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Chinese Hackers Bring Down Change.org in Response to Ai Weiwei Campaign. Chinese government-sponsored hackers took down Change.org with a DDoS campaign after the site registered over 100,000 signatories on a petition in favor of the imprisoned Chinese artist.

Ai Weiwei had been known for his role in the construction of the Beijing Olympic stadium and as China's leading digital activist and a pioneer in the use of blogging and Twitter in China.

Love the future.

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."

Google today announced a number of SMS-based services for the African market. Google SMS provides access to information by SMS (news, local weather, sports, agriculture tips, etc.), while Google Trader is an SMS-based marketplace where buyers and sellers can connect. Google SMS Tips is a query-and-answer service that can take any free-form text query, find the keywords, and then identify and return a relevant answer from a large database.

Facebook senior engineer Charlie Cheever flew to Kampala, Uganda, a couple of weekends ago to lead a Facebook Developers Garage and teach 100+ East African students how to take advantage of the growing Facebook economy using the company's apps platform and APIs. Leila Chirayath (founder of Samasource) and I (from Appfrica Labs) were also involved. The three of us organized this event to offer not only a hands-on workshop, but a concrete path for any developer in the region to expand his or her network and develop for an international audience.