How do we ensure access to the internet is a human right enjoyed by everyone? This is one of the critical questions asked by an annual publication that highlights the importance of people's access to information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure. Global Information Society Watch 2008 (or GISWatch), published in print and online by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), the Third World Institute (ITeM), and Dutch development organisation Hivos, collects the perspectives of ICT academics, analysts, activists and civil society organisations from across the globe in over 50 reports.
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"No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last." Journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge, who was murdered in Sri Lanka on January 8, 2009, wrote this for his last editorial published in The Sunday Leader on January 11.
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In assessing cyber crime legislation, policy makers and gender and development advocates must carefully consider the implications for privacy and information security. As ICT blur the lines between personal and public, the nature of the internet and cyber crime - including how they affect human rights and social justice - must be questioned.
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According to the Graz University of Technology research, Google as search engine is dominating and that on its own is dangerous, "but could possibly be accepted as 'there is no real wayout', although this is not true, either. However, in conjunction with the fact that Google is operating many other services, and probably silently cooperating with still further players, this is unacceptable".
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Gangs and corrupt officials in Latin America. Tyrants in the Middle East and Asia. Wars in Africa. Death threats and court cases in Europe and Central Asia. These are the most serious threats to free expression, says the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) in its half-year press freedom review. The report is a grim picture of the attacks, imprisonment and violence faced by journalists in many countries.
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In 2005, a group of scholars and activists, mostly from the global South, created the Copy/South Research Group to analyse, criticise, and confront the oppressive nature of current global copyright regimes, such as those defended by the World Intellectual Property Organisation, and similar ones around the globe.
The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) is of the view that the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has fulfilled its core mandate in terms of paragraph 72 of the Tunis Agenda on the Information Society to constitute a space for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue on internet governance.
The Forum will offer participants a series of highest level panels addressing critical issues to the WSIS implementation and follow-up in multi-stakeholder set-ups.
About 120 communication experts, meeting in Accra, have endorsed a blend of modern information and communication technologies with traditional and other alternative media forms to disseminate information for development in the globalised world.
