Iran has launched its own video-sharing website after the country deemed YouTube’s content inappropriate.

 

The website aims to attract Persian-speaking users and promote Iranian culture, according its ‘About Us’ section.

 

The website is called 'Mehr,' which means 'affection' in Farsi. It has its own Facebook page dedicated to providing links to its content, including Iranian-produced music clips.

 

Tehran has censored YouTube since 2009, in the wake of the controversial elections that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.

 

The country has also been trying to stop its citizens from accessing a number of foreign websites that Tehran says undermine the Islamic regime. The Islamic Republic has blocked Facebook and Twitter, and aims to also censor blogs, pornography and Western media outlets.

 

Speaking at a conference in Amir Kabir University in August, Iran’s head of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, Reza Taqipour, accused the Internet of being “untrustworthy” and in the “hands of one or two specific countries.”

 

Iran’s Web censorship plan has been met with criticism from the US, which has accused Tehran of seeking to develop an 'electronic curtain' to cut its population off from the world.

 

Others believe the move has less to do with censorship and more to do with the future protection of Iran’s controversial nuclear program.

 

In 2010, the Stuxnet virus, which was developed by Israeli and American intelligence agencies, was used to disrupt around 1,000 centrifuges in Iran's nuclear program.

 

The virus is estimated to have delayed Iran’s nuclear program by as long as 18 months, although skeptical assessments say the impact may have been lower.

 

The announcement of its video-sharing site is one of Iran's first steps in its goal to establish a walled-off national intranet separate from the worldwide Internet. The project could be completed as early as 2013, officials said.

 

If the plan goes through, Iran will not be the first country to successfully develop its own intranet.

 

North Korea’s 'Kwangmyong,' which was launched in 2002, contains its own newsgroups, a browser, an email program and a search engine. Direct access to the Web is largely censored, much like China’s ‘Great Firewall.’

 

Back in 1992 on December 3 the first SMS was sent as a simple Christmas greeting.

 

Twenty years later and the technology has spawned its own spellings and acronyms and we are sending around eight trillion texts each year. Although it took a while to get going it has become the most common way for friends and family to exchange information.

 

The words "Merry Christmas" sent from a personal computer to a mobile phone - on December 3, 1992, the use of texts exploded after 1998 when the UK's four major mobile-phone companies introduced "pay-as-you-go".

 

Now four billion people around the globe use SMS - Short Message Service - to communicate with each other. But, for the first time since their inception, text messaging volumes have declined.

 

New figures from the media regulator Ofcom saw two quarterly declines - by over a billion - in the volume of SMS messages sent in the UK.

 

The volume of texts sent in Britain reached a peak of 39.7 billion at the end of last year, but have now dropped to 38.5 billion - the first recorded decline.

 

The pattern is similar in the US where volumes of texts have also dropped, according to a new report.

 

"For the first time in the history of mobile phones, SMS volumes are showing signs of decline," 'The Independent' quoted James Thickett, Ofcom's director of research, as saying.

 

"The availability of a wider range of communications tools, like instant messaging and social networking sites, means people might be sending fewer SMS messages, but they are communicating electronically more than ever before," Thickett said.

 

Technological change is now so rapid and so unpredictable that no one can say how we will be communicating in 20 years' time. However the SMS messages have been defining texts of the past two decades, the reports said.

 

An evangelical Christian group in the United States has filed a petition calling for Twitter and the US government to "ban Hamas from Twitter".

 

The group argues that Hamas, the hardline Palestinian group currently ruling the Gaza Strip, is listed as a "Foreign Terrorist Organisation" by the US government, and federal law prohibits providing "material support" to such groups.

 

The group, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), says that "when it comes to Israel's military campaign, there is little that we here in America can do to help. But when it comes to this second conflict - the so-called 'twitter war' - there is something important we can do."

 

This follows a letter sent by seven Republican congressmen in September, calling on the FBI to order Twitter disable accounts affiliated with Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Shabaab, which operates in Somalia.

 

The recent conflict in Gaza led Congressman Ted Poe, who represents a district in eastern Texas, to claim the congressman's request had been vindicated, according to The Hill, a political newspaper focusing on the US Congress. “Allowing foreign terrorist organisations like Hamas to operate on Twitter is enabling the enemy,” he wrote in an email on Wednesday.

 

Gaza tweets

 

Both Hamas and the Israeli military were highly active on Twitter during the recent conflict in Gaza. The Israeli military used Twitter to explain their operations, even tweeting a link to a video showing its assassination of Ahmed Jabari, Hamas' military chief.

 

Although Hamas does not have an official Twitter feed, its military wing, Al Qassam Brigades, does. "We told you #IDF that our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are, 'You opened the Gates of Hell on Yourselves'", reads one such tweet.

 

David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University's law school, suspects that CUFI may have a strong legal case. In an article for the Daily Beast, he wrote that "the 'material support' law is written so broadly that it makes virtually anything one does to or for a designated group a crime, even if it has no link to terrorist activity of any kind."

 

Cole, who frequently writes on civil liberties issues, argues that "the more appropriate campaign should be directed at Congress, to amend the 'material support' law to limit its draconian reach".

 

A pretrial hearing in the case against accused LulzSec hacker Jeremy Hammond this week ended with the 27-year-old Chicago man being told he could be sentenced to life in prison for compromising the computers of Stratfor.

 

Judge Loretta Preska told Hammond in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday that he could be sentenced to serve anywhere from 360 months-to-life if convicted on all charges relating to last year’s hack of Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, a global intelligence company whose servers were infiltrated by an offshoot of the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

 

Hammond is not likely to take the stand until next year, but so far has been imprisoned for eight months without trial. Legal proceedings in the case might soon be called into question, however, after it’s been revealed that Judge Preska’s husband was a victim of the Stratfor hack.

 

According to the indictment filed in March, Hammond illegally obtained credit card information stolen from Stratfor and uploaded it to a server that was unbeknownst to him maintained by the federal government.

 

Months earlier the FBI had arrested Hector Xavier Monsegur, a New York hacker who spearheaded LulzSec under the alias “Sabu,” and relied on from thereon out to help the authorities nab other individuals affiliated with Anonymous and LulzSec.

 

The feds say Hammond openly admitted to compromising Stratfor’s data in online chats with their informant and unsealed a three count indictment against him relating to hacking back in March.

 

After Anons gained access to Stratfor’s servers, they collected a trove of internal emails and more thousands of credit card details belonging to the firm’s paid subscribers that were released last Christmas.

 

A class action suit was filed against Strafor over the breach of security, and in June the company settled with its customers at an estimated cost of $1.75 million. Just now, though, it’s been learned that Judge Preska may have a vested interest in seeking a prosecution by any means necessary.

 

the thousands of Statfor client’s whose credit card data was compromised in the hack alleged to be linked to Hammond is Thomas J. Kavaler, a partner at the law firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP and the husband of Judge Preska.

 

The archived document dump released by LulzSec last year includes personal information from Mr. Kavaler that suggests he was victimized in the attack and thus qualifies for the class action settlement.

 

In a press release issued under the branding of the Anonymous collective, supporters for Hammond call for Judge Preska’s immediate resignation from the case.

 

“Judge Preska by proxy is a victim of the very crime she intends to judge Jeremy Hammond for. Judge Preska has failed to disclose the fact that her husband is a client of Stratfor and recuse herself from Jeremy's case, therefore violating multiple Sections of Title 28 of the United States Code,” the statement reads.

 

“Judge Loretta Preska's impartiality is compromised by her Husband's involvement with Stratfor and a clear prejudice against Hammond exists, as evident by her statements,” it continues.

 

“Without justice being freely, fully, and impartially administered, neither our persons, nor our rights, nor our property, can be protected.”

 

According to Sue Crabtree, a member of the Jeremy Hammond Solidarity Network and a witness to his bail hearing this week, Judge Preska ordered the continue incarceration of Hammond on the basis that he is a danger to the community and likely to flee the country if released from holding.

 

Crabtree notes that Hammond does not now nor has he ever had a passport, though, and has also since been added to a terrorist watch list.

 

“In the end, Jeremy was denied bail because he was deemed a flight risk and more dangerous than [a] sexual predator. And yes, if you are asking yourself if this was said, it was said. Jeremy's legal team stated they would appeal this denial of bail,” she writes on a Facebook group for Hammond.

 

After Anonymous went public with the hack of Strafor in December 2011, the internal emails from the intelligence firm were handed off to WikiLeaks, who soon after began publishing the findings.

 

Among the information stored in the emails was documentation alleging that law enforcement agencies spied on Occupy Wall Street protesters and proof of an international surveillance system called Trapwire. Hammond is at this point likely to be the first US citizen tried in a civilian court for crimes relating to the whistleblower site.

 

Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) tells The Real News network this week that the denial of bail is both “very disturbing” and “legally wrong.”

 

“The bigger story is what they've done in this country to Jeremy Hammond, Bradley Manning, and what they have proposed to do to Julian Assange, and that's really say that they're going to come down as heavily as they can on people who expose government secrets, whistleblowers,” Ratner says.

 

Hackers say they are responsible for taking down the website of a Texas school district in retaliation for a mandatory surveillance program students are being told to comply with.

 

The website for San Antonio’s Northside Independent School District was unavailable at times throughout the weekend and into Monday after hacktivists claiming to be involved with the Anonymous movement waged an attack to draw attention to a controversial new program that requires students to be monitored with tiny Radio Frequency Identification (“RFID”) chips.

 

Through the Twitter account @RemainSilentz, one self-described participant in Anonymous confirmed that NISD.net was taken offline late Friday.

 

“DOWN AND OUT – Boom, track my ass like you track children you pervs,” the user wrote.

Two schools in NISD — John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School — began asking students earlier this year to carry RFID-equipped identification cards so that educators can monitor their location on school grounds.

 

The school district says tracking students allows for more accurate attendance figures, and therefore better funding. It hasn’t been welcomed with open arms by students, however, and last week a judge had to intervene and issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the principle from Jay High from expelling sophomore Andrea Hernandez for refusing to wear a badge after the school said participation was mandatory.

 

“We are conditioning kids to live in a surveillance state,” John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, told RT on Friday.

 

Whitehead has been instrumental in helping Hernandez fight to be free from being monitored, and celebrated the issuing of a restraining order. And as more people become aware of cases like hers, he says he hopes there is a chance at holding onto our right to privacy.

 

“There are going to be people who are going to want to opt out, and we want to protect those people who don’t want to be part of a system that they feel violates their human dignity and their constitutional rights,” he says.

 

A hearing is scheduled in the coming days to consider a preliminary injunction that will prohibit NISD from making the tracking program mandatory any further, but meanwhile Anonymous has taken matters into their own hands.

 

“I sincerely hope you have noticed that I have took down your website for a reason, and that reason is stripping away the privacy of students in your school. What was going through your mind when you had this idea?” an Anon using the alias tr1xxyAnon wrote in a statement circulated over the weekend.

 

After a judge agreed to file an order blocking the expulsion of Hernandez last week, Whitehead wrote, “The court’s willingness to grant a temporary restraining order is a good first step, but there is still a long way to go—not just in this case, but dealing with the mindset, in general, that everyone needs to be monitored and controlled.”

 

Although only two schools in Texas ask students to use “SmartID” cards at the moment, the success of the program at John Jay and Anson Jones will determine of other facilities in NSID will soon make the badges mandatory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"In response to the new Facebook guidelines, I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, illustrations, comics, paintings, professional photos and videos, etc. (as a result of the Berner Convention). For commercial use of the above my written consent is needed at all times!"

 

You may have seen that very message pop up -- perhaps time and time again -- in your Facebook feed. The message has been making the rounds on the social network. It encourages people to copy and paste the text and post it on their own walls if they want to be placed "under protection of copyright laws."

 

It's a frightful message and those worried that Facebook will own their photos or other media are posting it -- unaware that it is a hoax. Here's the truth: Facebook doesn't own your media and there is no such thing as the Berner Convention.

 

"We have noticed some statements that suggest otherwise and we wanted to take a moment to remind you of the facts -- when you post things like photos to Facebook, we do not own them," Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said in a statement.

 

"Under our terms (https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms), you grant Facebook permission to use, distribute, and share the things you post, subject to the terms and applicable privacy settings."

 

Brad Shear, a Washington-area attorney and blogger who is an expert on social media, said the message was "misleading and not true." He said that when you agree to Facebook's terms of use you provide Facebook a "non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any content you post.

 

You do not need to make any declarations about copyright issues since the law already protects you.  The privacy declaration [in this message] is worthless and does not mean anything." 

 

Snopes.com, a site dedicated to clearing up fallacies on the Internet, reminds Facebook users of that same thing. "Facebook users cannot retroactively negate any of the privacy or copyright terms they agreed to when they signed up for their Facebook accounts nor can they unilaterally alter or contradict terms instituted by Facebook simply by posting a contrary legal notice on their Facebook walls."

 

This isn't the first time a message like this has popped up on Facebook. A similar message made the rounds in June and a few years ago as well.

 

Bottom line? Don't bother copying, pasting, and posting. It was a hoax before and is still a hoax now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal are among the defendants in a lawsuit filed by Kazakh prosecutors seeking to shutdown some opposition media outlets in the republic.

 

The prosecutors are demanding the websites stop publishing material from Kazakh opposition sources.

 

"The company Google is a defendant. I don't know if they know it or not, but they are on trial and they need to present their comment on this lawsuit," Sergey Utkin, a lawyer for information portal Respublika (Republic) told journalists on Friday.

 

He also presented a copy of the lawsuit, which names popular social networking services Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, and the Respublika information portal as co-defendants, reports Interfax agency.

 

On Thursday, a court in Almaty banned the opposition newspaper Golos Respubliki (Voice of Republic).

 

The ruling came a day after state prosecutors filed applications to ban eight local newspapers and 23 internet-sources – all united under the Respublika brand – and several international news portals. The officials claim the media outlets undermine security in the former Soviet Republic.

 

They also demanded that unregistered opposition political movements Alga and Khalyk Maidany are recognized as extremist and outlawed.

 

The move comes shortly after a court sentenced several Kazakh opposition leaders who were found guilty of inflaming social hatred and calling for the violent overthrow of the government. The activists were arrested following violent riots the oil city Zhanaozen in western Kazakhstan in December last year.

 

Dozens were injured and 16 people killed as the result of the unrest.

 

San Francisco, Calif., - As African Americans and other people of color have begun to find their way into the internet technology industry, it is important to know that some, such as Terrence D. Black, have already been pioneers in the field and have offered important schemes for solving problems and stimulating future innovation in the social media arena.