Yahoo Involved In Photo Censorship Dispute

The Sunnyvale company Yahoo has gotten into some new troubles in China after it was reported that its online photo sharing service Flickr in unavailable for most of the local users. There is no official statement to indicate that Yahoo is facing a new ban in the country but, after the company's representative denied the problems with their servers, the speculations were quickly spread on the Internet. As Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped reported, the Yahoo technology is still available but all the pictures disappeared from the users' accounts.

"It seems that access to our image servers is being blocked for users in much of China. Our technical staff has looked into this at depth and determined this is not a technical issue from our end. We will keep an eye on the situation and update if we get any developments," the Flickr employees said at 10:00 PDT, June 7th. "We are checking periodically to see if the block is still in place, but haven't detected any change. We hope that this is a temporary issue and we currently believe that it will be. In the meantime, we are investigating our alternatives. Thank's for your patience," they added at 01:00 PDT, June 8th.

The authorities refused to comment the issue but, according to Google Blogoscoped, Amnesty International warned a few days ago that the Internet repressions are quickly spreading and must be stopped before this situation evolves. "The 'Chinese model' - of an Internet that allows economic growth but not free speech or privacy - is growing in popularity, from a handful of countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites and arrest bloggers," they said.

Amnesty International is an organization that protects human rights. Based in UK and founded in 1961, Amnesty International is led by Sean MacBride and Martin Ennals, the two superiors who are organizing the activity.