{"id":37,"date":"2013-05-21T14:49:30","date_gmt":"2013-05-21T18:49:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/?p=37"},"modified":"2013-05-21T14:49:30","modified_gmt":"2013-05-21T18:49:30","slug":"imweekly-may-21-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/2013\/05\/21\/imweekly-may-21-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"#imweekly: May 21, 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

Australia<\/strong>
\nAustralian Internet users are wary of the government’s newly exposed ability<\/a> to block multiple websites without notice, revealed when the Australian Securities and Investment Commission accidentally filtered<\/a> over 1200 sites in an attempt to shut down a single website for fraud. Among the accidentally blocked sites was that of community-based activist group Melbourne Free University, which documented its experience trying to obtain information about the shutdown in a blog post<\/a> .<\/p>\n

Iran<\/strong>
\nIn advance of Iran’s upcoming presidential elections<\/a>, scheduled for June 14, 2013, Internet users are experiencing<\/a> slower speeds and trouble using VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to access blocked sites. The Wall Street Journal reports<\/a> that most Internet caf\u00e9s in the country have had to close due to service disruptions, and that a newly created “special election cyberunit” has been established to monitor social media surrounding the presidential race. SMS service has also been affected<\/a>. Thus far, Iranian authorities are denying<\/a> any involvement in the disruptions.<\/p>\n

Syria<\/strong>
\nSyria’s Internet has experienced multiple blackouts<\/a> this month as the country’s internal conflict<\/a> continues. On May 7, 2013, Renesys reported a complete Internet outage<\/a> lasting over 19 hours; Google also noted a disruption<\/a> to all of the company’s products in the country. A second outage<\/a>, lasting approximately eight hours, took place on May 15. Cloudflare has a video explaining how<\/a> the shutdowns took place.<\/p>\n

#imweekly is a regular round-up of news about Internet content controls and activity around the world. To subscribe via RSS, click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Accidental, secret blocking of 1200 websites worries Internet users in Australia; two Internet blackouts in two weeks in Syria; disruptions to Internet and SMS in advance of Iranian presidential elections. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2444,"featured_media":44,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[83927,941,83924,83929,622,2846,2386,83921],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-accidental-filtering","category-australia","category-im-weekly","category-internet-blackout","category-iran","category-sms","category-syria","category-technical-filtering"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4L9BV-B","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/files\/2013\/05\/2013-05-08_syria_shutdown.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2444"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions\/47"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}