Eurasia Review reports that Rojin Mohammadi has been arrested. Mohammadi is a medical student, currently studying at the University of Manila in the Philippines. The Human Rights Reporters Committee reported that she was arrested initially on November 14 when she returned to the country to visit her family, but was released 24 hours later.
She was rearrested yesterday in her home province of Kermanshah.
Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-American journalist, blogger and frequent source of information for ReadWriteWeb Egypt coverage, was arrested at the Ministry of the Interior in Cairo on Wednesday. She was beaten and assaulted by police, interrogated by military intelligence and finally freed 12 hours later.
She borrowed the Blackberry of another protester arrested and detained with her to tweet, "Beaten arrested in interior ministry."
Ever since the eruption of the series of political uprisings now known as the Arab Spring, there's been much speculation over the role of social media and mobile technology. Whether revolutions in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and elsewhere could have happened without Twitter and cell phones is something historians will probably continue to debate years from now.
What's indisputably clear is that regardless of what's sparking and fueling these revolutions, technology is certainly helping to spread information and facilitate communication among the protesters.
German social bookmarking service Mister Wong was, not so long ago, an ambitious, well-used, innovative project. It was also the subject of heated international controversy online. Today the service finds itself put up for sale by parent company Construktiv. In a post on the company's German language blog, Mister Wong says its changing priorities require it to seek a new operator.
Mister Wong instituted a number of different features appreciated by users, like automatic Twitter sync to save shared links, a Delicious importer and an attractive mobile version of the site. The service also faced a substantial amount of criticism, though, for its name and branding. So much criticism that it provided an interesting opportunity to talk about contemporary racial stereotypes, the importance of intention and more.
Hussein Ghrer, a prominent Syrian blogger headquartered in Damascus, disappeared after leaving his house on October 24. Ghrer joins many journalists and activists who've been arrested and otherwise detained during the civil strife in Syria.
Other imprisoned journalists include Lina Saleh Ibrahim and Wael Yousef Abaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Also imprisoned is blogger Anas Almawari.
The Renesys blog reports "significant but sporadic Internet outages in the Palestinian Territories today. As many as half of the routed networks of the Palestinian Territories were unreachable (withdrawn from the global routing table)."
Both the Washington Post and the BBC have reported a possible hack on the Palestinian communications sector.
Anonymous has targeted a Mexican drug cartel after that group, Los Zetas, allegedly kidnapped one of its members in Veracruz. In a video released on October 6, the group "claimed that they would release the names of journalists, taxi drivers and others who have worked with Los Zetas in the past" according to Foreign Policy. They also threatened to include the addresses of the collaborators on November 5.
The Guardian posted a translated version of the Spanish-language video. (See the original embedded after the jump.)
Updated below the fold.
Prominent Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah has been arrested by the Egyptian military. He was summoned for questioning on Sunday. His last tweet says starkly, "Going in." He has since been remanded for further questioning for 15 days. During his initial appearance he refused to answer questions, declaring the military court that held him, and sentenced fellow blogger Maikel Nabil to three years in prison, was illegitimate.
The charge he was arrested on was inciting violence against the military.
Wikileaks shed light on UN documentation of executions of children performed then covered up by US military.
Controversial international watch-dog organization Wikileaks announced today that it will cease publication of leaked documents due to financial difficulties resulting from an inability to access millions of dollars in donations blocked or held in limbo by by major financial institutions. It's an important story about just how uncontrollable the web really is; organizations like Wikileaks still require budgets to operate and the centralization of financial transactions is one meaningful choke point available to those who would aim to slow or cease their activities.
The news comes days after the United States government announced it would withdraw all troops from Iraq by the end of this year, a decision reportedly forced by the Iraqi government's unwillingness to grant US troops legal immunity if they remained in the country.
Big data and sentiment analysis can do amazing things, whether it's in the enterprise or in the quest to create compelling applications and experiences for consumers. But can technology trends such as these actually predict major real-world events?
As sci-fi as it may sound, that's exactly what researcher Kalev Leetaru was able to accomplish with a little help from SGI's Altix UV supercomputer packing 8.2 teraflops of processing power. Leetaru, a digital media analytics expert at the University of Illinois, wrote software that can scan over 100 million news articles and uses sentiment analysis, text geocoding and predictive analytics to determine when political upheaval will go from rowdy to revolutionary.
