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Deutsch: Frankreich will online-Glücksspielseiten filtern

From 7 till 9 October 2009, the French National Assembly will discuss a draft law on opening the competition and regulation of online gambling sector. The text foresees the creation of a similar authority to that of HADOPI, called ARJEL that would order the filtering of the gambling sites considered to operate illegally.

Although in a first version of the draft law ARJEL was referring to a judge for the blocking of the site, now, in order to expedite the procedure, the present text gives the authority the direct right to impose filtering of websites to ISPs.

ARJEL is meant to operate in a similar way to HADOPI.

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Deutsch: Die Türkei sperrt tausende ausländische Webseiten

Following the entering into force in November 2007 of the Turkish Law No. 5651 entitled Regulation of Publications on the Internet and Suppression of Crimes Committed by means of Such Publication, a large number of websites have been blocked in Turkey.

According to Dr. Yaman Akdeniz, Founder and Director of Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties (UK), there are at present more than 6000 websites blocked in Turkey including known sites such as YouTube, WordPress, GoogleGroups and Sites, DailyMotion and others.

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Deutsch: ISPs werden aufgefordert, Kinderpornografieseiten im Internet zu sperr...

In Germany, based on the initiative of the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ), the government has had discussions for several months now on how to block child pornography sites hosted on servers outside of the country.

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Deutsch: Europäisches Parlament fordert mehr Transparenz bei ACTA

The European Parliament has included in the Draft Regulation regarding public access to the European Parliament, Council and Commission documents a reference asking for more transparency in the current negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)

A recital in the text adopted by the European Parliament says: "In accordance with Article 255(1) of the EC Treaty, the Commission should immediately make all documents related to the ongoing international negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) publicly available."

The new regulation considers that the basic principle of the new

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Montenegro's office in charge with the government Internet infrastructure decided to ban access to several social networking or video sharing websites, such as YouTube or Facebook. The public servants were announced by a statement sent at the end of December 2008 by the office to all civil servants.

Now, the civil servants trying to access those website will receive an access denied message.

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While some European countries block the illegal content (mostly child pornography websites), other are considering implementing a similar measure through a hidden list. However the past month has shown, one more time if necessary, that usually the list of any blocked content will leak and thus the allegedly blocked content will become widely available.

Belgium is one of the new countries considering such a list. The Minister of Enterprise and Administrative Reform, Vincent Van Quickenborne, want to ban child pornography on the Internet through a protocol between ISPs and the Government.

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The findings of the World e-Parliament Report 2008 achieved by UNDESA and the Inter-Parliamentary Union on the use of information and communication technologies within 105 parliament assemblies from all over the world were presented on 25 November 2008, at the second high-level meeting of the Board of the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament.

The Report is the first one of this kind and was meant to assess the level to which information and communication technologies are used by parliaments within their activities.

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For the forth time in two years, on 20 November 2008, the Turkish authorities blocked access to YouTube asserting that certain content posted on the site was disrespectful to Kemal Mustafa Atatürk, the Turkish Republic's founder, or supported the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Turkey is the only country in the world banning YouTube.

"We have said it before and we say it again now - blocking access to YouTube is wrong. It has been blocked since 5 May, as a result of an earlier court order, and the obstinacy shown by the authorities is unacceptable.