Iran’s supreme court took a decision that a Canadian man that visited the country three years ago deserves death for promoting pornography. The court has upheld the death sentence for a programmer who is currently facing imminent execution after being found guilty of creating and promoting adult sites.

Saeed Malekpour has arrived to Iran in fall 2008 and was picked up by plainclothes police that took him to Evin prison in Tehran, where he had to spend a year in solitary confinement. Within that time he had no access to lawyers and wasn’t charged.

After a year, Saeed Malekpour was wheeled out in front of the TV cameras to confess to a number of “crimes” connected with porn sites. Based of his television confessions, Saeed was convicted of creating and supporting porn content on the Internet by a court in Tehran. However, Malekpour later retracted his own confessions in a letter he managed to send from prison. In the letter he claimed that confessions had been “extracted under pressure, physical and psychological torture” and under the threats to both him and his family.

Saeed Malekpour is a permanent resident of Canada. He designed photo-uploading program that had been used by some pornographic site without him even knowing. Upon completion of the international campaign and expert evidence, Iran’s supreme court has suspended his death sentence last year and required a judicial review. According to Western media reports, the court believed that it was all fair enough to execute a visitor to their country for something that is not even a crime in the country of his residence, and anyway he is probably innocent. In other words, Iran believes that its local legislation can be extended to other states.

Meanwhile, Saeed Malekpour was charged with the crime of “spreading corruption on Earth”. This one is vaguely worded to say the least. So, it seems that if you are doing anything that might miff the Iranian ideologies, you are strongly not recommended to visit the country which once was a flower of human civilization. Well, that is unless you are willing to be strung up in a car park, but this isn’t on any sensible person’s agenda.

By:
SaM
January 27th,2012

Following MegaUpload shutdown and arrests that took place last week, Filesonic, one of the largest cyberlocker services on the Internet, has removed the features which made the site that popular among file-sharers. This move was done in order to place the service at a safe distance from Hollywood’s revenge. However, some industry observers believe that taking into account what is going on today, nobody can really be sure that such a distance even exists.

The service that used to feature in the list of top 10 file-sharing websites on the web, with 250 million page views monthly placed today a red banner on the main page, saying that all file-sharing functionality on the service is disabled from now on and the site can only be used to upload and download files users have uploaded personally.

Moreover, Filesonic has also terminated its affiliates rewards program, which means that those users who have uploaded files to the service won’t any longer earn money for other visitors downloading their files. However, as the functionality of downloading itself was removed, the program wouldn’t have functioned anyway. Meanwhile, the uploaders are mainly concerned about the reward money they had already collected in their accounts before this shutdown. Users are not sure if they can even still receive that.

After the FBI arrested the founders of famous MegaUpload service and seized its domain name, all websites enabling files uploading and downloading, as well as their users, have been put on guard. However, what the unsuspecting ordinary online user doesn’t realize is that their fundamental rights are currently in danger, too, as they can be tragically limited. The reason for this is a new wicked anti-piracy legislation that hides behind such terms as “digital theft” and “intellectual property protection” is currently awaiting approval.

This is why a lot of the online giants went as far as to arrange a blackout regarding SOPA and PIPA bills in attempt to educate their visitors about the possible consequences of such laws. Today every other service urges everyone to get informed about the proposed legislation, offering detailed information about oncoming Internet filtering, and recommends taking immediate action in cooperation with the rest of the citizens trying to defend their rights and freedom.

By:
SaM
January 24th, 2012

Last week was indeed sad time for online freedom: shockingly enough, MegaUpload, one of the largest file-sharing websites throughout the world, has been shut down by the Federal Bureau Of Investigation based on charges of infringing copyright laws. This happened just one day after hundreds of websites protested against new US anti-piracy legislation named SOPA by doing a “blackout”.

The U.S. Justice Department indictment reads that MegaUpload, as well as its affiliated sites, generated revenues of over $175 million annually from advertising. In addition, it also read that because of the copyright infringement, the damages caused by the service reached $500 million. The leaders of the service have been convicted with five counts of copyright violation and conspiracy. Now the founders of MegaUpload face a sentence of twenty years in prison on the charge of racketeering, 5 years for money laundering and 5 more years on each of the substantive charges of criminal copyright violation. Four of the service leaders, Dotcom (the founder), Batato, Ortmann and van der Kolk had been taken into custody last week in Auckland, New Zealand, by local police. Meanwhile, three others (Bencko, Echternach and Nomm) are still free.

The file-sharing service has been supported by many celebrities, musicians and even producers. Just before being seized, the site contained endorsements from such celebrities as Kim Kardashian, Alicia Keys and Kanye West. Once the FBI seized MegaUpload domain name, the infamous hacker group Anonymous reacted to the move and compiled and published a file containing personal data about MPAA’s employees and US Democratic Party leaders and their families. The data was released, as usual, through Pastebin.com, as well as a list of the sites the hackers planned to attack next. In addition, the group under the Twitter name of @YourAnonNews claimed they managed to shut down FBI’s official site in response to MegaUpload being shut down. The tweet warned that 15 minutes after the government took down MegaUpload, Anonymous could take down government and record label websites.

The hackers emphasized that MegaUpload had been taken down without SOPA being law. The questions now are why they need this law in the first place then and what will happen if it passes. Apparently, the web as we know it will end in this case.

By:
SaM
January 23rd,2012