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Chinese authorities have implemented measures this week to further tighten control over the online space and wall off access to content it deems undesirable to its citizens.

At least one telecoms carrier, Guangzhou Huoyun Information Technology, has received a directive to start blocking virtual private networks (VPN) used to circumvent the Great Firewall, China's Internet censorship mechanism, reported Reuters on Thursday.

VPN services are used by Chinese Internet users to access overseas search engines such as Google and social media websites like Facebook that are banned in China.

Online news and livestreaming platforms also came under closer scrutiny this week as China extends control of its cyberspace, which it believes should have limits similar to real-world borders and subject to its sovereign laws.

Filtering by Chinese telecoms - required under a law that will take full effect next March - means more overseas VPN services are likely to become unusable in the months ahead.

Observers say this is a tactic to ensure social stability, with a top-level government reshuffle at the 19th Party Congress expected to take place by October.

On Tuesday, Beijing Internet regulators gathered representatives from the country's top online news providers, including Tencent, Baidu and Toutiao, and ordered them to strengthen self-censorship of offensive content, such as reports that "distort the history of China and the (Communist) Party, misinterpret policy directives and promote abnormal values".

Tighter media and Internet controls have also preceded past Communist Party congresses, which take place every five years.

NOV 2012: 18TH CONGRESS

Two months before the big event, over 4,000 media and education-related microblogs were shut down. The authorities said the accounts impersonated well- known media personalities and real media outlets such as CCTV, and were used for extortion and fraud.

In October, a state agency used a meeting of top provincial Internet information officers to warn news and commercial websites of their duty to report "responsibly and positively" on the party congress, and that the authorities would "resolutely investigate and deal with harmful information, spreading of rumours and vulgar information".

OCT 2007: 17TH CONGRESS

Half a year before the congress, Beijing released a top-level circular stressing the importance of "strengthening the construction of Internet culture".

The state regulator for news and Internet publications interpreted this as the need for "civilised online publishing and to purify the online publishing space".

In June that year, China announced that a joint operation by the Ministry of Public Security, the Central Propaganda Department and other agencies had taken down more than 100 websites that spread pornography and "other harmful information".

On the same day, China's top cyberspace agency and its anti-pornography office said they will increase oversight of livestreaming platforms to prevent the Internet environment from being "polluted by unhealthy or illegal information".

The latest clampdowns come after two days of partial WhatsApp blockage in China following the death of Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo last week.

Lianhe Zaobao's website was also blocked by the Chinese firewall during the same period, although it is now back to normal. Experts see a link between events deemed politically sensitive by Beijing and tighter Internet and information control in China.

Associate Professor Fu King-wa, an expert on Chinese media with the University of Hong Kong (HKU), noted that the WhatsApp outage came after users began to circulate pictures related to the Chinese dissident on the platform.

"In 2014, Instagram was similarly blocked after people began posting pictures of the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, which people in the mainland could see," he told The Straits Times.

The measures also come on the heels of multiple Internet-related regulations such as on procurement of critical network infrastructure and the controversial new Cybersecurity Law that took effect last month.

More than 90 per cent of Chinese netizens access news through their mobile phones, according to a survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences last year.

The new laws show that China's vision of centralised cyber control is coming together, said Mr David Bandurski, an editor at HKU's China Media Project.

"We can be sure that as the news in China increasingly goes digital, and as television goes mobile, the Cyberspace Administration of China's power will grow," he wrote on his blog.

Read more from the original source:
China extends control over its cyberspace - The Straits Times

For a year, the big question of Russiagate has boiled down to this: Did Donald Trumps campaign collude with the Russians in hacking the DNC?

And until last week, the answer was no.

As ex-CIA director Mike Morell said in March, On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all. Theres no little campfire, theres no little candle, theres no spark.

Well, last week, it appeared there had been a fire in Trump Tower. On June 9, 2016, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort met with Russians in anticipation of promised dirt on Hillary Clintons campaign.

While not a crime, this was a blunder. For Donald Jr. had long insisted there had been no collusion with the Russians. Caught in flagrante, he went full Pinocchio for four days.

And as the details of that June 9 meeting spilled out, Trump defenders were left with egg on their faces, while anti-Trump media were able to keep the spotlight laser-focused on where they want it Russiagate.

This reality underscores a truth of our time. In the 19th century, power meant control of the means of production; today, power lies in control of the means of communication.

Who controls the media spotlight controls what people talk about and think about. And mainstream media are determined to keep that spotlight on Trump-Russia, and as far away as possible from their agenda breaking the Trump presidency and bringing him down.

Just days into Trumps presidency, a rifle-shot intel community leak of a December meeting between Trump national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn and Russias ambassador forced the firing of Flynn.

An Oval Office meeting with the Russian foreign minister in which Trump disclosed that Israeli intelligence had ferreted out evidence that ISIS was developing computer bombs to explode on airliners was leaked. This alerted ISIS, damaged the president, and imperiled Israeli intelligence sources and methods.

Some of the leaks from national security and investigative agencies are felonies, not only violations of the leakers solemn oath to protect secrets, but of federal law.

Yet the press is happy to collude with these leakers and to pay them in the coin they seek.

Consider the original Russiagate offense.

Confidential emails of the DNC and John Podesta were hacked, i.e., stolen by Russian intelligence and given to WikiLeaks. And who was the third and indispensable party in this Tinker to Evers to Chance double-play combination?

The media itself. While deploring Russian hacking as an act of war against our democracy, the media published the fruits of the hacking.

If the media believed Russian hacking was a crime against our democracy, why did they publish the fruits of that crime?

Not only do our Beltway media traffic in stolen secrets and stolen goods, but the knowledge that they will publish secrets and protect those who leak them is an incentive for bureaucratic disloyalty and criminality.

Our mainstream media are like the fellow who avoids the risk of stealing cars, but wants to fence them once stolen and repainted.

Bottom line: Trump is facing a stacked deck.

People inside the executive branch are daily providing fresh meat to feed the scandal. Anti-Trump media are transfixed by it. It is the Watergate of their generation. The Pulitzers are calling. And they love it, for they loathe Donald Trump both for who he is and what he stands for.

Writes for Creators Syndicate.

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Opinion: Mainstream media and the real crimes of Russiagate - MyAJC

The crisis created by Polands ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party is nearing a boiling point. Having taken control of the Constitutional Tribunal last year, PiS is pushing new legislation through parliament that will place the rest of the judiciary firmly under the political control of the partys majority in parliament. The European Commission is urgently examining whether it should an initiate an Article 7 proceeding against Poland for violations of fundamental rights.

The crisis in Poland is not only an assault on the judiciary; it is an attack on all independent institutions. As Freedom House documented in a report published in June 2017, the media has been a special target for PiS since it won elections in October 2015. Following the playbook, established by Viktor Orban in Hungary, PiS launched an attack against the public broadcaster early on, rushing through laws that shifted personnel management, unconstitutionally, from the National Broadcasting Council to the Treasury Ministry. The top management of the public broadcaster resigned, or was fired, and a PiS party member was appointed to head the influential TVP.

Since then, the public broadcaster has become a mouthpiece for the party. Critics struggle to get airtime, and the main news shows savage the opposition. When the opposition and civic activists held protests in December 2016, over a proposal to limit journalists access to parliament, TVP broadcast a thirty-minute documentary titled Coup, claiming the opposition had intended to take power through force. Now, during the controversies over the judiciary bills, the broadcasters chyron reads, The opposition is trying to organise a coup against the democratically elected government. The private media may be next.

Polands media landscape is relatively diversified, competitive and attractive to international investors, without the oligarchic ownership that made Hungary so vulnerable to state-led capture. As a result, PiS has had limited means to control private media, although it has increasingly redirected state support through advertising and other channels away from its critics and towards supportive outlets.

Gazeta Wyborcza, the countrys most widely read newspaper and a fierce critic of the party, had a 21 per cent decline in revenue, from 2015 to 2016, which was partially attributable to reductions in state and state-owned enterprise advertising. PiS leader Jarosaw Kaczyski (in the photo), de facto the most powerful man in the country although he holds no government post higher than MP, has emphasised the importance of a repolonisation of the media sector to rid it of foreign influences. How PiS can advance repolonisation without running afoul of Polish and EU laws remains unclear, but the goal is there.

Instead, individual prosecutions may be the next frontier for PiS authorities. One of the partys early changes, in 2015, was to fold the general prosecutors office into the Ministry of Justice, decreasing the prosecutors independence and making its case decisions more subject to political influence.

Now, Minister of Defence, Antoni Macierewicz, has sent a criminal complaint against Gazeta Wyborcza journalist, Tomasz Pitek, to the General Prosecutor after Pitek reported, in a book, about Macierewiczs links, through far-right Polish actors, to Russian intelligence. Freedom House, along with nine other media freedom organisations, has called for the complaint to be withdrawn. During the crisis over the judicial laws this week, one PiS MP was caught on tape telling a journalist they would come after them next.

These attacks on independent institutions, whether it is the judiciary or the media, are rooted in PiSs rejection of liberal democracy as a form of government. PiS promotes a world view that democratic institutions are just a mask for power; tools to be used by whoever is able to take control. It believes these institutions have previously been manipulated against PiS and that now the party sees it as their turn to transform the state to their own ends.

The question is whether after their turn, anyone else will ever be able to have one.

_______________

The views expressed in this opinion editorial are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Emerging Europes editorial policy.

Read this article:
PiS Uses Media Control to Bring Poland to Heel - Emerging Europe (registration)

Facebook could begin testing a paywall for subscription news stories as early as October, according to a top company executive.

Campbell Brown, who heads up the social networks new partnerships business, made the reveal atthe Digital Publishing Innovation Summit on Tuesday, The Street reported. We have independently confirmed that, too.

We are in early talks with several news publishers about how we might better support subscription business models on Facebook. As part of the Facebook Journalism Project, we are taking the time to work closely together with our partners and understand their needs, Brown told TechCrunch in a statement via a spokesperson.

The project is still in its infancy, and it may be subject to change, but TechCrunch understands that the current plan is to work with a handful of publishers to introduce a system that would limit free viewing to 10 articles per month, as Digiday previously reported. After viewing 10 articles from the media company, a user would be promoted to sign up for a subscription to that publication or log into an active one.

That number is rigid at 10, despite the fact that publisher that operate a paywall allow varying numbers of free articles for visitors per month. A source to Facebook said the number would be the same across all partners to ensure consistency for users.

The source stressed that Facebook would allow participating media partners to maintain full control over what stories are locked behind the paywall and which arent, and full control of their subscriber data, too. At this point it is unclear exactly what access to reading data and history, which can help increase engagement, that the media partners would get.

Equally, it isnt clear how payment will be taken for subscribers that sign-up via the Facebook paywall. Digiday reports that the social network is considering bypassing Google Play and Apples App Store to avoid the mandatory 30 percent cut that each operator takes from digital payments. That may require a mobile web payment option which would add friction to the user experience, potentially impacting the effectiveness of the program.

Theres certainly much to be confirmed. For one thing, which media firms will participate.

Facebook remains in talks with prospective partners, some of which have had one-on-one briefings while others were engaged via roundtables staged in New York and Paris last week. All being well, our source said that Facebook will look to broaden the paywall feature to more users next year, but theres some way to go before that happens.

Read more:
Facebook may begin testing a paywall for selected media stories as soon as October - TechCrunch

The North Korean regime cementscontrol over its people by carrying out public executions for crimes as trivial as stealing and distributing media from South Korea, a report has found.

Research by the Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG), a non-governmental organization based in South Korea, was based on interviews with 375 defectors from North Korea about state killings in the totalitarian state.

Our interviewees stated that public executions take place near river banks, in river beds, near bridges, in public sports stadiums, in the local marketplace, on school grounds in the fringes of the city, or on mountainsides, the report said.

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The major charges for such killings as reported by the interviewees included: stealing, transporting and selling copper components from factory machinery and electric cables; stealing livestock... stealing farm produce murder and manslaughter; human trafficking... distributing South Korean media; organised prostitution; sexual assault; drug smuggling; and gang fighting, it continued.

North Korea rejects all charges of human rights abuses in the country.

Some of thesecrimes were not punished equally, the report said. It cited a U.N. report that found sexual assault by officials and soldiers often went unpunished, and thus laws against such crimes may be applied selectively.

Meanwhile, interviewees said that being from a bad family background might increase the chances of someone being executed for an offense, or for the purposes of government control as a means of establishing a new precedent by creating an atmosphere of fear around certain behaviours the government wishes to emphasise as unacceptable.

In political and correctional prisons, both public and private executions took place, the research said, as a means of inciting fear and intimidation among potential escapees among the inmates about the consequences of trying to flee.

The U.N. holds that, in countries where thedeath penalty is still legal, it should only be carried out for the most serious crimes such as cases of pre-meditated murder.

The TJWG conducts its work because it hopes to form part of an eventual justice process when regime change takes place in North Korea.

Despite the inability to predict when a transition may occur in North Korea, or what form that may take, undertaking a fair and transparent process of transitional justice will be a crucial part of determining the success of peace-building and reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula, the report says.

Read the original:
How Kim Jong Un's Government Cements Control Over North Korea With Public Executions - Newsweek