Tag archive: Cuba

According to Reuters, there will soon be a 1,000 mile, undersea fiber-optic cable connecting Cuba and socialist ally Venezuela. The new technology will eventually help Cuba increase its incredibly slow Internet connection. According to the country, its inferior technology and Internet service is due to the US trade embargo that has been upheld for decades. Leftist group ALBA (founded by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez) funded the $70 million… Read More

The United States Treasury Department has amended its commerce regulations granting general licenses to U.S. companies to export Internet-based communications services—like instant messaging, social networking, and email—to Iran, Cuba, and the Sudan. The move is intended to boost the free flow of information in those historically repressive countries, with the idea that improving citizens' ability to communicate with the… Read More

Myanmar – the country formerly known as Burma – has been judged the most restrictive country for bloggers, according to a new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists. The junta ruling Myanmar blocked all Internet access for a while during uprisings in 2007. Coming second on the list is Iran, where blogger Omid Mir Sayafi died in Tehran's Evin jail. He’d allegedly insulted the country’s leader,… Read More

Cuba is definitely changing. A few weeks ago President Raul Castro allowed Cubans to legally own mobile phones. Now the ban on them owning home computers has been lifted, slowly bringing Cuba intothe modern age.   The emphasis is definitely on slowly, however. With computers selling there for $800 when most people make $20 a month, they’re not likely to be lining up five deep tomake purchases. But, according to a BBC report, people… Read More

Cuba’s new President, Raul Castro, has been making some changes, but one of the biggest came quietly last week. He altered the rules, and now Cubans can legally own cell phones through theisland’s telecom monopoly ETECSA.   The service is expected to be offered imminently.   Some Cubans do already own and use cell phones, butthey’re a small minority, since they’ve usually had to go carefully through foreigners… Read More

Fidel Castro only stepped down as Cuba's president last month after nearly 50 years as the island nation's leader, but one major change is already on the way for Cuban citizens: Reuters is reporting the country is getting set to allow unrestricted sales of DVD players and computers. Currently, only businesses and foreigners are allowed to purchase computers in Cuba, and until last year DVD players were actually seized at Cuban… Read More

China, North Korea, Burma…they’re places where protest has been crushed. But yesterday people demonstrated against Net censorship in virtual locations from those countries.  Organized by the group Reporters Without Borders, the first Online Free Expression Day invited people to create avatars and take part in demonstrations in virtuallocations where protest would not be allowed in the real world.   In a statement RWB said,… Read More

With a few exceptions, American citizens aren’t allowed to go to Cuba. Steve Marshall, a British travel agent who operates tourism sites out of the Spanish-owned Canary Islands, knows that. Heclaims he doesn’t do business with Americans wanting to travel to Cuba because of that ban. So he’s baffled as to why the US Treasury blacklisted 80of his sites in October and ordered domain name registrar eNom to close his sites and deny… Read More

Reporters Without Frontiers have released their Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2007, and it highlights not only the problems with press freedom for traditional journalists around the globe, but also the threat to bloggers.   A number of countries have seen their rankings fall because of the way they’ve restricted or violated the freedom of bloggers. Several countries, like Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Egypt, have arrested bloggers… Read More

Travelocity.com has become the first online travel company to be hit with a fine for booking trips from the U.S. to Cuba.   The company had paid$182,750 to settle a complaint from the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control. Travelocity.com is said to have violated the 45-year-oldprohibition on travel between the U.S. and Cuba nearly 1,500 times between January 1998 and April 2004.   It is possible to receive… Read More

A year-long study by the OpenNet Initiative, detailed at a conference in Oxford, England, examined the practices of 41 countries to learn about online government surveillance and censorship. The results? Where five years ago only a handful of states were filtering Internet content, the study found 25 of the countries it examined were engaged in state-mandated filtering and censorship of online content, and the filtering is becoming more… Read More

With all the recent bruhaha in the U.S. about corporate employees being disciplined or pink-slipped over personal blog entries which reveal trade secrets or say unflattering things about their employers, it's easy to forget that, in many parts of the world, the consequences of posting unpopular or unsanctioned material online can be much higher. To that end, Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans Frontières, known by its… Read More