Cybersurf

Hello good morning and welcome to Cybersurf, three minutes of your time devoted to the virtual. I am Steven Lang.

Let’s start off with a quick look at the Reporters without borders web site – you can find it by typing in rsf.org that is rsf dot org. The site is dedicated to fighting for press freedom, and regularly publishes list of countries that curtail media freedom.

The reporters without borders web site also carries prominently a press freedom barometer informing users that as of yesterday – 66 journalists and 29 media assistants had been killed in the line of duty this year.

One hundred and thirty one journalists, three media assistants and 61 Cyber dissidents have been imprisoned in this same period.

Yesterday, the site published a list of Internet enemies – thirteen countries that suppress online free expression. This latest list coincided with the launching of a 24 hour campaign against Internet censorship.

The list of shame reads as follows in alphabetical order:

1. Belarus –
2. Burma – where computers in internet café execute screen captures every five minutes.
3. China – described as the country with the world’s most advanced internet filtering system
4. Cuba –
5. Egypt - a new entrant on the list for its systematic harassment of bloggers
6. Iran –
7. North Korea
8. Saudi Arabia
9. Syria –
10. Tunisia – where it is impossible to access the Reporters without Borders site
11. Turkmenistan
12. Uzbekistan and
13. Vietnam – where ten people have been arrested for what they said online this year.

The good news is that Libya, the Maldives and Nepal have recently been removed from the list because of significant improvements in the freedom of online expression in these countries.

As part of the campaign for online freedom of expression, Reporters without borders invites the user to vote against censorship by clicking on a particular button to register your disapproval.

The site looks good, but most of it is in French, and the voting section appears to be taking the strain with some serious online traffic.

Nevertheless you can still vote – the campaign ends at eleven am today.

Some other news flashes –

This week Microsoft announced that it will be shipping the business version of its new Vista operating system by the end of this month while the consumer version should be out early next year.

In the UK where online fraud is increasing dramatically, a recent survey showed that Britons are more concerned about being victims of a cyber crime than of a physical crime such as assault.

And to close of Cybersurf for today, some good news – a US based company called ZANGO has been fined three million dollars for “unfairly and deceptively” downloading its software onto people’s computers.

The American Federal Trade Commission ruled that Zango had installed adware more than seventy million times generating six point nine billion pop-up ads.

Well I think Zango got off rather lightly but at least they were fined.

With that we end this week’s edition of Cybersurf, please join me again next week for more on the best of the web.