ReadWriteWeb

In August, we mentioned that Turkey had backed away from mandatory Internet filtering. The initial plan had required each Internet user to choose from one of four filtering plans. This was wildly unpopular with Turkey's influential and very secular nerds and cosmopolitan types, especially in the capitol of Istanbul.

Instead, a voluntary program is now live. The problem with this, of course, is that, given Turkey's recent history of censorship, any program limiting access to information bears watching.

If the mere thought that your children (or some dude you don't know and will never meet) might be texting such filth as "smagma," "wuutang," "trisexual," and "carruth," your long trial is over. If you're Pakistani. And unrealistic.

As of today, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has ordered mobile phone companies to filter its list of 1,600 "offensive and obscene" words, according to AFP. Many of the words are in fact obscene. But a ridiculous number seem to have been copied off English language t-shirts spotted in the Tokyo subway.

Updated after the jump.

Campaign for imprisoned Syrian blogger. Anyone who still believes that imprisonment and torture of social media users is limited to political radicals and gadfly journalists need look no further than Syria's Anas Maarawi to be disabused of that notion. Maarawi was arrested on July 1. Talk about geek like me. Maarawi started Ardroid, the first Arabic language blog devoted to Google's Android OS.

His supporters have started a Facebook page to publicize his situation. A blog, Free Anas, has also been started, as well as a hashtag, #freeanas. Get on it, nerdlingers.

Are you subscribed to enough people on Twitter, Facebook, feeds and other inbound information that you're pretty sure you miss a lot of good things? New York startup KnowAbout.It launches out of private beta today and is now freely available to anyone who would like to tackle that problem.

The service brings in all your subscribed content from major social networks, then offers a number of different ways to sort what it finds. My favorite is the filter called "Potentially Missed - links from people who don't share a lot of links." All of the different sorting options make up a smart system based mostly on thoughtful permutations of publicly available, structured fields of data. How well does it work? I'm not sure yet, but I really like the idea.

China trying to buy some Facebook. News has surfaced that a sovereign wealth fund representing the Chinese government wants to buy a substantial amount of Facebook stock. According to anonymous sources who spoke to Business Insider, China wants to own enough of Facebook "to matter."

Is China's interest in Facebook a simply a government-sponsored group of venture capitalists looking to get a piece of the upcoming Facebook IPO or is there something more complicated at work behind the scenes?

Brazilian blogger murdered. 36-year-old Brazilian blogger Ednaldo Figueira was shot down in the streets of his home town, Serra do Mel.

After receiving death threats, Figueira was shot six times on June 15 by gunmen on motorcycles outside his workplace. In addition to being a blogger, he was a newspaper editor and an official in a trade union. This is the second time a blogger has been murdered by his government or, in Figueira's case most likely organized crime figures attached to the government.

Sources indicate the Nigerian government shut off the country's Internet and mobile communications networks in the capital of Abuja for 12 hours during May 29th's presidential inauguration. OpenNet Initiative outlined the incident.

The election saw interim president Goodluck Jonathan elected for a full-term. Nigeria is not noteworthy for its repressive attitude to the Internet. In fact, Jonathan was the first presidential candidate anywhere to announce his candidacy on Facebook.

Update after the jump.

Iran Officially Worst Online Oppressor. A new report from Freedom House has ranked Iran as the world's worst abuser of online rights.

"Freedom on the Net 2011" determined that the five worst countries for online freedom - based on obstacles to access, limits on content and violations of user rights - are Iran, followed by Burma, China, Cuba and Tunisia. (The last entry is certainly changed somewhat by the uprising earlier this year.)

In a blog post on the OpenNet Initiative blog, Rebekah Heacock notes that "most of sub-Saharan Africa has historically been free of technical filtering." No more.

Uganda, at the insistence of its national police commissioner, has sent its three largest ISPs a memo requesting they begin blocking what they called "Tweeter" (presumably Twitter) and Facebook, in order to "eliminate the connection and sharing of information that incites the public."

While countries as disparate as Armenia and Mauritania react to the reality of change in Tunisia and Egypt, China continues its crackdown. After blocking terms like "jasmine" (for the Jasmine Uprising) and even country names like "Egypt" from online searches, it began a campaign of arrests and harassment of protesters, and possible future protesters, in its major cities.

Now, in a material indication of its priorities, China has released its budget expenditures at the start of its new parliamentary session. For the first time, the country's spending on internal security, including online censorship program and tools, has passed the yearly budget for the army and all other defense organization.