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ANHRI denounces the censorship on publishings in Egypt, as it prevented the import of the book "History of the Modern Middle East" for the American historians, "William Cleveland" and "Martin Benton", without any reasons.

It was scheduled to teach the book to AUC's students of history of modern Arab history, in the next semester. But "Khaled Fahmy," historian and the professor of history at American University in Cairo said that the university administration had told him in a short email, that the censorship, which is affiliated to the Ministry of Information, banned the import of the book, without any reasons.

He explained in an article posted on "Facebook" that the book does not contain any misuse of the Egyptian history and one of the best books dealing with the Arab history to students. He added, he is sad because of the lack of respect for science because of concerns related to national security, which made the researchers use the west library to find references. He criticized the ignorance of those who are responsible for the censorship of publications on the priorities of scientific research, pointing out that national security can not be achieved by banning books, but are available.

The news spread that the reason of the banning is because the book because of "it does not include Haliab and Shalateen (on the borders with Sudan) in its pages)!

ANHRI said that "the ban of books and scientific research is unacceptable, whatever the reasons is totally refused, as it contradicts with the right the knowledge for all people in accordance with the international treaties and conventions."

ANHRI added that "security fist still control the censorship bodies and force them to think through security logic, which is full of false fears which is hostile against the freedom under the name of security".

ANHRI asserted that the need to believe in the freedom of information exchange, a availability of information and stop using the banning and confiscation method which is practiced by the old regime.

ANHRI views that the amendment related to the law on publications issued in 1936 and the enactment of a law to regulate and ensure the right of the information exchange must be a priority for the agenda of the legislature authority immediately after being re-election.

Copyright 2012 Arabic Network for Human Rights Information. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.

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Africa: ANHRI Condemns the Prevention of the Importing 'History of the Modern Middle East' Book

'A pirate-themed adult movie featuring a sword fight cannot be legally screened.'

SHOULD Fifty Shades of Grey be banned? Australians clearly don't think so. On any typical train carriage, you'll find at least one reader unabashedly engrossed in Ana Steele's romps with Mr Grey and his Red Room of Pain. Yet a film with the same content - that is, a movie combining real sex with bondage - must, by law, be refused classification. How does that make sense?

The disparity seems even more peculiar given the censors' historical obsession with banning novels. Lawrence, Nabokov, Miller, Roth, Orwell: you could run a credible literature course out of books Australians were once banned from buying. In theory, novels can still go to the Classification Board. In practice, they almost never do, probably because the famous literary anti-censorship cases made rating books seem deeply unpalatable.

It's merely one example of the prevailing weird classificatory hotchpotch. In some respects, federal censorship law reflects a New Left libertarianism: the code's proclamation that ''adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want'' comes, almost word for word, from Don Dunstan's Labor policy from 1969. But the classifiers are constrained by specific legislative prohibitions, such as the ban on bondage and other fetishes. Most significantly, films containing actual sex cannot feature violence - which seems reasonable, until you realise the stipulation forbids any violence at all, even if entirely unrelated to sexual activity. In other words, a pirate-themed adult movie featuring a sword fight cannot be legally screened.

Yet the extraordinary disparity between state and federal jurisdictions means few Australians even know the rules. The national code contains an X rating: essentially, for films showing unsimulated sex. But in the states, the sale of X films remains illegal. Insofar as they retail X (which most do), the adult shops in Melbourne and Sydney are breaking the law.

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That's a consequence of activism by social conservatives during the 1980s when the code was being debated. But though the premiers refused to ratify the X category, they're also reluctant, most of the time, to enforce the rules. Given the extraordinary quantity of porn consumed in Australia, a crackdown on adult shops would spur a backlash that no politician wants. Perversely, the very strictness of the laws contributes to a curious laxity: most adult retailers now operate outside the official code.

Or, at least, most of the time they do. Arrests happen, but it's hard to understand their logic. Last year, I spoke to Darrell Cohen, who went to prison for selling, in a Sydney shop, DVDs that could be bought openly throughout the country. Because it's so rare to be jailed for retailing adult content, he suffered enormously in custody, since the other inmates concluded he must be a paedophile and treated him accordingly.

The only places where you can legally sell X-rated DVDs are the ACT and Northern Territory. Or, rather, the Northern Territory so long as you are not indigenous. Few people realise that the Howard government's Northern Territory intervention introduced a draconian censorship regime into indigenous communities, even though the Little Children are Sacred report recommended nothing of the sort.

The irony is glaring. In Canberra, where the politicians live, the adult industry flourishes. But in remote towns in the NT, where there's nothing comparable to Canberra's porn barns, signs warn visitors against the pornography legally available everywhere else in the territory.

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Fifty shades of ambiguity make porn laws a perverse joke

Yammer has upgraded its cloud-based enterprise social networking software with new and improved features designed to make it easier for end users to manage their content.

The upgrades, which will be rolled out progressively to all users over the next two weeks, include a new content repository, appropriately called Inbox, for the multiple types of activity notifications users receive.

Instead of having to monitor a continuously updated activity stream, and risk missing important notifications that scroll by when they're not looking, users can review the Inbox, which corrals notifications so that they can be reviewed when it's convenient.

The Inbox will contain elements like direct messages, alerts about new replies on threads users are participating in or monitoring, and notifications about new content added to groups or online communities they belong to.

From the Inbox, users will be able to also take action on the notifications they see, including replying to messages and posting comments on discussion threads.

Yammer has also revamped the software's home page, displaying prominently notifications that are of particular relevance to users, such as files and pages that are being actively shared, viewed and discussed.

The new home page also features a section for key company content, such as important calendars, personnel manuals and the like, so that these resources are easily accessible to users.

"We want to make sure that the things you're looking at are relevant to you," said Adam Pisoni, Yammer's CTO.

The Yammer upgrade also adds a feature called Online Now that displays which user contacts are available at a particular moment and allows co-workers to engage in multi-party chats. This feature also archives conversations and makes them searchable.

Recently acquired by Microsoft for US$1.2 billion in cash, Yammer is one of many companies offering software that companies can use to create workplace social networks.

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Yammer simplifies enterprise social networking software with upgrade

(getty images - GETTY IMAGES/IMAGE SOURCE)

Everybody, at one time or another, has dreamed about a social networking do-over -- completely gutting their social networking presence to get rid of all their fake followers, annoying ads and blatant intrusions by brands into their daily lives. If anything, the Im quitting Facebook or Im quitting Twitter comments are becoming more and more common. Thats because theres a growing sense that the Webs leading players are selling users to advertisers, rather than selling products to users. No wonder App.net, the much-hyped initiative to create an ad-free social platform, was able to raise more than $800,000 from everyday Internet users in less than a month.

But can it work?

At a time when Facebook seems to have lost its mojo and Twitter appears to be aggressively pursuing paid advertising opportunities, the App.net project (they prefer to call it a movement) tapped into the popular zeitgeist at precisely the right time. More than 12,000 people have chipped in anywhere from $50 to $1,000, according to The Next Webs Jon Russell, to help build a social platform completely free of ads. The campaign has attracted the support of some of the tech worlds leading evangelists, as well as a healthy number of "tech snobs", to borrow a term from Gawker, who dont mind shelling out $50 per year to be part of an exclusive social experiment. The brilliance of the App.net project is the fundamental insight that any truly social platform should work for the users and developers not for the advertisers.

Bold claims of building a social networking alternative, though, are nothing new. Remember two years ago, when Diaspora was the trendy social network that was going to upend Facebook? Back then, the rallying cry wasnt Death to advertisers! it was Give us back our personal privacy!

Users were concerned that they no longer owned their own data, and that they could not easily port that data across various social platforms. So, four NYU students raised $200,000 via online donations, promised to build a new social network that was ad-free and data-friendly, and... two years later, we're still waiting for Diaspora to become a full-on technology migration. Getting to 100,000 users is nice, but getting to 1 billion users is nicer.

This well-intentioned desire to give users a chance for a do-over has been the inspiration for nearly every recent innovation in the social networking field. The big innovation of Google+ was Circles, the ability to sub-divide your friends into smaller groups, so that you arent sharing weekend exploits with your boss, or family-related matters with your weekend softball team. More recently, Foursquare did a total revamp to its social platform in order to become more of a location-based social network and less of a gaming platform. Now that mobile phones are changing how we connect with each other, Foursquare felt that most people would like their social experience to better reflect the context of their current geographic location. Indeed, the number of social networking alternatives seems to expand every couple of months.

This should sound familiar. The Social Networking War is reminiscent of the Google Search War, when competitor after competitor came after Google with knives sharpened. Each promised to do search just a little bit different, a little bit better, than Google. Some promised a better algorithm, others promised the ability to search in real-time, or to search rich content such as images and video. At the end of the day, though, Google is still the king of the search mountain.

The difficulty of unseating Google as the king of search or Facebook as the king of social networking illustrates the inevitable problem that any great idea faces in the tech world: inertia. Just as people continue to use Google for search because they dont perceive any great value in switching, people continue to use Facebook and Twitter for social networking because thats where their friends and family are. App.net has already proven that there is momentum and support for a social alternative that is advertising-free. Punching through the wall of inertia that accompanies any tech do-over, though, is harder than it sounds. Especially when it comes with a $50 annual subscription fee and sky-high user expectations.

What do you think: Will you sign up for app.net? Do you think it will become the next, great social network, unseating Facebook?

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App.net and the myth of the social network do-over

By Natalie Hayes Contributor August 14, 2012 6:42PM

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Several years ago Glenview entrepreneur Bob Hunt left his job as a trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and decided to put his Internet marketing talents to good use by launching his own company aimed at helping local businesses optimize their online presence.

Deviating from the traditional 9-5 corporate career, the 34-year-old Hunt now works as his own boss operating The B24 Group, a start-up Internet marketing company that offers a variety of online marketing services to businesses in the North Shore area and beyond.

Two years since starting his company, Hunt has so far proven himself as a successful business owner, adding more than 25 clients and four employees to what started as a one-man endeavor in 2010.

Working around-the-clock from anywhere with an Internet connection, Hunt is focused on helping local businesses grow by widening their customer bases and increasing sales through a variety of tools including automated lead capture and follow-up systems, Google Places optimization, specialized YouTube videos, and text message marketing.

Hunts list of Internet marketing services has expanded during the two years since he started The B24 Group, but the initial idea for the company started with his objective to help businesses increase their search engine optimization, or achieve better rankings on Google search results pages.

Hunt, a Glenview native and graduate of Loyola Academy in Wilmette, first got his feet wet in Internet marketing after he left his job as a trader in 2004 and started following his interests in marketing and web site creation.

Fully confident that the last place he wanted to be was in an office working for someone else, Hunt began deeper exploration of his personal interests and talents by writing e-books on topics like dating, silver and gold investing, and a variety of health topics including pet health.

Needing an effective way to get readers to find his e-books online, he taught himself the best ways to use SEO to get his sites ranked higher on Google search results pages.

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Glenview Trader leaves Merc and starts internet marketing company