How to identify a fake Facebook profile. Not.

Sri Lanka Watch reports that, According to intelligence reports, a massive fake facebook scam is underway by certain individuals to collect personal photos and information of people for commercial and other purposes. This is the latest Internet scam that is common in Colombo and Kandy areas. Sri Lanka Watch, in a remarkable display of sheer […]

The operator of the LTTE’s computer and database revealed

Palitha Kohona, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sri Lanka had this to say in a recent interview about the LTTE’s ICT infrastructure published in Himal, Himal: If there were entire villages that had nothing to do with LTTE, they can just be let go. But for the others, it’s a massive […]

More websites including ghs.google.com blocked in Sri Lanka?

Reports online and which I received through email indicate that more sites are being deliberately or inadvertently blocked in Sri Lanka, with most of the disruptions occurring on Sri Lanka Telecom ADSL broadband connections. Some reports claim that domains hosted on blogger.com are being blocked, and other reports indicate that this is now a matter […]

IGP now wants to “suspend licenses” of porn websites in Sri Lanka

An order by the Inspector General of Police in Sri Lanka, the same chowderhead who once said women could record themselves getting raped through mobile phones, now wants to the Director General of Telecommunication Regulatory Commission to suspend the licenses of 12 websites which were exhibiting nude photographs. Firstly, none of the websites the IGP […]

Sunday Times in Sri Lanka “hosts” Twitter!

Not satisfied with such pathbreaking initiatives in the “professional” print media industry in Sri Lanka such as using Wikipedia to defame and plagiarising content from Flickr, the Sunday Times in Sri Lanka proudly announces today that it has “linked up” with Twitter and will be “hosting” the service to boot! Journalist Surekha, understandably a little […]

Citizens.lk introduces state of the art security to Sri Lanka

This one is really hard to explain without expletives, but here goes. The Sri Lankan state wants citizens to register online on a website for their own security. Super idea, never mind that the Sri Lankan State is about as illiberal and undemocratic as they get today. The first version of http://www.citizens.lk was shoved to […]

Gagging the web and Internet: Implications of the proposed Private TV Broadcasting Regulations in Sri Lanka

Censorship of media in Sri Lanka isn’t a new phenomenon, but the Rajapakse regime took it a step further recently when it recently promulgated a new set of regulations through a gazette notification, called the Private Television Broadcasting Station Regulations. The over broad and ill-defined regulations, in parts copied and pasted verbatim from Indian Cable TV […]

Thailand and Malaysia clamp down websites

In moves bound to embolden Sri Lanka’s own regime to officially clamp down on websites, Thailand and Malaysia blocked or shut down hundreds of websites this week. Thailand’s manifestly idiotic and regressive lese majeste laws were used to shut down 344 out of a total of 400 sites it shut down. As this Asia Media report […]

Legal action against MoD regulations on CDMA and mobile phones

The Daily Mirror carries the story of a lawyer who has filed a writ application in the Appeal Court yesterday against the proposed law to prevent the use of mobile or CDMA phones by anyone other than the registered owner. “The lawyer complained that the proposed law would create a series of problems to phone […]

The rise of the Nanny State: Sri Lanka to filter pornography on the web

It was almost exactly a year ago that I read this report on Techcrunch that said children in Nigeria were accessing porn from the XO Laptop (alias $100 PC). The story noted, tongue in cheek that It’s heart warming to know that the efforts of the well meaning folks behind the OLPC project are delivering […]