There's a debate over free speech taking place after Microsoft-owned GitHub "restricted" the account of a developer based in the Crimea region of Ukraine, who used the service to host his website and gaming software.

Kashkin says GitHub advised him this week that it had restricted his account, pointing to its page about US trade controls, which lists Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria as countries facing US sanctions.

As GitHub notes on its page about US trade controls, US sanctions apply to its online hosting service, GitHub.com, but its paid-for on-premise software -- aimed at enterprise users -- may be an option for users in those circumstances.

The traffic crapflood resulted in the app, which is advertised as being "privacy-focused", going offline to users "in the Americas", according to the firm, as well as unspecified "other countries". Telegram claims to have around 200 million users and said the outage lasted for around an hour.

The timing of the attack, last night, came as Hong Kong residents staged large-scale protests against a Chinese extradition law being pushed through the territory's legislature.

The ramping up of tariffs come in an apparent game of high-stakes chicken between President Trump and the Chinese government. Trade talks, soon coming to a conclusion between the two sides, may make for good TV but are causing concern for American businesses who will have to pay significantly more for essential imported components and equipment.

China responded to the latest tariffs this week by saying that it "deeply regrets that it will have to take necessary countermeasures," and hopes that "the US and the Chinese side will work together and work together to resolve existing problems through cooperation and consultation."

A leading politician from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s junior coalition partner took a page straight out of Karl Marx’s playbook, calling for the people to take control of large companies in the battle against profit-hungry capitalists.

“The distribution of profits must be democratically controlled,” Kevin Kuehnert, the leader of the youth wing of the Social Democratic Party, told Die Zeit newspaper in an interview published on international labor day. “That excludes that there is a capitalist owner at this business,” he said, using luxury-car maker BMW AG as an example.

German MEP Daniel Caspary, who chairs the large CDU/CSU group in the EU Parliament told a German publication a completely made up lie -- reminiscent of the kind of "fake news" propaganda that has been used elsewhere, that all of the protesters were actually paid to be there.

A major political leader is so infatuated with his false belief that real people couldn't possibly be upset about the plan to fundamentally move away from an open internet, that he insists Google must have paid the protesters €450 each to show up.

Either way, no matter what lies politicians tell themselves, they might want to think about so many people coming out to protest over this issue, especially given that the next EU Parliamentary elections are in just a few months.

Last week, we pointed out that he was making provably false statements about Article 13, and wondered why he'd be doing that. But the more he talks, the more I'm wondering if he simply doesn't understand the basics of either copyright law or the internet.

So how is it that Axel Voss is considered an authority on this? He doesn't seem to understand that every new work is covered by copyright, so any website that hosts user-uploaded content -- audio, video, text, images, etc. -- is subject to this law.

The Trump administration has been pressing allies to end their relationships with Huawei, but Germany, moving ahead with its plans, has not moved to ban the company from its networks.

According to the Journal, a letter sent from the US Ambassador to Germany warns the country that the US will stop sharing some secrets if it allows Huawei to work on its next-generation 5G infrastructure.

Facebook has targeted politicians around the world – including the former UK chancellor, George Osborne – promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook’s behalf against data privacy legislation, an explosive new leak of internal Facebook documents has revealed.

The documents, which have been seen by the Observer and Computer Weekly, reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU.

Schulze must have thought he was really on to something in claiming he had real proof of Google astroturfing. In a tweet (in German) he claimed that because all of the complaints he's getting seem to come from people with Gmail addresses, it's proof of fakery. No, really.

To claim that seeing Gmail emails proves Google is astroturfing is... nutty. And, it would appear that Schulze's followers recognize just how idiotic this looks.

This happened despite the fact that there's basically no one left who supports this version of Article 13. The public is widely against it. The internet companies are against it. And, perhaps surprisingly, even the legacy copyright companies -- who pushed so hard for this -- are still angry about the result, which they insist is too lenient on the internet.

It would, effectively, make it nearly impossible for any website to ever host any user-generated content. In nearly all cases it would require expensive and problematic upload filters.