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Numerous filmmakers have withdrawn their films from the Istanbul Film Festival due to a deepening disagreement regarding government censorship.

The government is accused of forcing the festival organizers to withdraw a Kurdish documentary. The controversy has resulted in all festival competitions being cancelled. At a time of peace efforts between the government and the Kurdish rebel group the PKK, the documentary Bakir was widely seen as one of the most anticipated films of the Istanbul film festival, with its rare access to PKK bases in Turkey.

But just hours before its screening, festival organizers received a letter from the Ministry of Culture warning them all documentaries made in Turkey need a screening certificate issued by the ministry. Festival director Azize Tan said they had no option but to withdraw the film. Tan says it has been more than a decade since the ministry had enforced the regulation and only five documentaries of the 33 to be screened did not have the required certificate. The regulation only applies to Turkish films, and critics warn that enforcing the regulation gives the government the right to veto the screening of any film.

While the ministry did not name Bakir specifically, the timing of its intervention leaves most festival goers in little doubt the move was censorship. In an open letter to the media, more than 100 filmmakers, including recent Cannes Palm D'Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan, condemned the move. Many withdrew their films from the festival, and in protest to the government restricitons, the festival canceled all competitions.

Festival director Tan said the film industry has to unite to challenge the legal restrictions.

"I think we have to come together in solidarity, the whole film sector, all the associations, everybody involved in the film sector. We have to fight to change the existing laws [that] make life impossible for all of us," Tan said. The growing groundswell is welcomed by Ertugrul Mavioglu who, along with co-director Cayan Demirel, made Bakir. Mavioglu says he his not surprised that his film was not screened. "The state always has these unknown regulations or regulations that are never used to censor subjects that for them are forbidden," Mavioglu said, adding that he is not surprised this happened and has seen it before. Founded in 1981, the Istanbul Film Festival's goal was to give people a window to the outside world when the country was in the iron grip of its military rulers. It was at the forefront of successfully challenging censorship, which was instrumental in the lifting many restrictions across the film industry.

Veteran film critic Atilla Dorsay worked closely with the festival in its early days. He said the return of censorship, while deeply disturbing, is not surprising in the current political climate. "We used to have censorship, but gradually it disappeared. As far as the festival's films are concerned, we really considered this problem was solved for good," he said.

"But seeing the general situation in the political area, which means more and more censorship, on journalism, on media, on everything, it was very much expected in the matters of cinema and festivals," Dorsay said.

Ankara is already facing growing national and international criticism over freedom of expression and this latest controversy, observers warn, is likely to add to those concerns.

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Censorship Leads to Cancellation of Istanbul Film Fest

File photo.(REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon)

The ongoing denial-of-service attack against code-sharing site GitHub marks an escalation in Chinas cyber censorship battle, security experts warn, urging a strong response from the U.S. government.

San Francisco-based GitHub has not said who it believes is behind the attack, which started last month, although the finger of suspicion has been pointed firmly in the direction of China. Anti-online censorship group Greatfire.org says that Chinese authorities took over computers both inside and outside the country to launch cyberattacks against the Greatfire.org website and GitHub, which hosts some of the group's data.

The attack, which was the largest in GitHubs history, began March 26, causing intermittent shutdowns of the code sharing forum. The shadowy attackers used the web browsers of unsuspecting, uninvolved people" to flood github.com with high levels of traffic, according to GitHub. On March 31, after days of battling the attack, GitHub reported that that its service was operating normally.

I believe that its likely that it is the government of China behind this, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at software security specialist F-Secure told FoxNews.com. The reason why the attack is still ongoing is because their target is to cause pain for GitHub.

Its a tremendous escalation of nation state enforcement of their policy of banning what people can get access to, added Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst at IT-Harvest. China probably thinks of the U.S.s Internet infrastructure as the wild wild west, where everybody does what they want this could be bad, if the government doesnt respond, there will be more attacks.

Security expert Robert Graham traced a machine used in the GitHub attack to a location on or near the so-called Great Firewall of China -- the technology infrastructure for Internet censorship in China. This is important evidence for our government, he wrote, in a blog post. It'll be interesting to see how they respond to these attacks - attacks by a nation state against key United States Internet infrastructure.

The long-running nature of the digital assault also underlines the threat posed by shadowy attackers. A person with knowledge of the issue told FoxNews.com Monday that the attack is ongoing, but has decreased in intensity. GitHub, the person added, is mitigating the attack well and is fully operational.

F-Secures Hypponen told FoxNews.com that GitHub poses a unique challenge for China. With every single GitHub page encrypted, The Great Firewall of China is unable to block individual pages on the site. They would have to block everything, and that will not happen because a lot of Chinese companies are using GitHub, he said. The only option that China has is to bully GitHub.

Greatfire.org said it had mirrored some of its content on GitHub repositories, and that the data were the targets of the attacks.

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GitHub attack marks escalation in China's cyber censorship battle, experts warn

[2.55 SPOILERS] FINAL FANTASY XIV: Unnecessary Censorship #5
Here #39;s the fifth and last in a series of videos I really enjoyed making! Hope you enjoy, and if you do please leave a thumbs up so I can keep this series going! They will be resuming when Heavenswa...

By: Zodical Candy

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[2.55 SPOILERS] FINAL FANTASY XIV: Unnecessary Censorship #5 - Video

A receptionist works behind the logo for Baidu.com, the Chinese search engine whose customers were hijacked by the first firing of the Great Cannon. Photograph: NG HAN GUAN/AP

The Great Cannon has entered the cyberwar lexicon alongside the Great Firewall of China after a new tool for censorship in the nation was named and described by researchers from the University of Toronto.

The first use of the Great Cannon came in late March, when the coding site GitHub was flooded by traffic leaving it intermittently unresponsive for multiple days. The attack, using a method called distributed denial of service or DDoS, appeared to be targeting two specific users of the site: the New York Times Chinese mirror, and anti-censorship organisation GreatFire.org.

Both users focus their efforts on allowing Chinese residents to bypass the countrys Great Firewall the system China uses to restrict access to parts of the internet.

The attack, which continued for almost two weeks, was observed by researchers led by the University of Torontos Bill Marczak. They concluded that it provides evidence of a new censorship tool above and beyond the Great Firewall.

While the attack infrastructure is co-located with the Great Firewall, the attack was carried out by a separate offensive system, with different capabilities and design, that we term the Great Cannon, the researchers write.

The Great Cannon is not simply an extension of the Great Firewall, but a distinct attack tool that hijacks traffic to (or presumably from) individual IP addresses, and can arbitrarily replace unencrypted content as a man-in-the-middle.

Where the Great Firewall was a tool for largely passive censorship preventing access to material and providing the Chinese state with the ability to spy on its residents the Great Cannon provides the ability to effectively rewrite the internet on the fly.

When used offensively, that ability can turn a normal internet user into a vector of attack. In the case of the GitHub attacks, the Great Cannon intercepted traffic sent to Baidu infrastructure servers, web servers run by Chinas largest search engine that host commonly used analytics, social, or advertising scripts. Roughly 1.75% of the time it took that traffic and returned a malicious script, unwittingly enlisting the web surfer in the hacking campaign against GitHub. The scripts were not complex, doing little more than sending requests for content to GitHub; but the sheer quantity of users affected proved difficult for the site to handle.

The researchers conclude that the Great Cannon, like the Great Firewall before it, is likely to be operated by the Chinese government. Both systems appear to be hosted on the same servers, and appear to share source code for intercepting communications. As such, its operation points to a shift in Chinese censorship tactics, and has a highly visible impact, the research says. It is likely that this attack, with its potential for political backlash, would require the approval of high-level authorities within the Chinese government.

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'Great Cannon of China' turns internet users into weapon of cyberwar

Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan was one of more than 100 film-makers who published a letter accusing the Turkish government of oppression and censorship. Photograph: Loic Venance/AFP/Getty Images

Dozens of Turkish film-makers have withdrawn their work from this years Istanbul international film festival in protest over the removal of a documentary from the programme, as a growing censorship row prompted organisers to cancel all festival competitions halfway through the event.

The documentary, Bakur (North), the first set in the camps of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) in Turkey, had been scheduled to open on Sunday, but was cancelled only hours before the screening after festival organisers received a letter from the Turkish ministry of culture claiming that the film did not have the required registration certificate.

But the organisers decision to comply with the ministrys orders prompted immediate outrage. On Monday, more than 100 film-makers, including the most recent laureate of the Palme dOr in Cannes, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, published an open letter in the Turkish media, accusing the government of oppression and censorship.

We, the undersigned film-makers, oppose the imposition [of this regulation] as a tool of censorship, the letter said, claiming there was a political agenda behind the decision to ban Bakur. The festival programme was announced weeks ago, and other local films that did not have the registration certificate were screened without problems.

In total, 23 Turkish film-makers withdrew their films from the festival, and the festival organisers announced on Monday that all competitions and the closing ceremony had been cancelled.

Ertugrul Mavioglu, journalist and co-director of Bakur together with documentary film-maker ayan Demirel, said he was impressed by the reactions triggered by the de facto ban of his film from the festival.

This is the first time that there is such massive solidarity against censorship, and of course I see this as a positive, he said, adding that he was disappointed by the stance of the festival organisers. They should have cancelled the whole festival immediately instead of complying with the ministrys bogus request, he said.

According to the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), the organiser of the festival, Bakur was removed from the programme because the film-makers had failed to obtain the necessary commercial screening licence for their film. Azize Tan, director of the festival, said that the organisers had previously conducted negotiations with the ministry to change the licence regulation, in place since 2004 and applicable only to locally produced films.

But to Mavioglu, the governments last-minute reminder of the licence rule was a thinly veiled attempt to cover up the outright ban of a film that Ankara might find uncomfortable.

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Film-makers withdraw films from Istanbul festival in censorship protest