INDIAN GOVERNMENT TAKES STAND AGAINST IT GIANTS

IT IS SENSITIVE ABOUT POSTINGS ON SITES.

GET A GRIP MATE-JOIN THE REAL WORLD

India’s government has authorised the prosecution of 21 internet firms, including Facebook, Yahoo! and Google, in a case over obscene content posted online, sources say.

The approval could lead to company directors being called to a trial court in New Delhi to answer serious charges such as fomenting religious hatred and spreading social discord, an official and a lawyer said.

A criminal case against the web titans was first filed in a lower court by local journalist Vinay Rai, who complained that the sites were responsible for obscene and offensive material posted by users.

He also claimed they had broken laws designed to maintain religious harmony and “national integration” in India.

Rai’s lawyer, Sashi Prakash Tripathi, said: “We had applied for the government’s sanction and the ministry of communication and IT has filed it directly in the metropolitan magistrate’s court.”

The companies targeted have filed a petition in the Delhi High Court seeking to have the lower court’s case against them stayed. The hearing of the petition is to resume on Monday.

The lower court yesterday ordered that summons be served on the 10 foreign-based companies, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and YouTube.

The government’s sanction to prosecute represents an escalation of a recent tussle between social networks and the government.

Communications Minister Kapil Sibal last month pledged a crackdown on “unacceptable” online content and urged social networks to exert more control over their platforms.

He provided examples of religiously-sensitive images and obscene photoshopped pictures of Indian politicians.

Mukul Rohatgi, a lawyer for Google India, told the High Court on Thursday: “No human interference is possible and, moreover, it can’t be feasible to check such incidents.”

The companies will now hope the High Court stays the prosecution, but they received some hostile comments from a presiding judge.

“You must have a stringent check. Otherwise, like in China, we may pass orders banning all such websites,” the Delhi High Court said.

Companies should “develop a mechanism to keep a check and remove offensive and objectionable material from their web pages”, Justice Suresh Kait was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Twitter site blocked in Egypt:

Harvard’s Herdict

SAN FRANCISCO |

Tue Jan 25, 2011 3:07pm EST

(Reuters) – Egyptians say the Twitter Web site is blocked on all Internet Service Providers in their country, a representative of Harvard University’s Herdict Web monitoring service told Reuters on Tuesday.

But Twitter users within Egypt are currently sending Tweets, short 140-character messages, via SMS text messages and through third-party applications, the center said as thousands of Egyptians took to the streets to protest President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule.

Jillian York, a project coordinator at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which runs the Herdict Web accessibility monitoring service, said in an email that she had “confirmed with users in Egypt that Twitter.com is in fact blocked on all ISPs.”

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Germany puts access

limits on Facebook

January 26, 2011

FACEBOOK, which faces potential fines for violating privacy laws in Germany, has agreed to let users there better shield their email contacts from unwanted advertisements and solicitations.

After discussions which dragged out for more than six months, Facebook, which has more than 10 million users in Germany, agreed to modify its ”friend finder” service. Users will be better able to block Facebook’s ability to contact people, including non-Facebook users culled from a user’s email address books.

Tina Kulow, a spokeswoman for Facebook in Hamburg, said users in Germany would be advised that the site could send solicitations to people on their mailing lists if they uploaded their address books to friend finder.

Facebook is the second US internet business to modify its operations to suit German privacy laws, which give individuals extensive control over personal data.

Last year, Google, which also faced fines, let Germans exclude photos of their homes from its ”street view” photographic map archive before the service went live.

Like Google, Facebook changed its operation after Johannes Caspar, the data protection supervisor in Hamburg, began a review of the company’s practices. Violations of German privacy law carry penalties of up to €300,000 ($412,000), though adverse publicity can be more damaging.

Mr Caspar said his office had received ”many, many complaints” during the past six months from Germans who had never used Face- book but were receiving solicitations because their email addresses had been siphoned from friends.

The issue took on political overtones when the German data protection commissioner, Peter Schaar, and the consumer protection minister, Ilse Aigner, criticised Facebook for disregarding privacy laws.

Mr Caspar’s office initially demanded that Facebook deactivate its friend finder service in Germany. But in a compromise, Facebook has agreed to explain the features of friend finder prominently and to tell users how to limit its ability to gain access to contacts and to store them.

The New York Times

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Twitter Launches in Korean

As is typical for the microblogging company, it made the announcement in Korean. In its blog post, Twitter() revealed that it chose Korean as the next language for launch because the number of Twitter users from Korea has increased tenfold in the last year. That’s an astounding growth metric.

Not only is Twitter.com now translated in Korean, but so are the official Twitter Android and iPhone apps. It has also launched a recommended user list of Korean users, including actor Park Joong (@moviejhp) and novelist @Oisoo.

Twitter now supports seven languages. The others include Spanish, Italian, German, French, English and Japanese.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha