Wikileaks.de Suspended by Germany

Germany's registration authority has suspended investigative journalism site Wikileak's Internet domain registration without a notice.

The action comes two weeks after the house of the German WikiLeaks domain sponsor, Theodor Reppe, was searched by German authorities. Police documentation shows that the March 24, 2009 raid was triggered by WikiLeaks' publication of Australia's proposed secret Internet censorship list. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) told Australian journalists that they did not request the intervention of the German government.

The publication of the Australian list exposed the blacklisting of many harmless or political sites and changed the nature of the censorship debate in Australia. The Australian government's mandatory internet censorship proposal is now not expected to pass the Australian senate.

It is also worth mentioning a secret draft of international copyright treaty negotiated behind closed doors by some governments representing unidentified entities has been successfully uncovered and made public by Wikileaks.

I find this trend (secret policy making, nation-wide censorship attempts - some already in action, therefore not attempts) extremely annoying. I can understand parents' concern for their children and similar arguments but I believe this issue can be tackled at a user level by commercial or free software. This is not regulation of Internet, it is regulating freedom of expression. Power corrupts, great power corrupts even more.

Short URL for this post

Comments

  1. RWApril 19, 2009 at 8:58 AM

    Thank you for posting this. Very good information on a subject I had no idea that was going on. I agree with you on your points in summation, nothing could be truer.

    Also thank you for visiting my EC market place, I appreciate that!

    ReplyDelete
  2. ArchiverApril 19, 2009 at 11:56 AM

    You're welcome Roger. Let me add this: I believe Wikileaks is doing a tremendous job for the public. Both of us (I assume you are, too) are writing in the web. Some of us do it for income. They, too produce copyrighted material. And some governments are cutting a secret deal about copyright as if we do not exist or we do not have a say in the matter. And I have learned it from Wikileaks. Let me at least thank again for their work once again, here.

    ReplyDelete
  3. NessaApril 21, 2009 at 4:19 AM

    I agree with you that censoring what one's children have access to should be done on the user level, without government regulation. It seems goverment in various countries thninks we as people are not capable of doing what is best for ourselves.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pros of Short Domain Names

Life is a good teacher. Up to now, it has never occurred to me a short domain name could be an advantage. I have always assumed, because I do it that way, people could bookmark a site when they like it regardless of the length of its name. Though I do not use it, social networking sites like Twitter changed my mind. I suddenly realized how difficult it must be to write a tweet about an article on this site without the aid of URL shortener services. Just writing the part "experimentsincyberspace/2009/04/" with the protocol prefix consumes 52 characters. I am not saying you will not be found. I am talking about the extra step, often tedious, of the necessity of shortening the URL. A very good idea could be having a short URL handy beneath or above your articles so that people can easily use it. Rather than having your visitors do it, you can take the extra step and place a short link yourself. In addition, keeping your URL intact can be a marketing and branding advantage. ...
Read more

A Thought Experiment on Do Follow Comments

Image
Einstein was a great scientist and without exception all physics students new to his work are introduced to his use of Gedanken Experiment or thought experiments. Gren Ireson, a lecturer at Loughborough University, UK, where his research interests include quantum philosophy, physics of sport and learning and teaching physical sciences, contests that a thought experiment has three requirements [PDF]: It is carried out in the mind (however one cares to define 'mind'). It draws on experience. It allows the experimenter to see what is happening (perhaps a better term to use than 'see' is 'imagine' or 'form a mental image').  I see a lot of blogs announcing they do follow comments lately, so I will humbly use Einstein's technique to shed some light on do follow commenting today. Let us start with a definition first. Google's Matt Cutts speaks: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives web masters the ability to modify PageRank flow ...
Read more

New Rush for Top Level Domains Begins

It will shortly, if ICANN's new proposal holds up, that is. According to Paul Levins, VP corporate affairs, any domain name will be possible, subject to your imagination, The familiar .com, .net, .org and 18 other suffixes — officially "generic top-level domains" — could be joined by a seemingly endless stream of new ones next year under a landmark change approved last summer by the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, the entity that oversees the Web's address system. Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly. A rapper might apply for a web address ending in .hiphop. [...] To beat a competitor to the punch, a company might decide it needs to control a new generic domain, such as .cereal or .detergent, but it would be costly. The currently proposed application fee is $185,000, plus an annual "continuance" fee of $25,000. If more than one company wants a suffix, there could be a bidding w...
Read more