UK

• Wikileaks hit by denial-of-service attack, turns to Amazon hosting...
• ...but Amazon drops the site following pressure from a U.S. senator.
• Google extends its https encryption to YouTube, making video blocking harder.
• Censorship of the Net directly related to how authoritarian a regime is, claims a study.
• Venezuala's telecom regulator proposes stronger takedown powers over Internet content.
• Thailand's technology minister says "blacklisting [websites] doesn't work."
• UK police seek powers to suspend web domains if there are "reasonable grounds to believe they are being used to commit a crime," even before a warrant or trial.

New York, November 16, 2010--The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the Singapore High Court's sentencing of British author Alan Shadrake to prison over his book criticizing the nation's judiciary.

• Computers belonging to South Korean government officials have been infiltrated by targeted malware in email. Chinese hackers are suspected. Contrary to what this article says, I'm betting that the attachments were PDFs, which are currently the document of choice when attempting to infect journalists' machines.
• Another intriguing academic paper, this time on the structure of the Russian political blogosphere. Commentators continue to post mostly on the LiveJournal platform and are less politically divided than the United States.
• Russian police investigate the Russian-language Wikipedia on suspicion of hosting extremist materials.
• The United Kingdom renews plans to centrally store every source and destination of every email, phone call and website visit for "at least a year"...
• ...while India's home ministry has told mobile phone companies to store every SMS text message for six months. Currently the companies keep messages for just for two days.

This morning, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that British aid worker Linda Norgrove, who died in a rescue attempt after she was taken hostage in Afghanistan, may have been killed by a U.S. grenade rather than by her Taliban captors, as originally reported.

IN NOVEMBER 2005, three senior aides to Britain's royal family noticed odd things happening on their mobile phones. Messages they had never listened to were somehow appearing in their mailboxes as if heard and saved. Equally peculiar were stories that began appearing about Prince William in one of the country's biggest tabloids, News of the World.

It's a story about journalists hacking subjects' phones, but the technique could easily be used against journalists too. Most voicemail systems either have a default PIN, or no PIN at all (they depend on Caller ID to tell them that the person calling to check a phone's voicemail is calling from the phone itself - Caller ID can be easily faked). If you use voicemail in your job, change your PIN!

This week, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill shielding journalists and publishers from “libel tourism.” The vote on Monday slipped past the Washington press corps largely unnoticed. Maybe it was the title that strove chunkily for a memorable acronym: the Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage (SPEECH) Act. Journalists and press freedom defenders outside the United States did, however, pay attention to the legislation, which they hope will spur libel law reform in their countries.

Life can be bumpy on Britain’s campaign roads. On May 3, Jerome Taylor, a “home news” reporter with the London daily The Independent went into the Bow borough of East London in order to look into allegations of widespread postal voting fraud. His bloodied nose and face appeared in the next day’s Independent.

New York January 11, 2010—The death of U.K.-based Sunday Mirror reporter Rupert Hamer, who was killed in an explosion outside a village in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, is an indicator of the rising danger for journalists in Afghanistan. The explosion also wounded Hamer’s colleague photographer Philip Coburn and took the life of a U.S. Marine.