Blog Flak

A group of nearly 200 bloggers joined together to plead for the life of an American journalist named Jill Carroll who was captured by terrorists in Iraq. Many people are crediting the bloggers for helping to gain her release but there are still 3 more journalists being held captive. There were other efforts involved in the campaign for her release including people from all cultural and religious backgrounds that pleaded for her freedom in letters and on television.

Reporters Without Borders reports that 86 journalists have been killed in Iraq since March of 2003.

Source: Tech Web

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tags: terrorists, journalists, Iraq, Reporters Without Borders

I decided to change the front end of the site to WordPress publishing. It should help make everything more searchable with better archiving, categories and commenting than what I had before. I would appreciate a heads up if you notice any broken links or problems with the site.

As a result though, the Freebies on Fridays feature will be a bit late, sorry about that kids!

Thanks!

The Iranian hard-line government is enabling ever tighter restrictions on what bloggers in their country can say on their personal blogs. A number have been detained, imprisoned and sentenced with prison time for various infractions concerning Islamic laws and culture. Before you are allowed to even get internet access you must sign papers promising that you will not access non-Islamic websites.

Their filtering system is second only to China in the world as far as restrictions go on what you are allowed to see on the ‘net. The ironic thing is that they rely heavily on US commercial software to do the filtering with!

A Canadian blogger that was recently detained and interrogated in Iran wasn’t allowed to leave the country until he signed an official apology for his blog writings after writing articles explaining how to set up personal blogs in Iran.

When you read things like this it makes you appreciate the freedoms we have here in the US, doesn’t it?

Source: iWon News

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tags: censorship hard line Iran blogging regime

What a way to go! G00gle accidentally deletes it’s own official Blogspot blog! At first they suspected that the site had been hacked and the name stolen by a hacker, but after a short investigation they determined it was their own fault! A blogger somehow noticed that the name was available and registered it for himself. Everything is all back to normal now, G00gle has it’s blog back and they’ve listed a short explanation at the official G00gle Blog.

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tags: har kiri google blog hacking suicide

There’s a swirling controversy going on over at Live Journal involving their abuse teams allegedly arbitrary suspensions of both free and paid accounts where they have used very broad definitions of “abuse”. The Terms of Service, or TOS, appears to be vaguely worded in many areas with double talk definitions that include a number of “weasel words” that allow very broad interpretations of the TOS. The abuse teams consist of a group of volunteers made up of both paid and free members that are allowed free access to all Live Journal users entries including the ones marked “private”.

If you were considering moving to Live Journal for the “private post” features available to their users, you might to want reconsider!

More info: Exposing LJ Abuse

Also: Live Journal Abuse

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tags: abuse live journal abuse sixapart blogging harassment