Wired’s Epicenter blog reports that China has blocked YouTube again. At the same time, according to TechCrunch, the country has blocked the microblogging site Plurk.

Rationale for blocking YouTube has ranged from an “overzealous” Internet official to footage of Chinese navy ships trying to vandalize communication cable to (in our opinion the most likely) footage of Tibetan protests.

Plurk’s blog delivered a very heartening, and very unusual message to come from a Western social media or Internet company, the vast majority of whom engage in enthusiastic collaboration with Chinese authority in the hopes of adding a coin or two to their piggy banks.

It’s very unlikely that we will censor or suppress freedom of speech of Plurk users – as we see freedom of speech as a basic human right. It’s known thought that other big corporations such as Google, Skype, AOL etc. are censoring for the Chinese government and probably indirectly putting people in jail.¬†

We very seriously hope that the unlikeliness of Plurk’s censorship solidifies into a commitment.

ReadWriteWeb reports that YouTube has disabled uploads in South Korea in response to an anti-free speech law there.

Google has disabled both uploads of videos and comments on the Korean version of YouTube after the South Korean government tried to enforce a new law which requires web sites with at least 100,000 users to verify the person’s real name if they upload files or leave comments. The Cyber Defamation Law, as it’s called, went into effect on April 1st. According to officials at the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), the country’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulator, the law is an attempt to quell the cyber-bullying and spread of misinformation on the internet . . .

Or perhaps that’s just what they want you to believe, say critics. The Korea Times, for example, notes that it’s more likely that the government is simply continuing its crackdown on free speech. Already they have been “repeatedly attacked by bloggers,” the paper reports, “first over the controversial decision to resume U.S. beef imports, and more recently for its ineptitude in economic policies. The watershed moment came in January when police arrested Park Dae-sung, a blogger known more widely as ‘Minerva’ and a frequent critic of the government’s economic polices, on charges of ‘deliberately’ undermining public interest by distributing fraudulent information.”

If Koreans wish to continue to use YouTube, they may change their country setting in preferences.

We have not been shy about criticizing past YouTube activities for a cynical cooperation with tyrannical governments. We now praise them with equal alacrity. A company that exists because of free speech should be zealous in its defense. YouTube has not been. Perhaps this is the begining of a shift. We encourage you to write them and thank them for this stand and encourage them to take it in the future.

According to Global Voices, the well-known Egyptian blogger and film-maker Wael Abbas was attacked along with his mother in their house in Cairo. Wael made the announcement via his Twitter account.

My mother and I have been assaulted my a Police officer and his brother, they broke into our house and beat me up. My head has a cut and I lost one tooth. Police corruption has reached my house!

Abbas finally did make it to a police station to report the crime, after a period of non-responsiveness, according to GVO.

It is noteworthy that Abbas blogs on torture crimes committed by the Egyptian police. And his blog Al-Wa3i Al-Masri (Misr Digital) has published many leaked clips showing torture in police stations. According to Abbas, he was threatened a few times that he will be arrested or physically harmed.

Abbas finally answered a call from one of the bloggers, saying he had just arrived at the police station to report the assault. He said his mother was fine but that his head was hurting and that his tooth was gone!

Abbas’s YouTube archives were deleted at one point by YouTube.

China in its quest to control whatever is written or posted online has blocked the video sharing site, Youtube.  Google who own Youtube say that the site has been blocked and they havent been given areason for this.

Xinhua, the Chinese news agency reported that the government blocked access to the site after a fabricated video showing C hinese police brutally beating up Tibetans during the riots last year.  The description of the offending video fits one that was posted by the Tibetan government in exile and is a collage of varios clips showing the police putting down the riots brutally.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman when asked about the matter side stepped the issue, offering a lame satement thus:

Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact, it is just the opposite

It is not know when, if ever online users will access Youtube.¬† The Chinese government has lately been on an online crackdown blocking access to ‘pornographic’ sites which is a facade to hide the point that they are indeed taking down sites that the deem troublesome.

Update: I can access the site now and it appears that Sudan’s “National Telecommunications Corporation” has instituted the block. The fact that some Sudanese can still visit YouTube looks to be because there is at least one ISP, Canar, that is not directly controlled by the NTC.

The use of social media sites by the politically-minded in recent demonstrations is probably behind the block. There is now a Facebook group for unblocking YouTube in Sudan. As of Tuesday morning there are 495 members.

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Victor sends us a link to a story on YouTube being “partially blocked” in the Sudan. Unfortunately, the link won’t load for me. Nor does the GVO site in general.

Can anyone verify this?

After blogging WordPress and YouTube and Slide (more about those here), Turkey, according to the RSF, has now blocked the Paris-based video sharing site Dailymotion, beginning on August 2nd. The rationale behind the block is uncertain, though if YouTube is any guide, it’s probably due to a video “insulting” the founder of the modern Turkish state, Kemal Ataturk.

Turkey blocks sites like these wholesale, even if the offender is one single video, then requires their owners to jump through a preposterous number of hoops to get them unblocked. YouTube insists it’s complied and has still not been unblocked.

Additionally, two Turkish free speech sites, Antenna-tr and Ortakpayda, were hacked on July 24th by an ultranationalist group.

Update: Lewis wrote us.

Im in Beijing and Youtube.com is unblocked but veoh.com is blocked. Please check this.

Can anyone else confirm?

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Your website is blocked also but i am using a proxy to get it but it doesnt
work with videos.CNET reports that China has unblocked YouTube. They also ask, did Google have a direct hand in the blocking?

Last Friday, YouTube was accessible but anything related to what we called T%%% to avoid filters would return a message to the effect of, “This content is not available in your country.” Though it would be relatively easy for Chinese filters to replicate this result, this may indicate some effort on YouTube/Google’s part. Mama reports that YouTube soon went completely dark, until just now.

Another glitch that emerged, which may suggest some sort of Google involvement, is that when Mama was sending Gmail messages, anything containing the non-redacted T%%%, or even its first three letters, would return an error message she’d never seen, saying that there was an error while sending…The YouTube messages are still vexing. Was YouTube cooperating or was this a very smart error message? To have a Google property that’s not Google China itself cooperating with Chinese censorship would be unprecedented, to my knowledge.