internet diplomacy

It is the most popular subject on China's Internet that no one is allowed to talk about. After overseas media reported the death of former president Jiang Zemin, web-savvy Internet users in China are finding creative ways to jump the Great Firewall, the cloak of Internet security authorities use to disrupt or halt access to things deemed too sensitive for the Internet.

Globally, Yoani Sánchez’s blog, is available in a score of languages and gets up to 14 million visits a month. Within Cuba, though, the dictatorship of Fidel and Raúl Castro has from the start sought to silence her and prevent other Cubans from reading what she calls her “little vignettes of reality.”

Chinese Internet company Baidu says it has reached an agreement with Microsoft to provide English-language results generated by the U.S. software company's Bing search engine. The agreement, announced Monday, will automatically direct English search requests to Bing and its results will be displayed in pages in Baidu's search engine.

The project informally called "Internet in a Suitcase," is being developed by a team of experts at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group, with funding from the U.S. State Department. It be used to set up a shadow Internet anywhere you like -- say, in a repressive country where the government shuts down communication avenues in times of crisis.

Pope Benedict XVI has tweeted for the first time, announcing the launch of a Vatican news information portal. Benedict’s tweet on Tuesday read: “Dear Friends, I just launched News.va Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ! With my prayers and blessings, Benedictus XVI”.

This week’s NexGen IT Entrepreneurs Boot Camp is a five-day training event in Cairo to help budding Internet technology businesses. It is part of a broader American initiative to help develop Egypt's economy, particularly in the wake of the Feb. 11 revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak.

The Netherlands... became the first EU member state to enshrine in law the concept of net neutrality, the idea that there should be no hierarchy of information or services in the internet.Net neutrality is one of the hottest global regulatory issues around...

Social media, including Twitter, Facebook, Diggit, live video, texting, bloggers, websites, My Space, and other outlets, now focus on the power of mass protests to rally together to topple governments and spread messages to fellow countrymen, and ultimately tell their story to the rest of the world.

Pages