Tag: free speech

Is VPN Legal in Your Country?

TheBestVPN.com published a study of whether or not VPNs are legal in 196 countries around the world.  There is a summary for each, and some links to details of the research.

VPNs are legal, generally.

It depends largely on the country you’re physically sitting in while using a VPN. But even then, their laws and restrictions are often opaque.  What’s legal vs. illegal is not always clear.  Some activities, while frowned upon, are still shrouded in grey area.  In this research we fact-checked 196 countries laws and their opinions on VPNs.

VPNs are illegal in: China, Turkey, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Belarus, Oman.

VPNs are some-what illegal in: Iran, North-Korea, Turkmenistan.

P.S.: If you can’t access the links above, VPN is probably illegal (or at least blocked) in your country or region.

Online censorship ranked by country

vpnMentor blog runs a post with a lengthy infographic ranking online censorship in different countries.  There’s plenty of interesting data regarding torrents, social media, political media, pornography, and other types of online censorship targets.

Paphos court orders Facebook to remove offensive comments

facebook

Cyprus News reports that :

The Paphos District Court has issued an injunction against social media giant Facebook, ordering the company to remove a number of offensive comments posted on a local business profile, aimed at a local man.

The comments, posted on February 4, accuse the man of criminal activities. The original post was still on Facebook on Wednesday morning.  It has over 1,000 shares.

Charalambos Savvides of the Ch. P. Savvides & Associates LLC law firm, which handled the case, told the Cyprus Mail that Facebook was not only required to remove the comments but also take steps to ensure that future related comments were taken down immediately.

In-Cyprus has a few more details:

The case concerns comments on Facebook made against a bar owner from Paphos who became the target of a hate campaign which attracted thousands of users who shared and liked the page. The man in question was, according to those who had got the ball rolling on popular social media site, committing various crimes around the town and especially against competing bars.

He was also accused of being a police informant that was getting special protection in the town despite his ‘known illegal activities’.

The man has denied all the allegations against him.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Project Shield – a DDoS protection layer from Google

Project Shield is not a mainstream service yet, just an idea that Google is trying out, but still, I think it’s worth a mention.

Project Shield is an initiative launched by Google Ideas to use Google’s own Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack mitigation technology to protect free expression online. The service allows other websites to serve their content through Google’s infrastructure without having to move their hosting location.

There is also a video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmTvv8ISwPA]