Prime Minister, David Cameron, was accompanied by his Secretary of State for Culture and Media, Jeremy Hunt. Nobody has actually disclosed what they discussed in the course of the meeting.

Jeremy Hunt, however, sent out a tweet stating that Zuckerberg was a really smart guy with some good ideas. Mr. Hunt’s press office did make it known that the meeting had been organised by the Prime Minister’s office itself.

Mark Zuckerberg later praised the U.K.’s open data initiative, which had been launched by Tim Berners-Lee under the previous Labour government. He also found that the Prime Minister and his team were very “insightful”.

While Facebook’s social networking prowess is unchallenged, their record on consumer privacy is rather poor, at best. The Conservative government would need to tread with extreme caution when taking on any serious initiatives based on Facebook in order to avoid any privacy faux-pas akin to the Labour government employee losing CDs containing personal data of 25 million citizens.

On the whole, though, Cameron and his government’s intention to involve the public and open themselves and the workings of the government up a bit more is definitely commendable.

Citizen Lab has come across a database, which has thousands of words, that are considered to be politically sensitive. Whenever a Skype message contains any of these words, it gets automatically blocked. The database on which these words are stored also stores the personal information of the users, including their IP address, username and phone number. The database is insecure and hence is publicly available, which is a blatant breach of security for the users.

According to Citizen Lab, there is a surveillance system in place, which selects and stores messages transmitted through online telephones, and text messages. The messages that get deleted may contain some commonly used words such as democracy, Taiwan, Tibet, Voice of America, milk powder, Olympic games, earthquake, Tiananmen and SARS. The database reportedly contains over 1,50,000 messages, and it is possible to identify all the senders and recipients by entering just a username.

The internet service provider Skype, which runs its services in China in a joint venture with the Chinese company TOM online, under the name TOM-Skype, says that they are aware of the filtering of data by the Chinese authorities, but are concerned by reports about the resultant breach of security.

Citizen Lab has enquired whether or not Tom online and Skype are cooperating with the Chinese authorities and if so to what extent.

President of Skype, Josh Silverman has said that it is common knowledge that that Tom Online follows procedures to meet the local laws and regulations, such as monitoring and blocking messages containing certain words, which the Chinese government disapproves of. However according to policy these messages are to be deleted. They will have to investigate to know if the policy has been changed to allow storage of these messages and why.

The United States government are buying AdWords units that link to a page on the America.gov portal,  telling America’s side of the story:

http://fpolicy.america.gov/fpolicy/security/

This page shows various subjects of international interest such as America’s foreign policy matters, the up-coming U.S. presidential elections, human rights stories, Middle East topics, peacekeeping, confronting terrorism and the US’s work with NATO.

The (rather unrealistic) intention might be to try and lure terrorists who show an undue interest in these stories and thus crack down on terrorism. The ads are visible to Internet visitor on the content network and to searchers looking for keywords such as “terrorism”, “Middle East peace”, “human rights”, “press freedom”, “renewable energy”, “food aid” and “US elections”. The ads are only shown to Google users in Canada, the UK and the UAE.

Jonathan Margolis from the Bureau of International Information Programs, which has released these ads says, “We are trying to engage, inform and influence foreign audiences. Before you can do either of the last two you have got to find some way to engage them . . . We found that when you launch a website and if you want to attract a target audience, Google ads are a very effective way of drawing people to the site.”

The U.S. government is spending $25,000-$30,000 per month on these ads and and additional $15,000 per month on ads in Farsi and Arabic, which have generated about 300,000 impressions per month.

Surely the US could have thought of better ways to spend that money rather than trying to buy a change in public opinion?

Protests erupted in Lhasa the capital of Tibet, against the Chinese government. The Chinese government blocked the popular video-sharing website YouTube to restrict the public from getting information on the protests. Soon after, access to other sites such as Yahoo!, Google News, the Guardian UK, The Times Online and the BBC was either completely cut off or selectively filtered.

The Chinese government usually encourages the use of the Internet for educational and business purposes, but has placed online filters to regularly block access to any foreign material that they feel is inappropriate or objectionable. Chinese websites such as youku.com, tudou.com and 56.com have not published any information about the protests in Tibet as theses sites are expected to enforce self-censorship.

Chinese users trying to access YouTube, just found a blank screen. The government has made no official statement about this move. Interestingly, today YouTube has almost as many videos depicting opposition to the Tibetan protests as it has of protesters against the Chinese government.

Video on YouTube showing protests in Tibet

This is the second time in less than a month that an Eastern government has blocked access to YouTube. In the last week of February, the government of Pakistan had ordered the national ISP to block access to YouTube, leading to the site going down worldwide due to a propogation error.

While the Internet allows individuals from all over the world to share their thoughts and experiences, it also allows more and more people in the world to become aware of the plight of others. Stamping out free speech by banning video sharing sites and newspapers might cocoon the citizens of China temporarily, but in the long run, the Chinese government will end up hurting its own credibility in the West.

Micronet, one of the local ISP’s in Pakistan sent out an email to all users, apologising for the ban on YouTube. User jk on the Pakistaniat blog shares the email contents:

Dear Valued Customer:

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (www.pta.gov.pk) has directed all ISPs of the country to block access to www.youtube.com web site for containing blasphemous web content/movies.

The site would remain blocked till further orders from PTA. Meanwhile, Internet users can write to youtube.com to remove the objectionable web content/movies because this removal would enable the authorities to order un-blocking of this web site.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience.

Best Regards

Manager
Technical Assistance Center
Micronet Broadband Pvt. Ltd.
Islamabad

This isn’t the first time Pakistan has tried to block Internet access and messed up while doing so. Back in September 2006 the government of Pakistan blocked access to BlogSpot, the then most popular blog platform for Pakistanis. This was later reported to be just a technical glitch. Then in March 2007 the national ISP, Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL), ended up blocking access to a large number of popular websites including Google, Microsoft.com, BBC, CNN and Yahoo! in an attempt to follow the Pakistani Supreme Court’s order to filter all websites containing “blasphemous” content.

Religious reasons cited by the government, however, seem to be a ruse to cover-up a political agenda. President Musharraf has been accused of exploiting the religious sentiment of the nation to suppress a number of videos uploaded on YouTube that apparently show evidence of vote rigging in the country’s recent election.

What might have been just another case of censorship in the state that went largely unnoticed outside Pakistan, became an international even when the resulting ban on YouTube got propagated outside Pakistani ISPs, blocking users from accessing the website in most countries across the world.

A post on the Wired Blog explains that Pakistan Telecom complied with the government directive by changing the Border Gateway Protocol entry for YouTube – essentially updating its local internet address book for where YouTube’s section of the internet is. The idea was to direct its internet users to a page that said YouTube was blocked.

Unfortunately, the ISP announced the new route to upstream providers. The upstream providers didn’t verify the new route but accepted it and then passed it along, cascading the bad address around the net, until most everyone using the net on Sunday would have been directed to the Pakistani’s network block. The blunder not only took down YouTube, but also choked the Pakistani ISP, which was quickly deluged with millions of requests for videos.

Google Inc. has set up a foundation, Google.org, that will work towards various philanthropic objectives. In order to do this Google will not only make use of its greatest strength – access to information – but has also committed to set aside 1% of its equity and annual profits, in addition to manpower and expertise , to achieve these targets.

1 percent equity equals 1/100 of its initial public offering of 3 million shares. This amount will be invested and later donated to various causes over the next 20 years. The value of this equity could of course go up or down, as per the value of the dollar and swings in the stock markets.

1 percent of Google’s profit may not sound like much but would actually amount to millions of dollars each year.

Google.org will work in several under-developed countries in Africa and South-East Asia, in conjunction with other non-governmental organizations such as Pratham (in India), to help spread basic amenities like clean drinking water, awareness and education and provide medical assistance especially in cases of pandemics or natural disasters.

Their 5 main initiatives as of now are:

1. Develop renewable energy that is cheaper than coal (RE
2. Accelerate the commercialization of plug-in vehicles (RechargeIT)
3. Predict and prevent emerging threats, such as infectious disease and climate risk
4. Inform and empower to improve public services
5. Fuel the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Google believes that it is more important to focus on the result achieved rather than just keep track of money spent. They will also help provide accountability and transparency to the various actions and schemes initiated by governments. This is indeed a noble venture and must be encouraged and applauded.

Read details about these initiatives at Google.org

View NDTV: Should blogs be regulated?

Blogging has given people the chance to express their views and feelings on various issues that they feel strongly about, while at the same time providing a platform of anonymity for those who may desire it.

In the social mileu of India this has created quite a hue and cry as some of the blogs seem to be quite “provocative” or offensive to other people. These bloggers face the possibility of receiving comments on their blog that may use unacceptable language and be hurtful to the blogger.

There is a debate raging, at present, in the Indian sub-continent about whether blogs should be regulated. Whether this is possible at all is also an issue under discussion.

Regulation of blogs, according to most bloggers, would be an infringement of their basic right to freedom of expression. As with all forms of media the idea of such censorship does not go down well with the blog authors. They believe that blogging has provided them with a forum to express themselves freely, which they could not do earlier and this freedom should not be curtailed.

As far as the issue of hurting sentiments is concerned, bloggers believe that people who feel offended always have the option of not reading these blogs. Hence their right to freedom of expression should not be censored.

While it is rather unlikely that the government of India, or any other country for that matter, can do much to regulate all blogging activity, or stop the message contained in a blog from going out before it gets written, the fact that they are contemplating this is cause for worry in itself.

Vikram Joshi, a charming gay professional who authors one of the popular blogs featured in the NDTV program says, “The reason a lot of us write blogs is because the mainstream media does not cover issues we face enough. Blogs have turned out to be the only way that young gay men like me can be heard and reach out in this society. If the government clamps down even on this, they will be stifling our voices and curbing our freedoms once again, which isn’t very different than what happens in dictatorial regimes!”