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Network analysts Renesys reported this morning that the global effort to supply proxy internet servers for Iranians to route around government control and communicate with the outside world is slowing down and facing increasingly effective state repression. The company mapped two thousand proxy servers shared on Twitter and other web sites over the course of the last week and found that it truly has been a global effort.

It can't be assumed that all the proxies were created to support Iranian protesters, but they were probably all shared for that purpose. Renesys reports that the rate of proxy creation appears to have slumped dramatically over the last few days and newly shared proxies are now being added quickly to the official list of filtered destinations online. This could have consequences for the political movement's global visibility and underlines how important it is for everyday people to create proxies and share them with friends overseas ahead of time.

Tonight, the bored and lonely segment of Twitter users banded together to push three sexy, raunchy, and totally inappropriate terms into the trending topics leaderboard.

Within minutes (as far as we could tell), both terms were removed from the list on the web interface at Twitter.com. However, they still showed up on third party services such as TwitScoop and Hashtags.org. We feel this blog's cachet and provenance do not allow for the repetition of such phrases, so you'll have to check out the screen shots below and gasp in mock horror along with us.

The Washington Post has reported that a Nevada newspaper has been served a grand jury federal subpoena to reveal the identities of commenters on its website. The newspaper editor is fighting the request.

The editor, Thomas Mitchell, received the subpoena after his paper covered the prosecution of business owner Robert Kahre in a federal tax fraud case. He is quoted as saying that anonymous speech, including online comments, is "a fundamental and historic part of this country," but that his publication might cooperate if specific crimes or threats were a factor.

Today, the UK government finally released its long-awaited Digital Britain report, which, among other things, confirms the government's intention to provide broadband access at 2Mbps to every household in the UK by 2012. According to the report, about 11% of all households in the UK cannot currently get broadband service at this speed. The British government plans to deliver this 'Universal Service Commitment' through a mix of existing technologies and expects to provide £200 million in public funding for this project.

In preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4th, China has started to block a number of web sites, including Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, Hotmail, and Microsoft's new search engine Bing. Tech-savvy Internet users in China, of course, know how to circumvent the Great Firewall, but for the large majority of Chinese Internet users, these sites will remain blocked for the foreseeable future. In addition to these high-profile sites, the Guardian also reports that the Great Firewall now also blocks access to more than 6,000 online forums affiliated with colleges and universities.

The Supreme Court of India has denied legal protection to a 19 year old computer science student facing a lawsuit for comments left on a group page he created on the Google owned social network Orkut, according to The Times of India. Local press has identified the young man by the name Ajith D (a common name) and report that his alleged offense was creating a group page where other visitors left "libelous" comments critical of militant right-wing political party Shiv Sena.

Indians around the internet are condemning the ruling as a blow against freedom of speech and democracy. It certainly appears to be a dangerous misunderstanding of the nature of the internet on the part of the court and a bad precedent in the most populous democracy in the world.

Wikileaks.org, a website that publishes classified, confidential, censored or otherwise secret documents for anyone to see, put out a call last night for help in advancing the site beyond its remarkable early success. Just a week after publishing one of its most high profile documents yet, the organization sent an email to subscribers last night asking them to "tell us your most radical ideas for our vision of justice and how they might be economically, politically, legally, technically and socially sustained."

Over the weekend, a debate raged across the tech blogosphere concerning the risks involved in developing for the iPhone platform.

What prompted the debate in the first place was Apple's decision to reject an app known as the Podcaster, which would have permitted you to listen to podcasts without first downloading them in iTunes. Because the app "duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes," says Apple, they decided to reject it from inclusion in the App store.

For most companies, having to deal with one piece of bad publicity in a day is already bad enough. Apple, however, has to deal with three pieces of bad publicity today. In England, the Advertising Standards Authority, moved to ban one of Apple's ads for the iPhone because of misleading statements in it. Also, an embarrassing security hole in the iPhone firmware lets anybody bypass your security code, and Apple's move to ban a violent comic book from the App Store has also set off a minor firestorm of protests.

With the start of the Olympics in Beijing being only a few days away, a lot of focus in the technology blogosphere has been on the restrictions put on Chinese Internet users by the Chinese government and the role of major US Internet companies in this. According to US Senator Dick Durbin, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are close to agreeing on a code of conduct that would govern how these companies would operate in restrictive environments like China.