InternetPolicy.net

Saudi Arabia unblocks 2 gay websites

Yesterday's IFEX Communique says that "Saudi Arabia has lifted a ban on two gay websites in response to pressure from Reporters Without Borders... Access to the websites gaymiddleast.com and 365gay.com within the country had been blocked since early March 2004 after authorities deemed them 'pornographic.' The country's Internet Services Unit (ISU), which controls all access to the Internet in Saudi Arabia, said in a written response to RSF on 30 March 2004 that 'after receiving your letter, we carried out a new examination of these sites' and found no pornographic content.

"Gaymiddleeast.com reports on gay issues, including discrimination, homophobia and gay rights, in the Middle East, says RSF. Its coverage extends to 15 countries. Homexuality is banned in Saudi Arabia and punishable by imprisonment or flogging. RSF welcomed the ISU's move, saying it hoped it would be a first step towards easing Internet censorship in Saudi Arabia.

"A few days prior to the lifting of the ban, RSF had staged a mock Cannes Film Festival prize ceremony, awarding a 'First Prize for Censorship' to Saudi Arabia for Internet censorship. The government has created one of the world's largest Internet filtering systems, blocking local access to more than 400,000 web pages, RSF said..."

Papers from Yale cybercrime conference

From BeSpacific we learned that many of the papers presented at last week's "Digital Cops in a Virtual Environment" conference, hosted by Yale Law School's Information Society Project, are now online. For example:

• Computer Crimes and Intermediary Liability: The Case for Protecting Vulnerability Publications
• Where Computer Security Meets National Security
• The Digital Crime Scene: A Software Prospective
• The Legal Construction of Identity Theft
• Designing Accountable Online Policing
• Law, Technology, and the Danger of Architectural Regulation

Virus + phishing = cyberfraud nightmare

From Agence France Presse: "Internet security experts have warned that the creators of some of the latest computer viruses were using computers infected by the bugs to run online scams and get credit card information from unsuspecting buyers. 'There is an operation of fake online shops running on infected home computers, which are being controlled by hackers or criminals,' Mikko Hyppoenen, head of anti-virus research at Finland's F-Secure, told AFP on Monday.... Many of the recent bugs open a so-called back door on infected computers, giving their creators access to the contaminated machines without the owners' knowledge. It was first believed that these back doors were mainly used to distribute spam, or unsolicited bulk e-mail advertisements, but in principle they could be used for all kinds of malicious purposes... 'To run fake online stores on infected computers is one of the things a back door can be used for,' Snorre Fagerland, virus analyst with Internet security firm Norman in Oslo, told AFP. To avoid being traced, the websites move from computer to computer, leaving buyers with no other real information than the the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the infected machine that registered their credit card information. [However, many] Internet connections also change IP addresses all the time, and the owner of the infected computer has in any case no idea what is going on. 'There are hundreds of infected computers being used, and the websites are changing locations every 10 minutes or so,' Hyppoenen noted. 'Behind every address there is an infected home computer, making it impossible to trace the people behind the website'..."

New Internet crime: sexual self-abuse?

The Associated Press reports that "A 15-year-old girl has been arrested for taking nude photographs of her self and posting them on the Internet, police said... She has been charged with sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography."

India's "Simputer" launched

The BBC reports that the "Amida Simputer" - a low-cost handheld PC - finally went on sale last Friday, after more than 2 years of development. Designed by the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and manufactured by Bharat Electronics (which is owned by the Indian government), three models are now available. The cheapest version - with a monochrome screen, a built-in microphone, 206 MHz processor and 64MB of memory - costs about $240. All the Simputers run Linux, and use a stylus and pressure-sensitive screen for data entry. Bharat hopes to sell 50,000 of the devices in the first year.

More bandwidth to link Europe, Mideast & SE Asia

A consortium of 16 telecom operators have awarded a $500 million contract to Alcatel SA and Fujitsu Ltd. to build and lay a 20,000 km long submarine cable linking southeast Asia, the Middle East and Western Europe, according to the Dow-Jones Newswire. "SEA-ME-WE-4 will carry telephone, Internet and various broadband data streams through 14 countries - Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh , India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France." It is supposed to begin carrying data in the third quarter of 2005.

Cerf urges a "layered approach" to regulating nets

Hard on the heels of his keynote speech to the UN's Global Forum on Internet Governance, Internetnews.com says that on Friday, Vint Cerf urged US regulators and the Congress "to adopt a brand new regulatory approach to broadband. He is among a group that is calling for a 'network layers' model that would separate services and applications, such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), from the underlying transmission medium. According to Cerf, this new model would create a sustainable legal and regulatory framework for the IP world and prevent the imposition of legacy telecommunications regulations on IP-based applications...

"Cerf was one of the headliners Friday at a Capitol Hill gathering of Internet policy luminaries, including Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, and Andrew McLaughlin, Google's senior policy counsel. The discussion was organized by the Consumer Federation of America as a forum for Senate and House staffers working on telecom policy reform. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps gave the keynote, but it was Cerf the policy shapers came to hear...

"'The reality of the world is that the Internet comes in a layered form, like a layer cake, but our regulatory structures look like silos and when you mix them together you get gridlock,' Cerf said... "Cerf said the layers model supports principles that say any attempts to limit content or applications layer activities should not result in logical or physical layer regulation...

"'Even if we don't actually apply this layer concept in some literal sense, we should at least hang on to the concept so we can better understand what we are doing when we do write legislation or, perhaps, rewrite legislation regarding telecommunications,' he said."

Forum on Internet Governance - Friday

Declan McCullagh on today's events: "A United Nations summit ended Friday with a consensus that poorer nations must have more influence on the way the Internet is run, but with no agreement among delegates on the details. The summit, which lasted two days and was organized by a UN Internet task force, was intended to provide a platform for developing countries to offer a laundry list of their proposals on topics from spam to root server operation. But when five different working groups reported their conclusions Friday morning, the only agreement was on vague and noncontroversial principles about what should be done instead of specific proposals about how to make it happen...

"The task force will continue to meet through 2005 to work toward a goal of presenting a report to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan at a meeting in Tunisia next year... One concern is that if third-world countries without a tradition of tolerance of free expression get more involved in running the Internet, censorship will inevitably result. The World Press Freedom Committee of Reston, Va., distributed a position paper at the summit, warning that 'authoritarian governments, which already censor their own Internet traffic, (will) seek content controls internationally and legitimization of such controls nationally'..."

Forum on Internet Governance - Thursday

Declan McCullagh reports for CNET on the first full day of the UN ICT Task Force's Global Forum on Internet Governance, in which "delegates from around the world gathered to take a preliminary step toward UN involvement in some of the areas that are bedeviling Internet users and governments alike, including spam, network security, privacy and the regulation of the technical underpinnings that control the sprawling global network. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan set the tone in a speech Thursday, criticizing the current system through which Internet standards are set and domain names are handled, a process currently dominated by the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan. Such structures 'must be made accessible and responsive to the needs of all the world's people,'Annan said...

"Although the UN process is still in its early stages, the result could dramatically reshape the way the Internet is run and put an end to some of the informal, collaborative processes that exist today....

"Dozens of delegates from developing nations echoed Annan's remarks throughout the rest of the day, arguing that their governments do not have a voice in the way the Internet is operated and that more money and investment from richer nations is the only way to end the so-called digital divide... Many delegates to the Global Forum on Internet Governance appeared to favor the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency, taking over at least part of ICANN's functions... 'We're in danger of overregulating,' not underregulating, said Karl Auerbach, a former ICANN board member and a veteran Internet engineer...."

China adopting e-signature law

We have no details yet, but Xinhua.net reports that an executive meeting of China's State Council adopted a draft law on electronic signatures on 24 March. "The draft law will be submitted to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) for further deliberation, said the meeting."