24 Aug 2010 | Index Index, minipost
Police in eastern Ukraine have reclassified the case of a missing journalist as “premeditated murder“. Vasyl Klymentyev, chief editor and reporter for newspaper Novyi Stil, was last seen on 11 August getting into a BMW with an unknown man. The Kharkiv-based weekly newspaper is well known for reporting on corruption in local government and law enforcement. Klymentyev’s most recent articles criticised a local prosecutor and head of the regional fiscal police, and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has urged investigators to focus on his journalism as a motive. Klymentyev’s deputy said that the editor had been threatened several times before and had been offered bribes to keep damaging information quiet.
24 Aug 2010 | Index Index, minipost
Carlos Flores, winner of the Index on Censorship and Guardian award for Journalism has won his fight to have his radio licence returned. Flores’ radio station, Radio La Voz, was closed by the Peruvian government for allegedly inciting violence in Bagua Grande in June 2009, when indigenous groups and villagers clashed with security forces. No official charges were ever brought against Flores. Just a few weeks ago Flores had travelled over 400km to attend a scheduled meeting regarding the reopening of the station, only to be met by a junior minister and told Radio La Voz would remain closed.
24 Aug 2010 | Uncategorized
Ph.D. student Sam Burnett has developed Collage, a tool that relies on user-generated content sites like Flickr to help citizens in countries oppressed by censorship communicate more openly.
The basic idea is to hide censored content in seemingly innocuous photos that are hosted on user-generated content sites like Flickr.
The landscape of internet censorship has changed drastically due to more refined and sophisticated censorship techniques. This has particularly been the case in China, over the last decade, where the infamous “Great Firewall of China” has been set up. He says this has been the impetus to a rise in techniques to try and circumvent internet censorship.
According to Feamster’s article, an infranet system can provide countries and companies with the capacity to work around censorship firewalls as it “uses a tunnel protocol that provides a covert communication channel between its clients and servers, modulated over standard HTTP transactions that resemble innocuous web browsing.”
However, he feels that these web proxies are easily discovered by censors and lack robustness and deniability, which he defines as “the users of the system must be able to deny that they were even using the system in the first place.”
This is where the new Collage tool comes in. Nick Feamster writes:
“Based on these observations, we designed Collage, which allows users to hide messages in photos that they post to user-generated content sites like Flickr and Twitter. The tool allows message senders to hide messages in photos and tweets and upload them to respective user-generated content sites. Its design has several advantages. First, it does not require users to set up fixed infrastructure (e.g., Web servers). Second, it uses erasure coding to “spread” any single message across multiple drop sites, making the system more robust to blocking than a proxy-based system. Collage appeared at USENIX Security Symposium last Friday (paper here) and has appeared in the press recently. Time will tell whether this tool sees more widespread adoption.”
You can read the full paper here.
23 Aug 2010 | Index Index, minipost
The Bosnian Central Parliament is to discuss new legislation on 1 September that would ban the wearing of a face veil, or niqab. The new law would impose a 24-hour curfew on veiled women, and those violating the ban could be fined 50 euros. Muslim women held a protest outside the Central Parliament in Sarajevo after the proposal was made by the Bosnian Serb Party of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD). France and Syria have already banned the veil, and the Netherlands and Belgium are considering similar legislation.
