Source: Arabian Business

Saudi authorities have detained a Saudi national for setting up a website that “harms the public order and violates Islamic values”.

Source: Al Jazeera

The United Arab Emirates has deported an online activist to Thailand after stripping him of his right to reside in the emirates, a rights group said.

Source: Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, openDemocracy

The Russian blogosphere has burgeoned into a open-door sanctuary for all strands of political opinion. Predictably, it has also attracted the attention of the country’s security services. Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov present the first in a series of investigations outlining how the Russian state is now monitoring its online public.

Source: CNN

Social media users who denounce drug cartel activities along the Mexican border received a brutal warning this week: Two mangled bodies hanging like cuts of meat from a pedestrian bridge.

Source: The Globe and Mail China’s state-run news agency demanded on Tuesday that Internet companies, regulators and police do more to cleanse websites of “toxic rumours”, adding to signs that the ruling Communist Party wants to tame the explosion of freewheeling microblogs. The Xinhua news agency’s denunciation of Internet “rumour mongering” came after a senior… Read more »

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University has released three new publications as part of their circumvention project. Over the past two years, the Center has carried out a number of research activities designed to improve our understanding of the knowledge, usage, and effectiveness of circumvention tools as a means to promote access to information online in repressive online environments.

Source: Olga Khrustaleva, Moscow News

The biggest-ever hack attack on LiveJournal, the world’s biggest blogging network, and its prominent opposition voices, has prompted bloggers to fear a new wave of shut-offs closer to the elections.

Last week, from Monday to Friday, a massive series of DDoS attacks, believed to emanate from computers in Latin America, hit LiveJournal’s Qwest and Verizon servers – hitting the network’s most prominent anti-government critics, including anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny.

The bloggers are hitting back, however, accusing authorities of wanting to quieten opposition in the run-up to the elections – but insisting the clampdown would be unsuccessful.

…

For full original article, see here

Source: RFE/RL

Some prominent Kazakh bloggers say the government’s blockage of the Wordpress blog platform since June is politically motivated, RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service reports.

In an official response to parliament deputy and active Wordpress user Murat Abenov, main Kazakh Internet provider KazTeleCom said on July 12 that it blocked domestic access to Wordpress because of two “illegal” blogs.

…

For full original article, see here

For weeks, Syrian democracy activists have used Facebook and Twitter to promote a wave of bold demonstrations. Now, the Syrian government and its supporters are striking back — not just with bullets, but with their own social-media offensive.

Mysterious intruders have scrawled pro-government messages on dissidents’ Facebook pages. Facebook pages have popped up offering cyber tools to attack the opposition. The Twitter #Syria hashtag — which had carried accounts of the protests — has been deluged with automated messages bearing scenes of nature and old sports scores.

For full original article, see here