Whoa, Nellie. Some international press outlets appear to have mistakenly reported that Google+, Google's new social networking site released yesterday, has already been blocked in China. But a handful of major blog websites in China have since debunked that story. According to their reports, it seems that Google+ is being not blocked, but "throttled." In other words, you can access it, but it's painfully slow. The Chinese have used this strategy before, and to great effect, says tech website Penn Olson's Steven Millward:

Web throttling is a tactic new to China's Great Firewall, and has been seriously slowing pretty much all overseas internet speeds all year. Gmail particularly has been horribly throttled, to the point were it can take five or ten minutes or more to go from the login page to your inbox. It's a very underhanded tactic by Net Nanny: being seen not to block the service, whilst actually rendering it nearly useless to its users.

Shanghaiist isn't impressed with the research techniques behind the mistaken reports:

Washington Post, and others, are only citing GFW [Great Firewall, the nickname for China's internet censorship firewall] check-up sites like Great Firewall of China and Ping. To give you an idea of how unreliable those tests are, we just tried Google+ again on both, and got an "OKAY" from Ping and a "fail" from Great Firewall.

Sadly, when it comes to censorship, Western news outlets have something of a track record with overzealous reporting. This spring, the lede of a New York Times piece purported to expose Chinese propaganda agents cutting off phone calls at the mention of the word "protest." Shanghai-based journalist (and FP contributor) Adam Minter tested the Times' claims and found them overblown, as did Shanghaiist's Kenneth Tan. Later that day, Times researcher Jonathan Ansfield, who was involved with the piece, left a damning comment on Minter's post:

for the record, the contributing reporter's own tests comport with yours. regrettably his input on the story made little difference.

The next day, the Times published a correction saying that the recipients of the calls cited in the article, who were left anonymous in the article, were both Times reporters in the Beijing bureau, adding:

Because scrutiny of press communications could easily be higher than for those of the public at large, the calls could not be assumed to represent a broader trend; therefore, those examples should not have been given such prominence in the article.

A lesson learned, we hope.

As events continue to unfold on the streets of Cairo and throughout Egypt, I spoke with Jillian York, project coordinator for the OpenNet Initiative at Harvard's Berkman Center and writer on Middle Eastern politics and the Internet for Global Voices and others, about the implications of Egypt's nationwide Internet shutdown: 

JK: Can you give me a sense of the sequence of events last night as the Internet began going down in Egypt?

JY: I was online online chatting with an Egyptian friend who lives outside of Egypt at around last night. At around 1 a.m. [Egypt time], he pinged me and said that Internet had been cut off entirely. Then shortly after that he wrote that there was one ISP that was still up.

That still seems to be the case now. One ISP, Noor,  is still accessible, but it looks like very few of the people who were tweeting or posting online have access to that. Looking at the folks on Twitter that we know have been posting, we only have about five people who are still connected, that I'm aware of. 

JK: Is this an unprecedented move? Has a country ever been removed from the Internet in this way before. 

JY: Burma was one example. Burma's military shut down the Internet on Sept. 29, 2007, [during the nationwide monks' protests against the country's military regime,]. That was the first time that anything like this had ever happened.  

The other example was Xinjiang Province in China in Summer, 2009.  [The Chinese government did not fully restore the region's Internet service until May, 2010.] 

JK: When the government blocked access to Twitter a couple of days ago, there were a number of ways people were getting around it using third-party applications. Is there any way to circumvent this shutdown?

JY: Dial-up is still working. Jacob Applebaum, [a U.S. computer-security researcher assosiated with WikiLeaks] has been Tweeting the number for a dial-up connection that people can get to through a French ISP.

A lot of the international community is trying to help.There's even a Twitter account called Jan 25 Voices that is literally reporting via Twitter on phone calls back to Egypt. But in terms of actual connectivity, it's just dial-up and this one ISP.

JK: I read your piece a couple of days ago on how the demonstrators are using social media. Has the black-out changed your views?

JY:  You can say,  "Wow, it's a 'Facebook revolution' or a 'Twitter revolution', but as soon as these are cut off, it will be interesting to see what the success of this is without social media. It's early to judge, but from what we've been seeing, it seems that people are still out there and still organizing despite this. They definitely seemed prepared for what happens when the Internet gets shut off.

Yesterday, the Internets were abuzz with the discovery of Julian Assange's OkCupid profile, under the alias HarryHarrison. Now, it seems HarryHarrison also had a profile set up (members only) on CouchSurfing.org, a site that helps travelers find hosts to stay with when traveling.

The picture is certainly Assange and the profile does feel real. His last login was December 17th, 2006 from Budapest and his occupation is listed as "Investigative journalist / rabble rouser." In case you're wondering about his taste in movie/books/music, he likes "Obscure works produced under difficult circumstances by courageous authors". The people he enjoys include, "Voltaire. Richard Feynman. My parents."

Anyone who hosts him can look forward to "Many stories from attempted assassinations in Africa to telephone taps in Australia, to under cover in Egypt, election rigging, deportations, Russian mafia, scientific expeditions, politician's wives..."

The reviews from other users who have hosted "HarryHarrison" or stayed at his place in Melbourne are overwhelmingly positive.

In only seven months, Hugo Chavez has passed 1,000,000  followers on Twitter. He announced the accomplishment this morning:

"Hello beautiful world. I would like to thank all my followers, We've passed the million mark! Woo-hoo!."

For comparison, U.S. President Barack Obama has almost 6,000,000 followers, though his account has been open for a much longer period of time. (Note: The White House has 1,800,000 followers -- the above figure is Obama's Organizing for America account, which was previously his campaign Twitter profile.) Dmitry Medvedev's official English Kremlin account, however, has a mere 50,000 followers. (And the Russian version has only 111,000 followers.)

If you're on Twitter, it'd behoove you to follow Foreign Policy's page, where you can stay up to date on the latest articles and news from FP. (At the moment, we've got 73,500 followers.) Furthermore, you can follow the personal accounts of FP's editors, handily compiled in the FP_Tweeps list.

In a new video blog entry, an unusually stern Dmitry Medvedev takes aim at Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko for using "hysterical" anti-Russian rhetoric on the campaign trail, which according to the Russian President, "goes far beyond not only diplomatic protocol but also basic human decency." He also gets in a dig at the autocratic ruler's human rights practices saying that Lukashnko should "should concern himself with his country's internal problems, including, finally the investigation of numerous cases of disappearances."

Medvedev is responding to Lukashenko's recent accusations that Russia is meddling in the country's election. Relations between Russia and its onetime closest ally have soured in recent years, and in the last few weeks, state-controlled Russian TV stations have been pumping out anti-Lukashenko documentaries. 

A similar barrage of criticism in the state-controlled press hit Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov before his firing last week and Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev before he was overthrown in April. Lukashenko is probably right to be worried.

The last leader to receive a similar Medvedev vlog-attack was Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko, who is, of course, no longer the Ukrainian president.

Countries as diverse as the United States and North Korea have all struggled at the nexus of statehood and social media. Until now, none have had to purchase the Twitter handle of their country's name from the owner of a porn site. That dubious honor goes to Israel, which recently purchased the user name @israel from Israel Meléndez, a Spanish man living in Miami, who registered the name back in 2007, early in the microblogging website's history.

According to the New York Times, Meléndez struggled with his account because every tweet posted provoked anti-Semitic and anti-Israel comments. "My account was basically unused because I was getting dozens of replies every day from people who thought the account belonged to the state of Israel," Meléndez said.

The Spanish newspaper Público first reported on the transaction, noting that Twitter helped facilitate, even though the company has a policy against username squatting (although CNN did the same last year). Meléndez said that the payoff was a six-figure sum. Israel refuted that number. According to Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the sum was actually $3,000. "I won't go into the details of our negotiations but originally he asked for a five digit sum and all we paid him was $3,000, period," Palmor told The Jerusalem Post.

On August 31, the old official address of the Foreign Ministry (@israelMFA) broadcast the tweet: "The IsraelMFA twitter account name has been changed to @Israel. Look for us here: twitter.com/Israel."

Israel has been trying to increase its social media presence, with recently opened accounts on Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube.

This appears to be more a case of mistaken identity and not internet-era extortion, such as the case of whitehouse.com. In 1997, that particular domain name was created as an adult and political entertainment site, whose existence sparked a letter of objection from the real White House.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev may be on Twitter, but he was not amused when Kirov's regional governor Nikita Belykh decided to post his thoughts during yesterday's State Council session. (Many thanks to the Wall Street Journal for translating the highlights.)

The bizarre story, which really could have only happened in today's Russia, began when Dmitry Zelenin, governor of Russia's Tver region, noted "State Council. 1 Minute to session." But it was Belykh's  furious pounding out 140-character messages that made things interesting. He first noted:

10-15 people at the State Council are sitting with iPads. They used to sit with laptops. Darned stenographers ;)

(He immediately followed his own tweet by asking if they were in fact "doing other things.")

As Medvedev spoke, Belykh posted the tweet that started the brouhaha:

I support your idea of presidential Lycees, Dmitry Anatolievich. Kress. Actually, that was my idea ;(

At this point, Belykh was publicly reprimanded by Medvedev, who had got wind of the governor's feelings: "Nikita Yurievich Belykh is posting something on his Twitter page right now, during the State Council session, as if he has nothing else to do." You'd imagine, at this point, that Belykh would stop Tweeting and pay sharp attention to the rest of the session. You'd also be wrong, as Belykh blamed Medvedev's adviser Arkady Dvorkovich for narking on him:

There you go ;(. Dvorkovich leaked my reports to the President. Such are the costs of the information society ;(

It's clear that Dvorkovich himself was paying more attention to his feed than his boss as he playfully chided Belykh:

At least the record was set straight :)

Other attendees got in on the act, claiming that Belykh's list of followers was destined to rise as a result of the exchange. After the meeting, Medvedev responded to Belykh on his own (Russian-language) feed:

Yes, those are the costs of the information society. The important thing is that they don't distract from work, right?

As a side note, Medvedev's English-language feed follows President Barack Obama, the White House, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and the Kremlin's Russian feed, but only Obama and the White House have returned the favor.

The internet is generally seen as a "green" technology -- emails can cut down on paper waste, teleconferencing can save on CO2 emitted by flying, and smart grids can help reduce overall energy consumption. But, according to the Guardian's series on carbon footprints, the internet releases about 300 million tons of CO2 each year -- as much as all the coal, oil, and gas used for energy in Turkey and Poland.

The British newspaper acknowledges that carbon footprints are, in general, tough to calculate. However, it arrived at this rough estimate by accounting for the power used up by data centers ("buildings packed top to bottom with servers full of the web pages, databases, online applications and downloadable files that make the modern online experience possible") and personal computing devices. Data centers are one of the less visible factors in understanding the global carbon trail left by our emails, blog trolling, and facebooking, but they are quite significant. A Harvard physicist last year estimated that just two Google searches generate about 14 grams of CO2--or enough to bring a kettle to boil.

A recent UK study determined that in 2005, consumer and commercial information and communication technology (ICT) accounted for about 1.2 percent of fossil fuel emissions. The report predicts that ICT's footprint could climb by 60 percent by 2030.

The Guardian feature highlights some other carbon footprints. Among them:

The Iraq War: 250-600 million tons of CO2 since 2003

The World Cup: 2.8 million tons of CO2 ("more than a billion cheeseburgers")

The 2009 Australian bushfires: 165 million tons of CO2

A banana: 80g CO2 each

Following the UAE's recent admonition of BlackBerry smartphones, the country will prohibit three of BlackBerry's web operations starting on Oct. 11 -- e-mail, instant messaging between BlackBerry phones, and the web-browsing program -- citing security concerns. Later this month, Saudi Arabia will also ban instant messaging between BlackBerrys.

A Saudi official revealed that the move is intended to strong-arm Research-in-Motion, BlackBerry's Ontario-based company, into conceding information, which it has already done for Russia and China. In 2007, RIM provided its encryption keys to a Russian telecommunications agency, which then passed it to the Federal Security Service. A year later, RIM's handset came out in China, but was delayed because the company "needed to satisfy Beijing that its handsets posed no security threat to China's communication networks."

The ban won't be lifted "until these BlackBerry applications are in full compliance with UAE regulations;" and it comes at a time when countries all around the world, are attempting to restrict the many freedoms provided by the Internet.

For the second time this week, someone on the Internet has gotten in trouble for expressing respect for the late Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. CNN Mideast Affairs Editor Octavia Nasr lost her job on Wednesday over a tweet about Fadlallah. Now, Britain's ambassador to Lebanon, Frances Guy, is taking fire from the Israeli government and others over a post on her foreign ministry blog about the late Shiite cleric. The ministry has taken the post down but a cached version is still available on Google. An excerpt:

When you visited him you could be sure of a real debate, a respectful argument and you knew you would leave his presence feeling a better person.  That for me is the real effect of a true man of religion; leaving an impact on everyone he meets, no matter what their faith.  Sheikh Fadlallah passed away yesterday.  Lebanon is a lesser place the day after but his absence will be felt well beyond Lebanon's shores.  I remember well when I was nominated ambassador to Beirut, a muslim acquaintance sought me out to tell me how lucky I was because I would get a chance to meet Sheikh Fadlallah. Truly he was right.  If I was sad to hear the news I know other peoples' lives will be truly blighted.  The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints.  May he rest in peace.     

Those confused about the source of this controversy would do well to check out my colleague David Kenner's piece on the legacy of Fadlallah,  who is frequently described as the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, but whose views, particuarly on Iran and women's rights, are far more complex. 

The British foreign ministry has been very active, and largely very successful, in encouraging diplomats to blog. But the Guy affair is an example of the tensions that can occur when people representing a government write in a medium generally designed for self-expression. The U.S. State Department got a taste of this recently with the uproar over irrevent tweets written on a trip to Syria by two State Department blog that were reprinted by FP's Josh Rogin. 

Though if Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin's Twitter is any indication, the Russian foreign ministry doesn't seem to worry about this too much. 

Twitter Communications Director Matt Graves writes: 

It's been an exciting morning at Twitter HQ. Russian President Dimitry Medvedev just visited to meet our co-founders, Ev Williams and Biz Stone, launch two official Twitter accounts for the Kremlin (@kremlinrussia in Russian, and @kremlinrussia_e in English), and send his inaugural Tweets.

The English account appears to be a direct translation of the Russian one. 

The twitter feeds adds to the tech-savvy president's already formidable online presence, including a vlog and a livejournal account.  After only five tweets (Example: "San Francisco is a very beautiful city. Heading to Silicon Valley today to visit Apple, Yandex and Cisco.") Medvedev already 7,842 followers on the English account and 10,201 on the Russian one. 

Barack Obama, with whom Medvedev will meet in Washington this week, has already welcomed Medvedev to the twittersphere. Is it too late to start calling it the "retweet button"?

Quiz question for the week:

Which country spends the most time on social-networking websites?

a) Italy    b) Japan    c) United States 

(For those of you who don't subscribe to the bimonthly print edition of Foreign Policy, you're missing a great feature: the FP Quiz. It has eight intriguing questions about how the world works.)

Answer after the jump ... 

Read on

As promised, the Bolivarian revolution has entered the Twittersphere. President Hugo Chavez's first tweet went up at around midnight last night and already has over 44,000 followers: 

Epa que tal? Aparecí como lo dije: a la medianoche. Pa Brasil me voy. Y muy contento a trabajar por Venezuela. Venceremos!! 

"Hey how's it going? I appeared like I said I would: at midnight. I'm off to Brazil. And very happy to work for Venezuela. We will be victorious!!"

Chavez has chosen @chavezcandanga as his handle -- candanga is an obscure word for "devil" -- and the feed will be part of what Chavez's allies have called an  "assault" on social networking sites, which are currently dominated by the opposition. 

But what are his thoughts about Justin Bieber?

Google's January investigation into Chinese hacking of over twenty companies and the emails of dozens of human rights activists has highlighted an increasingly potent form of espionage:

"Cyber espionage is the great equalizer. Countries no longer have to spend billions to build globe-spanning satellites to pursue high-level intelligence gathering, when they can do so via the web..."

That is from a joint report released today by the Information Warfare Monitor and Shadowserver Foundation called "Shadows in the Cloud". It details how China-based hackers stole secret documents from the Indian Defense Ministry, the Dalai Lama's offices and the U.N over the past year. Although the report acknowledges no Chinese government link to what they dub the "Shadow Network," the information harvested is unlikely to be of much benefit to individuals. It includes secret assessments of India's security in regions bordering Tibet, Bangladesh and Myanmar; missile systems; information on the domestic Maoist insurgency; and embassy assessments of Indian relations with West Africa, Russia, former Soviet republics and the Middle East.

Reuters neatly summarizes the report's conclusions into how the attackers operated:

"The cyber-spies used popular online services, including Twitter, Google's Google Groups and Yahoo mail, to access infected computers, ultimately directing them to communicate with command and control servers in China"

Although the Chinese government has denied any involvement and made clear that it views hacking as an international crime, it will be interesting to see if it investigates such hacker networks operating from its territory. There is surely enough evidence to do so. On the other hand, it is no secret that the U.S. also hosts a large number of the world' cybercriminals; a recent report from Symantec's Message Labs showed that while the bulk of the world's targetted email attacks (28 percent) originate in China, 14 percent originate in the U.S.

In fact, since the Google-China debacle exploded, grievances in the American media have seemed to focus on freedom of speech and freedom from censorship rather than on issues of espionage. The Indian press also seems somewhat unconcerned -- the report has gotten little attention there and the Chinese government has brushed it off as media hype. It just seems that all parties are resigned to the fact, at least tacitly, that this is the way things work nowadays.