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Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

Tunisia and Bahrain Block Individual Twitter Pages: “

First, governments blocked Blogspot. Then they blocked Facebook, and then Twitter. And just when technophiles all over the globe started groaning, a couple of governments got a bit wiser to social media and, rather than block the entire platform for the transgressions of one user, began blocking individual accounts instead. Notably, this has happened in the past with YouTube where, rather than cut off the video-sharing site for all users, a government will simply block a single video; the latest trend seems to be blocking individual Twitter pages.

Over the past few weeks, reports have trickled in to Herdict and via Twitter, alerting us of the filtering of individual Twitter pages in Tunisia and Bahrain (as well as, possibly, China). In Tunisia, the accounts of exiled activist Sami Ben Gharbia (@ifikra), engineer @Ma7moud, and popular independent news source Nawaat (@nawaat) have been confirmed inaccessible, while in Bahrain @FreeBahrain was allegedly blocked on New Years Day.

ifikra and freebahrain ruminate on their Twitter accounts being blocked

Twitter is no stranger to being blocked: Both China and Iran have blocked the social networking/microblogging site in the past, and Saudi Arabia reportedly blocked two individual Twitter users pages in mid-2009.

What is particularly interesting is that the governments of Tunisia and Bahrain have now demonstrated capability and desire to block individual Twitter pages, thus silencing certain voices while still keeping a major communication platform open. Only time will tell if this will become a global trend.

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(Via Global Voices Advocacy.)

'Iranian cyber army' hits Twitter: (BBC)
A group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army managed to redirect Twitter users to its own site displaying a political message. Twitter said the attack had been carried out by getting at the servers that tell web browsers where to find particular sites. The site said it would start an investigation into what allowed the ‘unplanned downtime’ to take place. see also Twitter hack by ‘Iranian Cyber Army’ is really just misdirection (Guardian).

(Via QuickLinks Update.)

Iranian hackers ‘hijack’ Twitter:

Popular online messaging service Twitter was left reeling overnight, after Iranian hackers appeared to break into the site and deface it.

The strike left the site completely unavailable for several hours in the early hours of Friday morning, with the site’s estimated 30m users unable to access the service or send messages to each other online.

The incident took place some time around 6am in the UK, when the main Twitter page suddenly seemed to disappear – instead replaced with a stark black and red screen featuring an image of a flag.

The page, which carried a mixture of English and Farsi slogans, appeared to name the group behind the attack and offer a call to arms.

‘This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army,’ said the message.

‘The USA thinks they control and manage internet access, but they don’t. We control and manage the internet with our power, so do not try to the incite Iranian people.’

The site returned to normal functions around two hours later, with staff telling users that it had suffered from ‘unplanned downtime’.

Although early reports suggested the site itself had been breached by attackers, it now seems that the strike was actually a crude form of assault known as a DNS hijack.

The DNS, or Domain Name System, is effectively a telephone directory of the internet – connecting the name of a website, such as twitter.com or guardian.co.uk, to the web servers that hold its contents.

In hijacking cases, computer criminals effectively redirect the traffic intended for a particular website, sending users to a page of their own choice rather than the planned destination.

Around two and half hours after the outage occurred, Twitter staff issued a short statement on the company’s blog confirming the style of the attack it had suffered.

‘Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed,’ said the post. ‘We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon.’

It is not the first time that Twitter has found itself subject to attention due to its links with Iranian activists.

During the uprising that followed the elections in June this year, in which incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad eventually triumphed, the US state department urged the site to remain online to allow more information about the protests to spread online.

Little is known, however, about the group who appeared to claim responsibility for hacking Twitter. But the nature of the messages they left appears somewhat confusing.

Though the text left by the hackers appeared to be anti-American, they also used the image of a green flag – the colour connected to the election protesters, and to Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the main challenger to President Ahmadinejad.

(Via Latest news, sport, business, comment and reviews from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk.)

Twitter breaks privacy law, says Norwegian consumer group: “The Norwegian consumer group that says that Facebook’s terms and conditions break the law has pledged also to take action against Twitter and LinkedIn.”

(Via OUT-LAW News.)

The Twitter storm that saved freedom of speech: “

But not exactly, not really…

Comment So was it Twitter what won it? Yesterday, in the wake of a flurry of Twitter and blogosphere outrage, the ’super-injunction’ banning the Guardian (and, we should note, everybody else) from reporting details of a parliamentary question effectively collapsed. ‘A few tweets and freedom of speech is restored,’ the Graun itself said, while Tory blogger Iain Dale claimed: ‘Let there be no mistake. This would not have happened without the online engagement through various blogs and Twitter which has happened over the last 18 hours or so.’…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Reporting bans may lose their power in Twitter age says expert after Guardian ban is lifted: “The editor of a newspaper which was banned from reporting on the tabling of a question in Parliament has thanked the users of micro-blogging service Twitter for their role in what he called a ‘victory for free speech’.”

(Via OUT-LAW News.)

Blogger who was target of Twitter and Facebook attacks blames Russia Russian hackers are believed to be behind a ‘single, massively co-ordinated attack’ on some of the world’s leading websites, all in an effort to silence a pro-Georgian blogger.

(Via Tech and Web from Times Online.)

New Calls for Global Web Censorship Probe – InternetNews.com

Following social media flurry in Iran and China, lawmaker calls for a hearing to look into online censorship abroad.

July 9, 2009, By Kenneth Corbin

In response to the recent flurry of street-level updates from citizens using social media during the unrest that followed the disputed Iranian election, a lawmaker is calling for a congressional inquiry to ensure that those services don’t go dark under pressure from repressive governments.

Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) has appealed to the leadership of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to hold a hearing to revisit the contentious issue of Internet censorship overseas, hoping to raise awareness and lend a formal stamp of approval to the groups and companies working to keep Web sites and services like Twitter and Facebook up in the face of government restrictions.

‘It is becoming increasingly evident that communications technologies and applications that are developed in the United States are becoming a growing part of the lives of people beyond our borders,’ Bono Mack wrote in a letter to the chairmen and ranking members of the Commerce Committee and its Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet.

‘It is imperative that the U.S. government do more to uphold and promote basic human rights, free expression and the economic activity generated and supported by the Internet,’ she said.

Spokespeople for the committee leaders told InternetNews.com they were reviewing Bono Mack’s request, but that there were no immediate plans to convene a hearing on the issue.

This would not be the first time online censorship abroad has caught the attention of lawmakers. In 2006, executives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cicso appeared in a high-profile hearing to defend their Internet operations in China. In the last Congress, Sen. Richard Durbin chaired a Judiciary Committee hearing revisiting the Internet heavies’ China policy.

But in the time since, the face of the Internet has changed considerably as sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have marched steadily into the mainstream and given people easy ways to broadcast real-time updates in areas where the mainstream media might not have access.

In the demonstrations that followed the election in Iran last month, for instance, the government moved swiftly to expel media outlets, and, for a time, the world watched as eye witnesses posted updates on Twitter, while correspondents from outlets like the BBC and Associated Press filed their reports from cities in neighboring countries.

Reflecting on the demonstrations a few weeks later at a security conference outside Washington last month, New York Times reporter David Sanger described the use of social media in the Iranian elections as a point of no return, both for sharing news with the world and organizing resistance within a repressive state.

‘The art of street protest against a government will never be the same after what we saw a few weeks ago,’ Sanger said.

He said he was not convinced that the protests ‘would have come together had it not been for the technologies that many Americans had not really thought of in political terms prior to this month.’

The Iranian people’s reliance on Twitter to communicate with the outside world was not lost on the State Department, which contacted the site’s executives to request that they delay a scheduled service outage so Twitter would stay online in Iran.

But it was broader than just Twitter. Images of the death of Neda Agha Soltan, known to most of the world simply as Neda, appeared on YouTube and Flickr and quickly became among the most recognizable icons of the Iranian government’s efforts to put down the demonstrations.

‘At a time when the Ahmadinejad government was doing everything in its power to control messages and images leaving Iran, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube became unfiltered, citizen-fueled news bureaus of reports filed straight from the streets of Tehran,’ Bono Mack said.

She also called attention to China, a key U.S. trading partner long criticized for restricting access to online content deemed subversive.

The most recent flare-up in China involved the uprising of the ethnic Uighars in Xinjiang province, but China has also come under fire in recent months for censoring Internet access to YouTube content documenting harsh tactics used against Tibetan demonstrators and blocking certain sites during last year’s Olympics in Beijing.

‘A hearing held by your committee will help shed light on government-sponsored censorship and around the world and its serious implications for trade and human rights that cannot be ignored,’ Bono Mack said.

Iran’s Twitter Revolution: Ahmadinejad’s Fear of the Internet: “With the Iranian authorities cracking down on the international press, the West is reliant on the Internet to find out what is happening on the ground. Hard as it might try, it will be difficult for the regime to easily stop the flow of information online. Web users around the world are rallying behind the protesters.”

(Via SPIEGEL ONLINE – International.)

IR – The Twitter crisis: how site became voice of resistance in Iran: “(Guardian)
As foreign journalists were expelled from Iran or confined to their hotel rooms, and as events moved at speed through the day, web users across the world turned in enormous numbers to their counterparts in Iran, who were using blogs, YouTube and social networking sites to spread information that would otherwise not have reached a wide audience. As one Twitter user with apparent links to the opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi put it: ‘Everybody try to film as much as poss today on mobiles ? these are eyes of world.’ Mobile phone footage and grainy pictures were copied on to blogs and news sites, while mainstream broadcasters, their correspondents constrained, relied on user-generated footage in an attempt to circumvent the censored state broadcasts.

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(Via QuickLinks Update.)