Asia

• Microsoft allows users to turn on https by default in Hotmail, but it's still couched in warnings.
• Meanwhile, Access starts its own global campaign for https to be turned on for the most visited websites.
• Thai censorship, originally aimed at a few hundred domains, now covers over 250,000 websites.
• China "unpublishes" previously approved online articles about a Party official's private life.
• Burma's entire internal network is knocked offline in a denial-of-service attack...
• ... while Digital Democracy reports on the domestic state of commmunications technology in the country.

This weekend, staff at CPJ received a personal invitation to attend the Oslo awards ceremony for Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. The invite, curiously, was in the form of an Adobe PDF document. We didn't accept. We didn't even open the e-mail. We did, however, begin analyzing the document to see was really inside that attachment, and what it was planning to do to our staff's computers.

The prosecution of dozens of defendants in the 2009 Maguindanao murders is testing a faltering judicial system in the Philippines. Bribes, intimidation, attacks, and flawed detective work already threaten to undermine the government’s case. Will this massacre go unpunished? A CPJ special report by Shawn W. Crispin

Grace Morales lost her husband, her sister, and her sense of security. She didn't lose hope. By María Salazar-Ferro

In our special report, "Impunity on trial in the Philippines," CPJ examines the troubled prosecution of defendants in the 2009 massacre of more than 30 journalists and media support workers in Maguindanao province. Among other problems, CPJ found that local investigators mishandled forensic evidence and failed to cooperate with federal prosecutors. Listen to the mp3 on the player above, or right click here to download. (2:44)

Read CPJ's special report, "Impunity on trial in the Philippines."

Mikhail Beketov is lucky to be alive, although I'm sure there are days when he doesn't think so. On November 13, 2008, the environmental reporter who campaigned against a highway that would have destroyed a forest in Khimki, a town outside Moscow, was beaten nearly to death by men with metal bars. The attackers made a special effort to destroy his hands and left him to die in the November cold. He would have if neighbors had not noticed him and called the police 24 hours after the attack.

New York, November 8, 2010--Burma must immediately release Toru Yamaji, a reporter with Tokyo-based APF news agency, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Yamaji, 49, was detained Sunday in Myawaddy, on the country's eastern border with Thailand while trying to cover the country's first elections in two decades, according to international media reports, which quoted Japan's embassy in Rangoon. He was flown to the capital after being detained, the embassy was reported as saying.

Sen. Richard Lugar, ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, wrote to Pakistani Prime Minster Yousuf Raza Gilani on September 22 to express concern about the brutal attack on Umar Cheema. The journalist was abducted on the weekend of September 4-5 by men in black commando-style uniforms, who beat and humiliated him. It's a case I've written about repeatedly (you can find links here, here, here, here, here, and here). But the prime minister has not yet responded to Lugar's letter, which was delivered through the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.

Leo Dacera, a senior state prosecutor and head of the witness protection program for the Philippine Department of Justice, died suddenly on November 4. Initial news reports said Dacera, 54, left, was the victim of an apparent heart attack. Dacera's untimely death is a tremendous blow to all those seeking to end the culture of impunity in Philippine journalist murders. 

• Turkey lifted its ban on YouTube and then re-asserted it within the same week.
• Digital technology is helping get news out of North Korea. Small digital cameras and tiny SD memory cards make it easier to smuggle images out.
• In China, meanwhile, Amazon's Kindle 3G e-reader is reportedly being used to get the news in. Users are able to bypass the "Great Firewall."
• José Alejandro Godoy has the dubious honor of being Peru's first blogger to be sentenced under the country's criminal defamation laws.
• Facebook hopes to provide SSL access (i.e. secure, encrypted access) in the coming months. CPJ will continue to push other sites to make their services more spy- and censor-proof.
• Will future censorship be tailored to the individual, just as Internet ads are now?
• In September, Burmese exiled media were brought down with denial-of-service attacks. Is the entire domestic Burmese Internet now suffering the same fate?