Cloudflare Terminates Service To Sci-Hub Domain Names

While Sci-Hub is praised by thousands of researchers and academics around the world, copyright holders are doing everything in their power to wipe the site from the web. From a report: Last weekend another problem appeared for Sci-Hub. This time American Chemical Society (ACS) went after CDN provider Cloudflare, which informed the site that a court order requires the company to disconnect several domain names. “Cloudflare has received the attached court order, Case 1:17-cv-OO726-LMB-JFA, ” the company writes. “Cloudflare will terminate your service for the following domains sci-hub.la, sci-hub.tv, and sci-hub.tw by disabling our authoritative DNS in 24 hours.” According to Sci-Hub’s operator, losing access to Cloudflare is not “critical, ” but it may “cause a short pause in website operation.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cloudflare Terminates Service To Sci-Hub Domain Names

Iran Cuts Internet Access and Threatens Telegram Following Mass Protests

Long-time Slashdot reader cold fjord writes: As seething discontent has boiled over in Iran leading to mass protests, protesters have taken to the streets and social media to register their discontent… The government has been closing schools and shutting down transportation. Now, as mass protests in Iran go into their third day there are reports that internet access is being cut in cities with protests occurring. Social media has been a tool for documenting the protests and brutal crackdowns against them. Iran previously cut off internet access during the Green Movement protests following the 2009 elections. At the same time the Iranian government is cutting internet access they have called on Telegram, reportedly used by more than 40 million Iranians, to close the channels used by protesters. Telegram is now closing channels used by the protesters while Telegram itself may be shut down in Iran. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Iran Cuts Internet Access and Threatens Telegram Following Mass Protests

Congo Shuts Down Internet Services ‘Indefinitely’

On Saturday Engadget wrote: Authoritarian leaders are fond of severing communications in a bid to hold on to power, and that tradition sadly isn’t going away. The Democratic Republic of Congo’s government has ordered telecoms to cut internet and SMS access ahead of planned mass protests against President Joseph Kabila, whose administration has continuously delayed elections to replace him. Telecom minister Emery Okundji told Reuters that it was a response to “violence that is being prepared, ” but people aren’t buying that argument. Officials had already banned demonstrations, and the country has history of cutting communications and blocking social network access in a bid to quash dissent. And today in the wake of deadly protests, Congo announced that the internet shutdown will continue “indefinitely.” The New York Times reports: At least eight people were killed and a dozen altar boys arrested in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Sunday after security forces cracked down on planned church protests against President Joseph Kabila’s refusal to leave office before coming elections… Congolese security forces set up checkpoints across Kinshasa, and the government issued an order to shut down text messaging and internet services indefinitely across the country for what it called “reasons of state security.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Congo Shuts Down Internet Services ‘Indefinitely’

Wikipedia’s Switch To HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship

Determining how to prevent acts of censorship has long been a priority for the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, and thanks to new research from the Harvard Center for Internet and Society, the foundation seems to have found a solution: encryption. From a report: HTTPS prevents governments and others from seeing the specific page users are visiting. For example, a government could tell that a user is browsing Wikipedia, but couldn’t tell that the user is specifically reading the page about Tiananmen Square. Up until 2015, Wikipedia offered its service using both HTTP and HTTPS, which meant that when countries like Pakistan or Iran blocked the certain articles on the HTTP version of Wikipedia, the full version would still be available using HTTPS. But in June 2015, Wikipedia decided to axe HTTP access and only offer access to its site with HTTPS. The Harvard researchers began by deploying an algorithm which detected unusual changes in Wikipedia’s global server traffic for a year beginning in May 2015. This data was then combined with a historical analysis of the daily request histories for some 1.7 million articles in 286 different languages from 2011 to 2016 in order to determine possible censorship events. After a painstakingly long process of manual analysis of potential censorship events, the researchers found that, globally, Wikipedia’s switch to HTTPS had a positive effect on the number censorship events by comparing server traffic from before and after the switch in June of 2015. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Wikipedia’s Switch To HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship

Encrypted chat app Signal circumvents government censorship

Just days after Open Whisper Systems concluded the Egyptian government had blocked access to its encrypted messaging service, Signal, the company rolled out an update that circumvents large-scale censorship systems across Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. The update also adds the ability to apply stickers, text and doodles to images, but that’s just icing on the censorship-evading cake. “Over the weekend, we heard reports that Signal was not functioning reliably in Egypt or the United Arab Emirates, ” Open Whisper Systems writes . “We investigated with the help of Signal users in those areas, and found that several ISPs were blocking communication with the Signal service and our website. It turns out that when some states can’t snoop, they censor.” Open Whisper Systems circumvents filtering systems with domain fronting, a technique that routes all messages through a popular domain name — in this case, Google. All Signal messages sent from an Egypt or UAE country code will look like a normal HTTPS request to the Google homepage. In order to block Signal in these countries, the governments would have to disable Google. “The goal for an app like Signal is to make disabling internet access the only way a government can disable Signal, ” the company says. The blog post continues, “With enough large-scale services acting as domain fronts, disabling Signal starts to look like disabling the internet.” Source: Signal

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Encrypted chat app Signal circumvents government censorship

Tesla Model S Owners Now Get Free In-Car Spotify

Looking for some way to justify that $70, 000 Tesla Model S? Well, how about this: starting today, Model S owners in some countries will have free in-car access to Spotify Premium. At $10 saved per month, that’s only 583 years until you break even! Read more…

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Tesla Model S Owners Now Get Free In-Car Spotify

Sen. Feinstein Says Anarchist Cookbook Should Be "Removed From the Internet"

schwit1 writes with this snippet from Ars Technica: In the wake of the Thursday arrest of two women accused of attempting to build a bomb, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote on her website that the 1971 book on bomb making, which may have aided the terror suspects in some small way, should be “banned from the Internet.” The senator seems to fail to realize that not only has The Anarchist Cookbook been in print for decades (it’s sold on Amazon!), but also has openly circulated online for nearly the same period of time. In short, removing it from the Internet would be impossible. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sen. Feinstein Says Anarchist Cookbook Should Be "Removed From the Internet"

Facebook Rant Lands US Man In UAE Jail

blindbat writes While back home in the U.S., a man working in the United Arab Emirates posted negative comments about the company he worked for. Upon returning to the country to resign, he was arrested and now faces up to a year in prison under their strict “cyber slander” laws designed to protect reputation. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Facebook Rant Lands US Man In UAE Jail

BattleBots Is Back After Ten Years, And It’s Bound To Be Incredible

Oh hell yes : BattleBots is coming back to TV. This summer, homemade robots will battle to the death on television, just as Asimov intended. They’ll be faster and stronger than ever before. Which makes sense, because the last time BattleBots was on television was over a decade ago . Imagine what they could do now. Read more…

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BattleBots Is Back After Ten Years, And It’s Bound To Be Incredible