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CYBER WARS
China blocks access to Google e-mail service
by Staff Writers
Beijing (AFP) Dec 29, 2014


Twitter back online after limited blackout
Washington (AFP) Dec 29, 2014 - Twitter was back online Monday following a partial outage which the company said was due to a bug.

"Some users were unable to sign in to Twitter. This issue was due to a bug in our front end code, which has been patched," the California-based company posted from the US West Coast late Sunday.

Users reported problems on the Twitter application for Android and iPhone smartphones, while tweets on the computer application TweetDeck were showing up as having been posted a year ago.

"We apologize for any inconvenience," Twitter said of the irregularities, which occurred from 4:00 pm to 9:25 pm in the California time zone (0000 GMT to 0525 GMT Monday).

"Something is technically wrong," the microblogging service's welcome page had said during the blockage. "Thanks for noticing-we're going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon."

Twitter claimed 284 million active users at the end of September.

The partial outage comes approximately a month after Sony Pictures was hit by a sophisticated hacking attack that stole massive amounts of data from its servers.

The US has blamed North Korea for the episode, with the reclusive state furious at the release of Sony film "The Interview," which parodies leader Kim Jong-Un.

China has blocked the last remaining way to access Google's popular e-mail service, experts said Monday, as authorities work to establish "Internet sovereignty" by controlling what enters the country via the web.

Gmail, the world's biggest e-mail service, has been largely inaccessible from within China since the run-up to the 25th anniversary in June of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.

But users could still access the service by using third-party mail applications, rather than the webpage.

"But they have blocked those ways of accessing," said Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of Danwei, a Beijing-based firm that tracks Chinese media and the Internet.

"I think this is pretty confirmed. It is now already four, five days, so this is real," he said.

Analysts say China operates the world's most extensive and sophisticated Internet censorship system and routinely blocks foreign websites.

"There is an increasingly aggressive attitude towards what they (Beijing) call 'Internet sovereignty' and they are confident about talking about Internet censorship in positive terms," Goldkorn added.

"The past two years have seen a consistent tightening of all kinds of censorship on the Internet and media."

A graph showing Internet traffic from China accessing Gmail dropped sharply on Friday, according to Google's Transparency Report, and has not returned to normal levels.

"We've checked and there's nothing wrong on our end," a Singapore-based spokesman for Google told AFP.

Internet users in China were irate Monday, with many spewing vitriol on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging service.

"The reason for blocking of Gmail domestically is political problems... it reflects the grim situation facing the political environment," one user said.

Another commentator fumed, "Protest the government blocking Gmail! Demand its restoration!"

China tightly controls the Internet, and only a fraction of its online population of 632 million can circumvent government restrictions.

Controls include the blocking of foreign websites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube using a system known as the "Great Firewall", as well as routinely deleting content the ruling Communist Party deems offensive.


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CYBER WARS
N. Korea suffers another Internet shutdown: Xinhua
Beijing (AFP) Dec 27, 2014
North Korea suffered an Internet shutdown for at least two hours on Saturday, Chinese state-media and cyber experts said, after Pyongyang blamed Washington for an online blackout earlier this week. "At Pyongyang time 7:30 pm (1030 GMT) North Korea's Internet and mobile 3G network came to a standstill, and had not returned to normal as of 9:30 pm," Xinhua news agency reported. Xinhua's re ... read more


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