The French football team didn’t do too well but France should get a big pom pom for this initiative:

Reporters Without Borders unveils first “Anti-Censorship Shelter”

Reporters Without Borders today launched the world’s first “Anti-Censorship Shelter” in Paris for use by foreign journalists, bloggers and dissidents who are refugees or just passing through as a place where they can learn how to circumvent Internet censorship, protect their electronic communications and maintain their anonymity online.

“At a time when online filtering and surveillance is becoming more and more widespread, we are making an active commitment to an Internet that is unrestricted and accessible to all by providing the victims of censorship with the means of protecting their online information,” Reporters Without Borders said.

“Never before have there been so many netizens in prison in countries such as China, Vietnam and Iran for expressing their views freely online,” the press freedom organisation added. “Anonymity is becoming more and more important for those who handle sensitive data.”

Reporters Without Borders and the communications security firm XeroBank have formed a partnership in order to make high-speed anonymity services, including encrypted email and web access, available free of charge to those who user the Shelter.

By connecting to XeroBank through a Virtual Private Network (VPN), their traffic is routed across its gigabit backbone network and passes from country to country mixed with tens of thousands of other users, creating a virtually untraceable high-speed anonymity network.

This network will be available not only to users of the Shelter in Paris but also to their contacts anywhere in the world and to all those – above all journalists, bloggers and human rights activists – who have been identified by Reporters Without Borders. They will be able to connect with the XeroBank service by means of access codes and secured, ready-to-use USB flash drives that can be provided on request.

XeroBank is a communications security firm that has cornered the market on one of the rarest commodities in the world: online privacy. It specializes in communication solutions that protect its clients from all eavesdroppers.

The best-known free encryption and censorship circumvention software is also available to users of the Shelter, along with manuals and Wiki entries on these issues. A multimedia space is planned for journalists and Internet users who want to film and send videos.

The Shelter will eventually also have a dedicated website for hosting banned content. Egyptian blogger Tamer Mabrouk’s reports on the pollution of Egypt’s lakes, which are banned in his country, and articles that are banned in Italy by its new phone-tap law will all have a place in what is intended to be a refuge for those who still being censored.

The Shelter is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Friday. Anyone wanting to use it should make a reservation by sending an email to shelter (@) rsf (dot) org

The Shelter could not have been created without the support of the Paris city hall.

Reporters Without Borders points out that around 60 countries are currently subject to some form of online censorship and that Internet filtering is in effect in around 40 of them. About 120 netizens (bloggers, Internet users, and citizen journalists) are currently in prison worldwide.

Trudy Stevenson, one of Zimbabwe’s most energetic and people focused politicians has become Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to Senegal. I miss her vibrancy but her Letters from Dakar are both inspiring and informative. Here’s a short excerpt from her latest one:

Meanwhile two of my three phases of electricity were inadvertently dug up by the nearby road works two weeks ago, so once again I had an emergency – on opening night of the World Cup, OF COURSE!!  So we couldn’t watch South Africa play the opening match, except that by amazing luck I have the MOST GENEROUS NEIGHBOURS!  They are Australians, and had organised a TV in the road reserved outside for all our security guards to watch the month-long World Cup, and the TV is connected both to their mains electricity and to their generator – so when the power went off, we sheepishly wandered outside, and were welcomed to join the guards – and watched Bafana Bafana draw 1-1!  There were about 25 people watching that TV, including another diplomat, the Hungarian consul-general who lives 3 houses away!  We were terribly bitten by mosquitoes, but we didn’t notice at the time!  Now we’re heavily into World Cup – but also terribly disappointed by our African teams, all of whom we have been supporting.  Tonight we’re undecided who to switch our allegiance to, after watching Nigeria’s defeat by Korea . . . we shall see!

I’ve just stumbled across Memory Chirere’s blog.

Highlights include an interview with Brian Chikwava, Reflections on Zimbabwe turning 30, and an obituary for Ruzvidzo Stanely Mupfudza, which features this paragraph:

A week before your death, I bumped into Ignatius Mabasa at an Avondale ice cream shop and he said he had seen you! He said you had talked. And as the kids ran around, licking their ice cream and bantering amongst themselves, Ignatius said you said that you felt that most of what you had written in the past was rather bleak and you were reworking some of your unpublished stories and poems (and novels too) because you now realized that, after all, life was a positive thing. We were impressed and were almost certain that one full volume of your work would eventually come out.

She opens herself to all influences – everything nourishes her. Everything is gravy to her, including what she does not understand – particularly what she does not understand.
- Henry Miller