Chinese students and intellectuals are expressing outrage at Beijing's decision to prohibit access to Wikipedia, the fast-growing on-line encyclopedia that has become a basic resource for many in China.

Wikipedia, which offers more than 2.2 million articles in 100 languages, has emerged as an important source of scholarly knowledge in China and many other countries. But its stubborn neutrality and independence on political issues such as Tibet and Taiwan has repeatedly drawn the wrath of the Communist authorities.

The latest blocking of the website, the third shutdown of the site in China in the past two years, has now continued for more than 10 weeks without any explanation and without any indication whether the ban is temporary or permanent.

Chinese authorities twice blocked the Wikipedia website for several weeks in 2004, apparently because it included articles on banned subjects such as the Taiwanese independence movement, the Tibetan autonomy issue and the Tiananmen Square student protests that were crushed by the Chinese military in 1989.

A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called "The Little Red Book."

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a "watch list," and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.

"Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that's what triggered the visit, as I understand it."

Dr. Williams said in his research, he regularly contacts people in Afghanistan, Chechnya and other Muslim hot spots, and suspects that some of his calls are monitored.

"My instinct is that there is a lot more monitoring than we think," he said.

Founder and co-ordinator of Freenet, Ian Clarke says: "Our goal was to provide a system whereby people could share information over the internet without revealing their identity and without permitting any form of government censorship."

Freenet encourages anonymous uploading of any material. Some users of the English version believe it is so secure they have used it to confess to crimes they have committed, or to their interest in paedophilia.

The storage is dynamic, with files automatically moved between computers on the network or duplicated. This adds to the difficulty of determining who might be storing what.

Even if a user's computer is seized, it can be impossible for experts to determine what the owner was doing on Freenet.

"You are giving over part of your computer, it will be in encrypted form, you will not know what you are carrying, but some of it is going to be seriously unpleasant. Are you happy with that?"

Internet giant Yahoo has been accused of supplying information to China which led to the jailing of a journalist for "divulging state secrets".

Reporters Without Borders said Yahoo's Hong Kong arm helped China link Shi Tao's e-mail account and computer to a message containing the information.

Shi Tao, 37, worked for the Contemporary Business News in Hunan province, before he was arrested and sentenced in April to 10 years in prison.

According to a translation of his conviction, reproduced by Reporters Without Borders, he was found guilty of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message.

"We already knew that Yahoo! collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese regime in questions of censorship, and now we know it is a Chinese police informant as well," Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

The companies say they have to abide by local regulations, and point out that since China is set to be the world's biggest internet market, they cannot ignore it.

Michael Lynn made some well reported comments about a Cisco vulnerability at a recent Black Hat conference. His presentation was being shown at sites like www.infowarrior.org.

Infowarrior took down the presentation over the weekend after getting a nasty letter from ISS. The letter said that not only was Lynn being sued by Cisco and ISS, the two had also called in Inspector Knacker of the Yard to investigate alleged industrial espionage by Lynn.

Copies of the 1.9MB PDF file have popped up on a number of websites, after Cisco first pressured Lynn's former company Internet Security Systems (ISS) into removing the presentation from the line-up at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

One of the things that is really strange about this, is that people who have seen the presentation say that Lynn demonstrated how the flaw could be exploited but obscured much of the technical details that an attacker would need to know to pull it off.

The German rights organisation for composers, lyricist and publishers, GEMA, has asked 42 access providers to poison their DNS servers in order to block sites that provide links to eDonkey files. In short, DNS poisoning obstructs the process of converting a URL to a numeric IP address. The GEMA apparently expects the access providers to configure their DNS servers so that "inquiries by end-users are not passed to the correct server, but to an invalid or another pre-defined side." The GEMA also demands that the providers sign a testimony,with which they commit themselves to ensure full blockage under a contractual penalty of 100.000 euro if any of their customers can still reach the targeted site after July 25th.

The providers in question are still doing their legal evaluations of the request, or have said right out not to comply, because the GEMA is not the kind of judicial instance that can set these kinds of demands. They're considering to bring GEMA's actions to court, in order to see if GEMA has any standing.

For the second time within the past year, an Indymedia server has been siezed in the United Kingdom. This time it is the Bristol Indymedia server (currently redirected to the United Kollectives IMC site); this follows on from the Ahimsa siezure last October. The current siezure was carried out using a search warrant by the UK police at approximately 16:30GMT on June 27th, 2005. This was despite being warned by lawyers "that this server was considered an item of journalistic equipment and so subject to special provision under the law" (press release). Bristol Indymedia is currently being supported by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), Liberty and Privacy International. Other media organisations have declared their support.

Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words "democracy" and "freedom" from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing's political censors.

Users of the joint-venture portal, formally launched last month, have been blocked from using a range of potentially sensitive words to label personal websites they create using its free online blog service, MSN Spaces.

Attempts to input words in Chinese such as "democracy" prompted an error message from the site: "This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech from this item." Other phrases banned included the Chinese for "demonstration", "democratic movement" and "Taiwan independence".

MSN on Friday declined to comment directly on the ban on sensitive words, but its China joint venture said users of MSN Spaces were required to accept the service's code of conduct. "MSN abides by the laws and regulations of each country in which it operates," the joint venture said. The MSN Spaces code of conduct forbids the posting of content that "violates any local and national laws".

But while China's ruling Communist Party deals harshly with political dissenters, there is no Chinese law that bars the mere use of words such as democracy.

China soon will close unregistered domestic Web sites and blogs as the government tightens its grip on the Internet, a media watchdog said.

Beijing announced in March that every China-based Web site now had to register and provide complete information on its organizers by June 30 or face being declared illegal, the Paris-based media-advocacy group Reporters Without Borders (RWB) said in a statement released on Tuesday.

"The authorities also hope to push the most outspoken online sites to migrate abroad, where they will become inaccessible to those inside China because of the Chinese filtering systems," RWB said.

China is the world's second-largest Internet market, with about 100 million users. That number is growing.

The Bush administration asked a federal appeals court Friday to restore its ability to compel Internet service providers to turn over information about their customers or subscribers as part of its fight against terrorism.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero of New York last year blocked the government from conducting secret searches of communications records, saying the law that authorized them wrongly barred legal challenges and imposed a gag order on affected businesses.

The administration said the judge's ruling was off the mark because the company did mount a legal challenge to the demand for records. "Yet in this very case, the recipient of the national security letter did precisely what the NSLs supposedly prevent recipients from doing," the filing said.

But ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer said the law does not contain a provision to challenge the FBI's demand for documents. The ACLU and the firm filed the lawsuit to challenge the law's constitutionality on the grounds that it doesn't contain such a provision, he said.