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Several Radio Free Europe websites were under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in the past week. The attacks started on 26 April 2008, the 22nd anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, primary targeted at the Belarus Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) service which was offering live coverage of a rally of protest organized in Minsk against the plight of uncompensated victims and a government decision to build a new nuclear plant.

Martins Zvaners, RFE spokesman, thinks that was the largest attack ever experienced by RFE. At its peak, the DDoS attack was sending more than 50000 requests to the RFE sites, flooding its servers' capacity and throwing them

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The Russian prosecutor's office wants to extend the anti-extremism laws to the Internet, proposing an amendment to the rules that presently govern printed media on the basis of which newspapers considered by the court to have published extremist material can be shut down.

In terms of the new proposal, which began circulating in the State Duma's Security Committee on 10 April 2008, any kind of material considered extremist or website deemed to have hosted extremist material should be blocked by ISPs. If found guilty of repeatedly hosting extremist materials, the website will be shut down. A list of extremist Internet-based materials and sites must be regularly made available and the ISPs will be bound to

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The European Ministers of Justice and Internal Affairs have agreed to make publishing bomb-making instructions on the Internet a crime. The French authorities are discussing making the publication on the Internet of any alleged pro-anorexia information a crime.

Justice and interior ministers from the EU member states backed a proposal from Commissioner Frattini to harmonise the normative acts that will make the "public provocation to commit a terrorist offence, recruitment, and training for terrorism" a crime. According to the statements of the EU officials publishing these acts on the Internet completed the European legislation in this domain. They described the Internet as "a virtual

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U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White reversed his initial decision of shutting down the wikileaks.org domain of Wikileaks, a website where whistleblowers can untraceably leak documents.

Wikileaks, launched in early 2007, has anonymously posted documents revealing delicate subjects such as the infiltration of agents of the Stasi, the former East German secret police, into the commission investigating their organization or massive corruption in Kenya.

The Swiss bank Julius Baer sued Wikileaks, at the beginning of February 2008, in relation to documents posted to the site that were showing corruption in the bank's Cayman Islands branch allegedly used by bank clients to launder money, hide assets and evade taxes. The Bank had obtained

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As of 1 January 2007 a law took effect in Finland allowing the Police to maintain a secret blacklist of child porn sites and distribute it to ISPs so that these may block access to those sites. Use of the lists is ostensibly voluntary to ISPs, but there have been rather strong hints of making it mandatory if not adopted otherwise. After a slow start, Police actually started distributing the list late last year and several ISPs have began using them.

In February 2008, the police added the site lapsiporno.info to the blacklist. Despite the name (Lapsiporno means "child porn" in Finnish), the website contains no child or any other kind of porn, but criticism of censorship and a partial collection of addresses from the officially secret

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French Internal Affairs Minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, announced on 14 February 2008 new measures to fight against cybercrime, including extending the websites blacklist and pushing for computer online investigations, without the permission of the country of the hosting company.

The Minister visited the Cybercrime Brigade that is located in Nanntere and announced a new "best practices chart" with the operators in order to block websites. According to the statements, the Norwegian model was taken into consideration, meaning the creation of a list with websites not only with child pornography information, but also the ones with information on making explosives or chemical weapons, terrorist propaganda and racial hate speech.

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A public workshop held in Ukraine on 12 December 2007 was aimed to discuss the issues regarding the regulation of the new online media. The workshop was organised by Internews Ukraine together with the Council of Europe and the National Commission on Freedom of Speech and Development of the Information Sphere under the President of Ukraine.

Besides the Ukrainian participants - from online and offline media - from Kiev and other important cities in Ukraine, the Council of Europe invited two experts - Thomas Schneider, Chairman of the Council of Europe Group of Specialists on Human Rights in the Information Society and Bogdan Manolea from EDRi as observer in the same Group mentioned above.

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As the Internet use in Russia increases spectacularly, having tripled in the last three years, Putin' governance concentrates its efforts on getting control over the Russian Internet after having already gained much control over the traditional mass media.

Putin's allies and supporters have created blogs and news sources to flood the Internet with messages favourable to the present political power.

During a national broadcast live on TV and Radio in October 2007, Putin tackled the issue of Internet censorship. "Naturally, in this sphere, as in other spheres, we should be thinking about adhering to Russian laws, about making sure that child pornography is not distributed, that financial crimes