The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has handed down a ban on about 1,600 terms and phrases it has deemed obscene, including the word "harder," for one.

Words on the list, which has been floating around on Twitter, run the gamut from "barf" to "Jesus Christ" to "back door" to "do me."

Published in both English and Urdu, it includes such words and phrases as "idiot," "monkey crotch," "athlete's foot," "damn," "deeper," "four twenty," "fornicate," "looser," and "go to hell," among others.

The European Parliament today adopted, by a large majority, a resolution on the upcoming EU/US summit stressing “the need to protect the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names.”

This situation is now turning critical, with legislative proposals such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act claiming worldwide jurisdiction for domain names and IP addresses. The definitions in SOPA are so broad that, ultimately, it could be interpreted in a way that would mean that no online resource in the global Internet would be outside US jurisdiction.

This wasn't a hearing designed to elicit complex thoughts about complex issues of free speech, censorship, and online piracy; despite the objections of the ACLU, dozens of foreign civil rights groups, tech giants like Google and eBay, the Consumer Electronics Association, China scholar Rebecca MacKinnon, hundreds of law professors and lawyers, the hearing was designed to shove the legislation forward and to brand companies who object as siding with "the pirates."

How low was the level of debate? The hearing actually descended to statements like "the First Amendment does not protect stealing goods off trucks" (courtesy of the AFL-CIO's Paul Almeida).

This dour notion comes to me on hearing of a labor tribunal in the United Kingdom. It reportedly upheld Apple's right to fire an employee for saying something not entirely flattering about the company on his private Facebook page.

Apple reportedly has strict rules about posting any negative comments on any social media sites in order to protect its commercial reputation. So the company fired Crisp for gross misconduct, according to the report.

Websites and IP addresses will become unreachable for the first time in the UK for copyright reasons. The High Court has ordered BT to block subscribers access to Newzbin 2, as well as any other sites or end points it uses.

US movie studios brought the case over Usenet scraper Newzbin, and although BT tried to argue that copyright infringement wasn’t any of its business, and that policing it was intrusive, a court comprehensively rejected its arguments earlier this year.

The site encourages internet users to reconfigure their computers to use BlockAid’s DNS servers. That way, if a domain name used by a piracy web site is seized by law enforcement, BlockAid will be able to direct surfers to the original owner’s IP address more or less transparently.

In May, DNS experts including Paul Vixie, Dan Kaminsky and now-ICANN chair Steve Crocker said that the Protect-IP Act in the US would persuade many users to switch to offshore DNS servers.

Recently, many people from Belgium have been joining The Pirate Bay's and Telecomix's IRC channels, asking for help with the Telecomix DNS, saying that it doesn't work to access www.thepiratebay.org. This is true. The court was very specific in its order, which was to block the domains www.thepiratebay.org, www.thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.com, www.thepiratebay.nu, www.thepiratebay.se, www.piratebay.no, and www.ripthepiratebay.com, or else face a daily penalty of 1000 EUR for every day when defendants do not implement such 'DNS-blocking' in their DNS-servers'. So, obviously in defiance of that, people testing their DNS servers go to the domain www.thepiratebay.org — except, thepiratebay doesn't have the www domain turned on.

A bunch of Italian MPs from Berlusconi's party have proposed in late July a draft law which can hinder investments on the Internet in Italy, cause ISPs and hosting e-commerce collapse, and block freedom of expression and access to information.

Citizens, outside of any judicial proceeding and without the right to appeal to the judicial authority, may be banned to access the Internet if ANYONE notifies a provider about alleged infringement of copyright or trademark or patent.

Internet service providers must comply to the blacklisting of citizens who are *suspected* of copyright or trademark or patent infringements.

An Internet service provider must not promote or advertise, and must use preventive filters against, services that do not directly violate copyright, trademark or patents, but that *may* lead citizens to *think* that infringing services exist.

Lawyer Peter Baugher recently wrote an editorial piece for the Chicago Tribune which rehashes a bunch of really bad arguments in an attempt to decimate the First Amendment by effectively removing anonymity online.

He seems to assume that it should still be illegal if someone has a bad opinion of you, because it "encourages anti-social behavior."

That's the nature of living in a free and open society that believes in the right to free speech. You won't like all of that speech.

The police have asked the UK’s Internet registry Nominet to change the terms under which sites operate in the .uk domain, so they can be closed down for acting illegally, but commentators have warned that this would mean businesses could be closed down before any crime has been proven.

Meanwhile Nick Lockett, a lawyer at DLL specialising in computer law, told the BBC that he was “deeply concerned” about SOCA’s proposal if it meant it could act before a conviction had been secured.