Despite earlier assurances that journalists would have unfettered access to the Internet at the Main Press Center and athletic venues, organizers are now backtracking, meaning that the some 5,000 reporters working in Beijing during the next several weeks won't have access to a multitude of sites such as Amnesty International or any site with Tibet in the address, according to an Associated Press report.

IOC members issued a clarification Tuesday, saying that Internet freedom applied only to Web sites related to "Olympic competitions."

When a senior vice president for NBC Sports, which paid about $900 million to broadcast the games, asked organizers last month to lift broadcast and interview restrictions at Tiananmen Square, the response was reportedly clear: "Don't push the issue."

Wikinews - like its sister site, Wikipedia - bills itself as a place without bias. Ostensibly, it's a democratic news source that never answers to a higher power. But that's just a setup for the latest act in the world's greatest online farce.

"Wikimedia has been doing things that are out of the ordinary and, in my opinion, against everything it stands for - such as free information for all and the fact that they claim to not censor anything," says Jason Safoutin.

Late last month, Wikimedia general counsel Mike Godwin filed a declaration with the court, pointing out that an article on Barbara Bauer "no longer appears on the Wikipedia site."

In telling Wikipedians to avoid re-posting a Barbara Bauer article, Godwin also tells them he's not telling them to avoid re-posting a Barbara article.

According to WorldNetDaily, the FBI is investigating Wikipedia after someone uploaded a photo of a nude adolescent. Safoutin's piece focused on the FBI probe, but it also mentioned other reports that Wikimedia Number Two Eric Moeller has advocated the free exchange of child pornography and posted a child pornography image to his web site.

Godwin killed this story too.

Google has murdered the AdSense account run by one of the web's most influential anti-Scientology sites.

Yesterday, the search giant cut off all ads served to Enturbulation, a fledgling site dedicated to promoting activism against the Church of Scientology and all its related organizations.

Of course, it's not Enturbulation's fault that Google was serving the site pro-Scientology ads. AdSense automatically chooses ads based on a site's content.

Google's crackdown on Enturbulation's AdSense account follows similar actions by its YouTube subsidiary. Last month, the world's most popular video site vaporized an account run by Mark Bunker, a well-known TV journalist/anti-Scientology activist.

The Mormon Church has instructed its lawyers to gag the Internet over WikiLeaks' release of the 1968 and 1999 versions of its confidential handbook for Church leaders. Apart from attacking WikiLeaks, legal demands were sent to Jimmy Wales of the WikiMedia foundation for a WikiNews article merely linking to the material, and scribd.com has also been censored. WikiLeaks has (of course) refused to remove the documents.

If you work from a Chinese Internet cafe – which is still where the vast majority of Chinese Internet activity happens, since so few people have connected computers in their own homes – you experience all of these blocking mechanisms as a matter of course.

As a matter of course I fire up my VPN at the start of any online session, not just for security but because otherwise I'll be blocked the first time I try a Wikipedia or Technorati link.

The idea is that if you're never quite sure when, why and how hard the boom might be lowered on you, you start controlling yourself, rather than being limited strictly by what the government is able to control directly.

China is refusing to guarantee that it won't censor the Internet during this summer's Olympic Games, but insists that the international media will still be able to function normally.

They said that while the government would be able to "guarantee as much [access] as possible," there's no way that China would turn off the Great Firewall entirely during the Games.

"I've not got any clear information about which sites will be shut or screened. But to protect the youth there are controls on some unhealthy web sites."

Brady, executive editor of The Washington Post's online division, said during a panel discussion at the Digital Hollywood conference here that he would like to see a technology that could identify people who violate site standards.

"I think part of the problem is that people aren't held accountable on the Web," Brady said. "People say things online they would never say when disagreeing with someone at the dinner table."

Brady believes that in the next five years people will be required to identify themselves in some way at many sites. "I don't know whether we do it with a credit card number, a driver's license or passport, but I think making people responsible would raise the level of discourse."

The Chinese government is demanding that US-owned hotels there filter Internet service during the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing, US Senator Sam Brownback has alleged.

"This is an insult to the spirit of the games and an affront to American businesses," he said. "I call on China to immediately rescind this demand."

"We would hope that people in China would be able to have access to all forms of information that are out there, including those that are available online, and that would apply to those who are full-time residents of China as well as those who might be visiting for the Olympics."

US entertainment industry interests have been pushing for quite some time to get stronger copyright laws in Canada, despite plenty of questions about why they're needed.

Knopf was going to do a presentation explaining why Canadian copyright law is already stronger and better than US copyright law, and why the US ought to be copying Canada's law, rather than the other way around. However, Knopf believes that PPF was pressured to remove him from the schedule, including removing him from a panel where he planned to debate these issues with a registered lobbyist of the entertainment industry.

A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world's largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word "abortion," concealing nearly 25,000 search results.

Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland.

On Thursday, a search on "abortion" was producing only the message "No records found by latest query."

"We recently made all abortion terms stop words," Dickson wrote in a note to Gloria Won, the UCSF medical center librarian making the inquiry. "As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now."