Pakistan Bans Access to YouTube

Crackdown adds site to growing list

(NEWSER) - Yesterday, Facebook ; today, YouTube: Pakistan has blocked access to the video-sharing site—along with 450 other links, including some Wikipedia pages—because of its “growing sacrilegious content.” The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority didn't refer to specific offensive material, but said it acted after the site failed to take down the "derogatory material." More»

(NEWSER) - The Internet keeps functioning thanks to the efforts of an army of unsung heroes, a Harvard cyberlaw expert told a tech conference yesterday. The professor used as an example Pakistan's attempt last year to take YouTube offline—the site went down across the world, but volunteers from a tech forum had it back up within hours. "It's like when the bat signal goes up and Batman answers the call," Jonathan Zittrain tells the BBC. More»

(NEWSER) - Pakistan has decided it's had about 139 characters too many of Twitter, yanking the microblogging site over material it says is offensive to Islam, reports al-Jazeera . The material in question was promoting a Facebook contest to post images of the prophet Mohammed—which are considered blasphemous, even those framed in positive terms. "We have been negotiating with them [Twitter] until last night, but they did not agree to remove the stuff, so we had to block it,'' says the country's telecommunications chief. No word on how long Twitter will be down. More»

Firms accused of failing to remove blasphemous content

(NEWSER) - Facebook and Google are on trial in India for failing to yank objectionable content from their websites quickly enough. A criminal complaint alleges that sites including Facebook and Google's YouTube didn't remove content mocking religious figures, despite Indian laws against "blasphemous" and "ethnically objectionable" material online. The trial begins today, and execs from the Internet firms could face jail time if convicted. More»

Great Firewall cracks, users urge Obama to push for China human rights

(NEWSER) - An apparent glitch in China's "Great Firewall" this week allowed the country's Internet users to enjoy the rest of the world's favorite websites without having to rely on expensive virtual private networks. Large numbers of Chinese flocked to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google+ while the crack in the wall—which now appears to have been plugged—remained open, Reuters reports. More»