any Chinese actions. He describes the consistent nature of the Great Firewall, in this story from CNN.
From CNN
In this article published in International Political Sociology Deibert and Rohozinski analyze cyberspace security concepts, which they argue can be divided into two related dimensions, articulated as “risks”: risks to the physical realm of computer and communication technologies (risks to cyberspace); and risks that arise from cyberspace and are facilitated or generated by its technologies, but do not directly target the infrastructures per se (risks through cyberspace). They argue that the contrasts between how governments view the domains has led to contradictory tendencies and paradoxical outcomes.
Microsoft recently added a new layer of complexity to the ongoing debate regarding the filtering and censorship practices of U.S. search engines via its own search engine, Bing. ONI testing reveals liberal filtering by Bing in one of the most censored regions in the world: the Arab countries.
Microsoft’s Bing, which tailors its search engine to serve different countries and regions and offers its services in 41 languages, has a filtering system at the keyword level for users in several countries. 1 Users in the Arab countries2—or, as termed by Microsoft—“Arabian countries”—are prevented from conducting certain search queries in both English and Arabic.
ONI testing reveals that Microsoft filters Arabic and English keywords that could yield sex- or LGBT-related images and content.
From OpenNet Initiative
