Stephan Urbach is part of Telecomix (previously), activists who worked tirelessly to keep the Internet on during the Arab Spring, when endangered despots were killswitching net links in a bid to keep protest from spreading.

Syria's brutal Assad government uses censorware from California's Blue Coat System as part of its systematic suppression of dissent and to help it spy on dissidents; 600GB of 2011 logs from Syria's seven SG-9000 internet proxies were leaked by hacktivist group Telecomix and then analyzed by University College London's Emiliano De Cristofaro.

Just a few days after Turkey's scandal-rocked government banned Twitter by tweaking national DNS settings, the state has doubled down by ordering ISPs to block Twitter's IP addresses, in response to the widespread dissemination of alternative DNS servers, especially Google's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (these numbers were even graffitied on walls). — Read the rest

Journalists entered Syria to see, first-hand, conditions close to the border with Turkey. Snuck in by a Syrian military defector, they stayed for a day and returned with this footage.

After observing the growing unrest and correspondingly violent crackdown in Libya, a group of hackers conceived and launched Operation Libya White Fax: while the internet and data connections are being throttled, cut off and censored, phone lines are still open, and fax machines are still working. — Read the rest