Benton RSS Feed

The demonstrations have died down, and the reporters and editors are back to work at China’s most prominent weekly newspaper. Its latest issue was published more or less on schedule. But the paper, Southern Weekend, is sure to remain a crucial battleground over Communist Party censorship.

Southern Weekend has been a weather vane for restrictions on news organizations in China since its founding 29 years ago, and its journalists say their frustration with those constraints has been building for years, turning their relationship with provincial party officials into something of a cat-and-mouse battle. The restrictions have tightened since last summer, leading to the protests that erupted at Southern Weekend’s offices last week over a rewritten New Year’s editorial, one of the sharpest outbreaks of friction so far. The newspaper appeared on newsstands on Jan 10, after protesting journalists accepted a compromise in which provincial propaganda officials promised to loosen some of the more intrusive censorship controls. The police in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, moved to quell any new demonstrations at the offices of the Nanfang Media Group, which owns the paper.

As a work of propaganda, the images that North Korea circulated this week showing Google’s executive chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, touring a high-tech incubation center are hard to beat.

With former-Gov. Bill Richardson (D-NM) at his side, Schmidt, who is fond of describing the Internet as the enemy of despots, toured what was presented as the hub of the computer industry in one of the world’s most pitiless police states. Both men gazed attentively as a select group of North Koreans showed their ability to surf the Web. It is unclear what the famously hermetic North Koreans hoped to accomplish by allowing the visit. But the photos of the billionaire entrepreneur taking the time to visit the nation’s computer labs were bound to be useful to a new national leader whom analysts say needs to show his people that their impoverished nation is moving forward. It will matter little, those experts say, that the visitors were bundled against the cold, indoors — a sign of the country’s extreme privation — or that the vast majority of North Koreans have no access to computers, much less the Web beyond their country’s tightly controlled borders.

A petition was filed on the White House's "We the People" website that aims to legitimize the use of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) as a legitimate form of protest.

“It is the equivalent of repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a webpage. It is, in that way, no different than any ‘occupy,’ protest,” the petition states. “Instead of a group of people standing outside a building to occupy the area, they are having their computer occupy a website to slow (or deny) service of that particular website for a short time. As part of this petition, those who have been jailed for DDoS should be immediately released and have anything regarding a DDoS, that is on their ‘records,’ cleared.” Some have speculated that Anonymous is behind the petition—but Anons aren’t the only one making this argument.