Global online censorship rising fast

Web censorship by governments for political, social or "national security" reasons is increasing, according to a global survey by the OpenNet Initiative, reports ITnews.

John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, and clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School, believes the survey shows online censorship is growing around the world.

"Some regulation is to be expected as the medium matures, but filtering and surveillance can seriously erode civil liberties and privacy, and stifle global communications," he said.

Microsoft's claims that open source technologies infringe on 235 of its patents irked some IT managers last week, while others said they viewed the patent offensive as nothing more than a standard corporate business tactic, says Computerworld.

None of the half-dozen IT executives who were interviewed about Microsoft's infringement assertions plan to change their open source adoption strategies, at least not unless and until there's a good reason for them to do so.

Among the users in the irked camp was Darryl Lemecha, CIO at data aggregator ChoicePoint. The patent claims sounded like "more sabre-rattling on Microsoft's part," Lemecha said via e-mail.

Some users have been unable to use Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) after installing Microsoft's latest patch fixing six bugs that was issued earlier this month, reports TechTree.

The Microsoft security team has acknowledged the problem, and has published some temporary fixes for it.

In a blog posting, Christopher Budd, program manager, Microsoft Security Response Team, said the problem is that, after applying the update, users may see a "File Download - Security Warning" dialogue box raised when starting IE. After they close the dialogue box, they end up not being able to start IE.