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Hong Kong (AFP) - A Hong Kong internet provider said Thursday it had blocked access to a website following a police order, the first confirmed takedown using a new national security law imposed by Beijing last year. Unlike mainland China, Hong Kong has open internet access, but critics of Beijing fear powers given to the police under the new law could herald the end of that freedom. Internet users noticed the website HKChronicles was unreachable from some Hong Kong-based devices last week, and its owner put out a statement saying she believed authorities were blocking access. HKChronicles, which is still...

Snapchat is ghosting President Trump. The messaging app banned the president’s account on Wednesday, joining other tech firms who have moved to curb Trump’s posting since a mob of his supporters breached the US Capitol last week. Snapchat said it decided to indefinitely suspend the account “in the interest of public safety, and based on his attempts to spread misinformation, hate speech, and incite violence.”

Thank you for your email. In response to content complaints on the ar15.com website, our team investigated and discovered content on the site that both promoted and encouraged violence. We asked them to remove the content and they refused. As such, they are in violation of our terms of service and we asked them to move the domain to another registrar. Best regards, The Office of the CEO - GoDaddy

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says that the social media company has “no plans” to lift its ban on President Donald Trump. “[We have] no plans to lift it right now,” said Sandberg in an interview with NBC News. “At least through the transition we’ve been very clear,” she added. “There’s obviously so much happening, and this is such a big step. We will definitely let people know and be very transparent about any changes to that.”

"Google has suspended President Donald Trump’s account on YouTube, which is the world’s largest video platform. The Google-owned company said Tuesday night that Trump uploaded content that violated its policies, giving it an automatic one-strike, which leads to a minimum seven-day suspension from uploading new content. It said it is also disabling the comments section...... .....“After review, and in light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence, we removed new content uploaded to Donald J. Trump’s channel for violating our policies......."

Twitter is openly condemning internet service providers blocking social media apps in the run-up to an election in Uganda as it takes criticism for alleged censorship on its own platform.

In the first week of January, Telegram surpassed 500 million monthly active users. After that it kept growing: 25 million new users joined Telegram in the last 72 hours alone. These new users came from across the globe – 38% from Asia, 27% from Europe, 21% from Latin America and 8% from MENA. This is a significant increase compared to last year, when 1.5M new users signed up every day. We've had surges of downloads before, throughout our 7-year history of protecting user privacy. But this time is different. People no longer want to exchange their privacy for free services....

Now that Amazon Web Services has shut down Parler, will the social network rebuild elsewhere? Parler CEO John Matze says Parler will be back with "many competing for our business." Don't bet on it. There appears to be no major public cloud or hosting company willing to give Parler a home. But, even if there were, Parler would find it almost impossible to return anytime soon. Parler will need to build its own infrastructure.

Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler? Zero. The planning was largely done on Facebook. This is all a bullshit pretext for silencing competitors on ideological grounds: just the start.

In the aftermath of Wednesday’s Capitol riot, Big Tech went nuclear. Most prominently, Facebook and Twitter suspended President Trump’s accounts on their platforms: Facebook’s suspension will last though the president’s remaining time in office, while Twitter’s ban is permanent. Trump was not the only prominent conservative figure suspended: former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his lawyer Sidney Powell were also banned from Twitter. Naturally, focus shifted to Parler, the most prominent of the “free-speech” alternatives to Facebook and Twitter. After President Trump’s suspensions, traffic to the site soared; consequently, left-wing activists demanded that Google and Apple pull Parler from...

I had to think a bit about this. For those of you less than 30 years old, when the internet was in it's infancy, there was a whole lot of things going on. Did you ever do an Archie search? How about utilizing Gopher menu's? The only three web browsers for DOS6.22/Win3.11 were Mozilla, Netscape, and Lynx. But there were, and still are, places on the internet that big tech doesn't own and can't own because it's too decentralize. For the the geeks like me, BBS'ing was where we started. This was the mid-80's. Imagine, posting a message on a...

The assault by power-drunk tech giants on topics, viewpoints and subject matters that don’t conform with the current approved, bien pensant orthdoxy continues. ARFCOM has just posted this tweet announcing that GoDaddy has booted them from their service. Because they can.

Obviously, we know Parler was shut down, anyone familiar with others? About an hour ago the most popular rifle forum ar15.com went offline. Someone said Google was blocking their DNS. Great purge is coming I think and I'm sure there will be more casualties.

We appear to be at the beginning of a massive crackdown on people who have supported Donald Trump, led by big tech and big media. These entities are making Trump into an example of their power to frighten the half of America that supported him in November. We cannot allow them to intimidate us. But they sure are trying, and on some, they will succeed. They are using the excuse of an unrepresentative group of fools criminally ransacking U.S. Capitol offices with a lighter touch than many of this summer’s often unpunished Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters. Remember: Some...

Silicon Valley did it because it knew it could get away with it.As Twitter and Facebook, and Google and Apple, moved hard to limit conservative messages on social media, they felt comfortable taking their oppressive and monopolistic actions because they knew no one would hold them accountable.With the United States Senate falling under Democratic Party control, they knew there would be no congressional committee calling them to account, and they knew the incoming presidential administration would leave them alone.Why?Because they calculated that the Democrats would put partisan advantage above principle.Big Tech understood that the Democrats would overlook the draconian silencing...

Parler CEO with Maria Bartiromo this morning ‘Our service has been dropped by every vendor and could end our business’ Parler CEO John Matze said today that his social media company has been dropped by virtually all of its business alliances after Amazon, Apple and Google ended their agreements with the social media service. “Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day,” Matze said today on Fox News. Matze conceded that the bans could put the company out of business while raising free speech issues, calling it “an...

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., called for a racketeering investigation on Sunday following Amazon, Apple and Google’s decisions to suspend the alternative social media platform Parler after Wednesday's U.S. Capitol riot.....

Parler will likely go offline for "a while" Sunday evening given Amazon Web Services' decision to suspend the upstart social media platform after Wednesday's U.S. Capitol riot, executives said Sunday........"

Can anyone access Second City Cop? I had the site bookmarked, and now when I try to access it Google asks me to sign in with my account, which has never happened before. I know they had posted some articles over the weekend critical of the official media take on the Capitol Hill incident, and I'm afraid they might have been taken down or had access restricted because of it.

More big businesses continued a boycott on Sunday of Republican members of Congress who followed Donald Trump's demands and voted to overturn the election. JPMorgan Chase said that it will pause all contributions from its political action committee for at least the next six months, saying 'the focus of business leaders, political leaders, civic leaders right now should be on governing and getting help to those who desperately need it most right now. There will be plenty of time for campaigning later.' U.S. digital payments company Stripe is to also stop processing payments for Trump's campaign website following the riot,...