Yahoo says Beijing likely blocking photo site
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Flickr.com, one of the world&#39;s most  popular online photo-sharing sites and owned by Yahoo Inc.  , is likely being blocked by the Chinese government,  Yahoo&#39;s Hong Kong unit said on Tuesday.
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A Beijing software group is suing Yahoo! China in an attempt to stop the company secretly foisting their programmes on to computer users, state press have said.
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Some long-time users of the popular photo sharing site Flickr are up in arms over a policy that requires all users to merge their accounts with a Yahoo ID by March 15 or risk losing access to the site.
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Blog: Reports start to surface about server downage across several Yahoo properties; is the summer heat to blame?
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A Chinese city planned to censor online  chatroom exchanges and ban anonymous postings after residents  used the Internet to organize a mass protest against a chemical  plant, Chinese media reported on Friday.
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BEIJING, Dec. 25 -- Outraged that his Internet posting about dogs had been banned, Chen Yuhua wrote to the mayor of Beijing. No answer. He wrote to the city council. Still no answer. When all else failed, he consulted a lawyer, studied China's civil code and marched into court with a lawsuit.
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Yahoo is accused of censorship  on photo site Flickr in a row over an online gallery selling pictures.
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Tiananmen anniversary photos apparently prompted government to restrict access to sharing site, Yahoo says.
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo wants a California court to dismissÂ a lawsuit brought against the company by jailed Chinese dissidents. In a filing Monday, Yahoo told the court that the lawsuit, which seeks to hold Yahoo accountable for the imprisonment and torture of the plaintiffs, should be tossed out various reasons, among which being that the U.S. justice system is the wrong venue for the case. "This is a lawsuit by citizens of China imprisoned for using the internet in China to express political views in violation of China law. It is a political case challenging the laws and actions of the Chinese government. It has no place in the American courts," the 51-page filing reads. After stating that Yahoo "deeply sympathizes with the plaintiffs and their families and does not condone the suppression of their rights and liberty by their government," the company states that it and its Chinese subsidiaries must comply with the laws of China. "Yahoo has no control over the sovereign government of the People's Republic of China, the laws it passes, and the manner in which it enforces its laws," reads the filing. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the California Northern District in April, alleges that Yahoo and Yahoo Hong Kong violated a series of U.S. and international laws by providing information to the Chinese government that led to the plaintiffs' arrest and torture. Yahoo's arguments for dismissal are flawed, said attorney Morton Sklar, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based World Organization for Human Rights USA, which represents the plaintiffs, including imprisoned journalists Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning. Yahoo is trying to blame China's government and arguing that Yahoo can't be held responsible for what has happened, Sklar said. "It was Yahoo that put the torture device in the hands of the government of China by giving the Internet identification information to the Chinese officials," Sklar said. "If they hadn't done that, there couldn't have been any torture abuses." While it's true that any U.S. corporation doing business in a foreign country has to comply with that country's laws, the corporation also has to comply with U.S. laws and international legal standards, Sklar said. "That's what Yahoo overlooked," he said. This case is but one of a series of human rights and free speech controversies in which U.S. Internet companies like Yahoo, Google, and MicrosoftÂ find themselves in regarding their operations in China. In addition to human rights groups and press watchdog organizations, these Internet companies have been criticized by U.S. lawmakers, by some of their own investors and by individuals. While Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and others in their position argue they need to comply with local laws, they also say that real progress on Internet issues of privacy, censorship, and human rights require government-to-government agreements supported by collaboration with industry players and human-rights organizations and leading to global standards of operation. Asked for comment about its dismissal request, a Yahoo spokeswoman said that while Yahoo believes "deeply" in human rights and "strongly" supports freedom of expression and privacy worldwide, it believes the case has no legal merits. "This is a political and diplomatic issue, not a legal one," she wrote. "The real issue here is the plaintiffs' outrage at the behavior and laws of the Chinese government. The U.S. court system is not the forum for addressing these political concerns." In its filing Monday, Yahoo outlines several reasons for the dismissal of the case. It argues that litigating the case "risks violating international law principles of sovereignty, interfering with U.S. foreign policy, and jeopardizing the U.S. law enforcement interests." Yahoo also argues that the plaintiffs have failed to state a claim under the Alien Tort Statute, the Torture Victim Protection Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), and the California laws on which they rely. Moreover, the plaintiffs' claims contravene federal, California, and international law, which protect defendants from civil liability for communicating with law enforcement officials regarding investigations, according to Yahoo. In their amended complaint, filed July 30, the plaintiffs allege Yahoo and Yahoo Hong Kong violated a series of U.S. and international laws, including torture, arbitrary arrest, prolonged detention, and forced labor as a violation of the international Alien Tort Statute and the Torture Victim Protection Act. They also allege violation of the California Business and Professional Code for unfair business practices and violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act for unlawful access to stored communications. The plaintiffs seek, among other things, awards of a variety of damages; declaration that defendants violated international law; a requirement that defendants actively help to secure the release of detained plaintiffs; and an injunction barring the defendants from "any further disclosures of user information" to prevent future abuses. The complaint states that Wang Xiaoning was arrested and unlawfully and arbitrarily detained and prosecuted for publishing and circulating through the Internet electronic journals and articles that supported democratic reform in China and for communicating with other democracy advocates. "He is serving a ten-year sentence at Beijing Municipal No. 2 Prison, a forced labor prison for political prisoners, under severe conditions of prolonged confinement that are highly abusive in nature. He has served almost four years of his ten-year sentence, and has been imprisoned for almost five years," the complaint reads. Meanwhile, Shi Tao was arrested and unlawfully and arbitrarily detained and prosecuted for e-mailing messages, notes, and journalistic dispatches describing government restrictions on journalists imposed in connection with the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on democracy advocates, according to the complaint. "He currently is serving the third year of a 10-year sentence for 'divulging state secrets abroad' at Chishan Prison of Hunan Province, a high-security prison with a documented system of forced labor and torture, and has been in detention for almost four years," the complaint reads. Their arrests and detainment of these two Chinese citizens were "inflicted upon" them as a result of Yahoo and Yahoo Hong Kong's actions to aid and abet Chinese government officials "in committing these major human rights abuses," the complaint reads. The judge will hold a hearing on Yahoo's dismissal request on November 1st at 2 p.m. Pacific Time.
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Flickr.com, one of the world&#39;s most  popular online photo-sharing sites and owned by Yahoo Inc., is  likely being blocked by the Chinese government, Yahoo&#39;s Hong  Kong unit said on Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Wikimedia Foundation's English-language site was accessible in China again on Friday, although its simplified Chinese-language site remained blocked. China censors Internet content that it finds objectionable, usually political material that relating to Taiwan or Tibetan independence, the Falun Gong cult, and occasionally pornography. Although the Web sites of most Western news outlets are available, the British Broadcasting Corp.'s news site remains a noteworthy exception. The English Wikipedia site has been available for various periods over the last three years, and has kept a record of those periods on its site. "Wikipedia is such a popular Web site that almost every foreigner who visits China may try to visit Wikipedia pages. I believe someone at [the Ministry of Information Industry] or another government ministry realized what bad PR a Wikipedia block produces," said Jeremy Goldkorn, editor of Danwei.org, a Beijing-based media and Internet site. "Once they had figured out the elegant solution of keeping the Chinese version blocked, and filtering out English Wikipedia pages about Tibet and other 'sensitive' subjects, they were happy to let us access the rest of Wikipedia," Goldkorn said. While English Wikipedia was unblocked, Yahoo Flickr photo service remained accessible from China. However, most photos on the site were blocked and could not be viewed by Chinese users.
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Music industry giants including Warner  Music Group Corp. are suing Yahoo! China for alleged copyright  infringement by providing links to unlicensed music, trade  organization IFPI said on Wednesday.
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China is debating whether to relax control of the Internet during the Olympics, allowing access to banned websites such as the BBC, a spokeswoman for the organising committee said Tuesday.
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China is blocking access to the Web site Google News, media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said on Tuesday, and accused the US-based company of being complicit by filtering its Chinese-language site.
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Defending its actions in disclosing the identities of Chinese dissidents, Yahoo on Monday said it acted with Chinese law in doing so. The company has been roundly criticized for its involvement in several jailings.
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A Beijing appeals court upheld a ruling against Yahoo China over its search engineâs links to outside Web sites that carried illegally copied music.
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo suffered availability problems on Friday that affected its home page as well as some of its other Web sites and services for a sustained period of time. Yahoo, which has some of the most popular sites and online services worldwide, first experienced problems on its home page at around 5:50 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time, said Dan Berkowitz, senior communications director at Keynote Systems, a global provider of mobile and Internet test and measurement services. Yahoo.com's operations began getting back to normal at around 7:15 a.m., said Berkowitz. At its worst point, Yahoo.com's availability dropped to around 60 percent, meaning that 4 out of 10 visitors couldn't access the page, he said, citing data collected from Keynote's global network of monitoring computers, which check the availability of the world's most popular sites. Yahoo didn't reply to requests for comments about the problems. NetCraft also detected the problems, saying in a short note that the intensity of the performance issues varied among geographical areas and also among Yahoo services. "The Yahoo.com home page was inaccessible for several hours from our London monitoring station and responded more slowly than usual from several locations in the U.S. Yahoo Search appears to have experienced lengthier availability problems than the home page and other Yahoo services," NetCraft reported. A variety of bloggers also reported trouble Friday morning accessing other Yahoo services like Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail as well as other Yahoo sites like the Flickr photo sharing site and the news aggregation site Yahoo News. Ideally, Yahoo and other major Internet players would never face Web site outages, but they all do, said industry analyst Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence. The key is to make sure that significant availability problems happen infrequently. Otherwise, users and advertisers get worried and upset, he said. Yahoo's problems on Friday probably affected fewer users than usual because many people are taking time off in the U.S. and are away from their computers due to the July 4th Independence Day holiday, Berkowitz said.