A list of open source software that provide alternatives to paid products.

A rundown of the top 5 extensions for the Google Chrome browser that allows users to surf the Internet anonymously, and bypass site and content filters.

1. Proxy Switchy!

• Manage and switch between multiple proxy profiles.
• Change the proxy configuration of Chrome and IE in one click.
• URL based switch rules.
• Supports Socks v4 and v5.
• Change LAN and VPN/Dial-up proxy settings.
• Quickly add rules for currently active websites.
• Quick proxy switch between two profiles or cycle all profiles.
• Online rule list support (AutoProxy compatible).
• Export switch rules as PAC/RuleList file.
• Backup/Restore options.
• Proxy change monitoring.
• Colorful profiles and icons.

2. Switch Proxy

3. Proxy Anywhere

4. Proxy SwitchySharp

• Use Chrome Proxy API instead of changing system proxy settings.
• Support auto switching, which switches among proxy profiles according to URL rules.
• Data import and export.
• Online rule lists (AutoProxy? compatible).
• Use event handling (which is much more efficient and accurate) instead of polling to monitor proxy change.
• Advanced quick switch mode options allow you to switch among your proxies with one click.

5. Hide My Ass!

• One click proxy. Whilst already browsing a website, click the extension icon to browse the website anonymously. Alternatively click the icon on a new tab to be shown a web proxy form and specify a website to proxify.
• Select one of 20 web proxy domain names (not just HideMyAss.com).
• Select a specific web proxy server (USA, UK, NL).
• URL obfuscation. Choose between encoded and encrypted web proxy URL's.
• SSL encryption. Choose between HTTP and HTTPS web browsing.
• Option to always launch web proxy in incognito mode for increased anonymity.
• Option to always launch the web proxy in a new tab.
• Option to always ask for manual URL entry (and not redirect based on address bar entries).

MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom has found himself in the legally surreal position of demanding that he be provided the evidence against him to build his own case. Shortly after, the FBI commented to the media that they are investigating child pornography on the servers. That's only a small start of some of the details that has been happening lately in the MegaUpload case.

Back in court, as Dotcom was tearing up, his lawyers seethed. Dotcom, who has denied being a pirate, was in a New Zealand courtroom on Wednesday seeking a judicial review of the search warrants served on him and Megaupload. His lawyers argued that New Zealand authorities illegally seized data that wasn't relevant to the case. Dotcom wants some of his possessions returned, according to Ira Rothken, the US-based lawyer leading Dotcom's worldwide defence. But that's only one part of the US government effort that has angered the Dotcom side. According to Rothken, when Dotcom's lawyers asked authorities to give them a copy of the data taken from him, they learned that New Zealand officials had shipped the information to the US FBI for analysis. Paul Davison, Dotcom's head lawyer in New Zealand, told the media that he was assured by authorities that none of the data seized would leave the country without warning. Without the data, Dotcom can't properly defend himself, his lawyers argue, and they feel betrayed. "The court will determine whether the United States and New Zealand had the authorisation to remove data from New Zealand absent a court order," Rothken told CNET. "This is a serious international issue, and we believe it requires proportional remedy ...It seems as though the United States is trying to win on tactics rather than on merits."

The US government is trying to "run out the clock" by denying Kim Dotcom's legal team access to the materials it needs to prepare for key court appearances. So says Ira Rothken, a lawyer for the Megaupload founder.

Rothken also faulted the government for the lengthy delay in supplying Dotcom with a copy of his own data. The defense team still hasn't gotten copies of Dotcom's own hard drives more than 4 months after the raid. "They're making an argument that they still haven't made copies of the rest of the hard drives because it's too burdensome to do it in New Zealand and they have to bring them back to the US," he told us. Rothken called that "hard to believe." "They could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on helicopters and raids," he said, "but they can't use the 800 number to Best Buy to buy the computer equipment they need to make mirror copies of hard drives."

Kim Dotcom's lawyer filed a complaint at the High Court in Auckland against "excessive police action" in the January arrest. The defendant is awaiting an August hearing on an extradition request to face trial, the New Zealand Herald reported. Paul Davison said Dotcom denied the US FBI charges of copyright infringement and money laundering, and insisted his website was legitimate. He said the seized computers contained CCTV footage of the raids at his rented mansion. Dotcom is seeking judicial review of search warrants used by police when they arrested him on behalf of the FBI. Davison said the seized material included thousands of e-mails, private information and family home movies going back decades. "This was just a household emptied out," the lawyer said. "These are libraries of documents, the data storage... Do you take a whole library when you are looking for a book?"

United States law enforcement authorities have confirmed they are investigating images of child abuse unearthed from Kim Dotcom's Megaupload servers. The material was discovered during FBI examination of the contents of the internet millionaire's cloud storage system, seized in the global takedown of the "Mega Conspiracy" that included police raids at Dotcom's Auckland mansion in January. Dotcom, 38, is currently on bail awaiting an extradition hearing. Authorities say he used Megaupload and its affiliated sites to knowingly make money from pirated movies and games, and have charged him with multiple copyright offences. A spokesman from the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, Peter Carr, said there was an ongoing investigation into the images of child pornography found on the servers but would make no further comment. Experts say Dotcom is unlikely to be held accountable for the child pornography also uploaded to the Mega websites. The laws covering objectionable material had broader "safe harbours" that ensured online service providers were not blamed for the actions of their users, said New Zealand internet lawyer Rick Shera. "It's absolutely impossible for a cloud service to scrutinise what's on its servers."

The patience of Kyle Goodwin, a former MegaUpload user, has apparently run out. The videographer, who stored clips of high school sports action at MegaUpload, filed a three-page motion today that asks a federal court in Virginia to figure out a way to return his clips to him. Goodwin has waited for the company, the U.S. government, Hollywood film studios, and other interested parties to determine what to do with the data on MegaUpload's servers, which were seized by the United States in January. The district court overseeing the case told everyone with a stake in MegaUpload's data to find a solution amongst themselves, but talks have dragged on for weeks without any kind of resolution.

The Google Transparency Report has certainly gained some attention over the last few days. One of the findings in the report was that FilesTube is the number one website when it comes to DMCA takedown notices. We had a chance to speak to FilesTube.

The United States has recently issued a report slamming China for an abysmal human rights record. Meanwhile, China hit back at the United States with a report of their own slamming the United States for an abysmal human rights record. We did some digging and found both reports so you can read both of them for yourself.

The government also censors the internet; maintains highly repressive policies in ethnic minority areas such as Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia; systematically condones— with rare exceptions—abuses of power in the name of “social stability” ; and rejects domestic and international scrutiny of its human rights record as attempts to destabilize and impose “Western values” on the country. The security apparatus—hostile to liberalization and legal reform—seems to have steadily increased its power since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China’s “social stability maintenance” expenses are now larger than its defense budget.

In February 2011, unnerved by the pro-democracy Arab Spring movements and a scheduled Chinese leadership transition in October 2012, the government launched the largest crackdown on human rights lawyers, activists, and critics in a decade. The authorities also strengthened internet and press censorship, put the activities of many dissidents and critics under surveillance, restricted their activities, and took the unprecedented step of rounding up over 30 of the most outspoken critics and “disappearing” them for weeks.

The government continued in 2011 to violate domestic and international legal guarantees of freedom of press and expression by restricting bloggers, journalists, and an estimated more than 500 million internet users. The government requires internet search firms and state media to censor issues deemed officially “sensitive,” and blocks access to foreign websites including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. However, the rise of Chinese online social networks—in particularly Sina’s Weibo, which has 200 million users—has created a new platform for citizens to express opinions and to challenge official limitations on freedom of speech despite intense scrutiny by China’s censors. On January 30 official concern about Egyptian anti-government protests prompted a ban on internet searches for “Egypt.” On February 20 internet rumors about a Chinese “Jasmine Revolution” resulted in a ban on web searches for “jasmine.” In August a cascade of internet criticism of the government’s response to the July 23 Wenzhou train crash prompted the government to warn of new penalties, including suspension of microblog access, against bloggers who transmit “false or misleading information.”

While advocating press freedom, the United States in fact imposes fairly strict censoring and control over the press and "press freedom" is just a political tool used to beautify itself and attack other nations. The U.S. Congress failed to pass laws on protecting rights of reporters' news sources, according to media reports. An increasing number of American reporters lost jobs for "improper remarks on politics." U.S. reporter Helen Thomas resigned for critical remarks about Israel in June 2010 ( "Report: On the situation with human rights in a host of world states," the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia, December 28, 2011). While forcibly evacuating the Zuccotti Park, the original Occupy Wall Street encampment, the New York police blocked journalists from covering the police actions. They set cordon lines to prevent reporters from getting close to the park and closed airspace to make aerial photography impossible. In addition to using pepper spray against reporters, the police also arrested around 200 journalists, including reporters from NPR and the New York Times (uschinapress.com, November 15, 2011). By trampling on press freedom and public interests, these actions by the U.S. authorities caused a global uproar. U.S. mainstream media' s response to the Occupy Wall Street movement revealed the hypocrisy in handling issues of freedom and democracy. Poll by Pew Research Center indicated that in the second week of the movement, reports on the movement only accounted for 1.68 percent of the total media reports by nationwide media organizations. On October 15, 2011, when the Occupy Wall Street movement evolved to be a global action, CNN and Fox News gave no live reports on it, in a sharp contrast to the square protest in Cairo, for which both CNN and Fox News broadcast live 24 hours.

The U.S. imposes fairly strict restriction on the Internet, and its approach "remains full of problems and contradictions." (The website of the Foreign Policy magazine, February 17, 2011) "Internet freedom" is just an excuse for the United States to impose diplomatic pressure and seek hegemony. The U.S. Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act both have clauses about monitoring the Internet, giving the government or law enforcement organizations power to monitor and block any Internet content "harmful to national security." Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 stipulates that the federal government has "absolute power" to shut down the Internet under a declared national emergency. According to a report by British newspaper the Guardian dated March 17, 2011, the U.S. military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas, and will allow the U.S. military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives. The project aims to control and restrict free speech on the Internet (The Guardian, March 17, 2011). According to a commentary by the Voice of Russia on February 2, 2012, a subsidiary under the U.S. government' s security agency employed several hundred analysts, who were tasked with monitoring private archives of foreign Internet users in a secret way, and were able to censor as many as five million microblogging posts. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security routinely searched key words like "illegal immigrants," "virus," "death," and "burst out" on Twitter with fake accounts and then secretly traced the Internet users who forwarded related content. According to a report by the Globe and Mail on January 30, 2012, Leigh Van Bryan, a British, prior to his flight to the U.S., wrote in a Twitter post, "Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?" As a result, Bryan along with a friend were handcuffed and put in lockdown with suspected drug smugglers for 12 hours by armed guards after landing in Los Angeles International Airport, just like "terrorists" . Among many angered by the incident in Britain, an Internet user posted a comment, "What' s worse, being arrested for an innocent tweet, or the fact that the American Secret Service monitors every electronic message in the world?" (The Daily Mail, January 31, 2012)

Google is offering a rather insightful look of what is being requested to be taken down. Many were copyright related, but some were requests from governments all around the world. That includes the American, Canadian and British government. We take a look through the report.

Striking is the sheer volume of takedown notices Google receives: in just the last month, it processed over 1.2 million requests for Search alone, from 1,296 copyright owners and 1,087 reporting organizations. That scale allows it to present trends in the data that might not otherwise be apparent. For example, even in the case of notorious "pirate" sites like The Pirate Bay, Google has received takedown notices for less than 5% of their indexable pages. On the other hand, this report also provides a clearer look into the abuse of copyright tools. Google explains that it's complied with 97% of takedown requests received between July and December of 2011, but also provides examples of obviously invalid copyright requests it's received. Those examples range from cases of negligent over-application, such as movie studios who have attempted to remove IMDB entries or links to legitimate trailers for their movies, to clear attempts at censorship, such as businesses who have issued takedown requests for employee accounts of unfair treatment. Of course, there are even more ridiculous examples: the report describes a reporting company sending a takedown notice for links to earlier takedown notices that obviously did not infringe. This transparency report gives Google a chance to highlight some of its good citizenship as an online service provider. Although the burden of liability is supposed to be on the organization that sends the takedown notice — it is required to claim under penalty of perjury to have a good-faith belief of copyright infringement — in practice many groups are willing to skirt those rules, sending takedown notices to silence unfavorable speech or even without human review. The 3% of takedown notices that Google chooses not to comply with is a large absolute number, and each of those are instances of legitimate speech that would have otherwise been shut down. Google deserves to be commended for that behavior.

- A major U.S. motion picture studio requested removal of the IMDb page for a movie released by the studio, as well as the official trailer posted on a major authorized online media service. - A U.S. reporting organization working on behalf of a major movie studio requested removal of a movie review on a major newspaper website twice. - A driving school in the U.K. requested the removal of a competitor's homepage from Search, on the grounds that the competitor had copied an alphabetized list of cities and regions where instruction was offered. - A content protection organization for motion picture, record and sports programming companies requested the removal of search results that link to copyright removal requests submitted by one of their clients and other URLs that did not host infringing content. - An individual in the U.S. requested the removal of search results that link to court proceedings referencing her first and last name on the ground that her name was copyrightable. - Multiple individuals in the U.S. requested the removal of search results that link to blog posts and web forums that associated their names with certain allegations, locations, dates or negative comments. - A company in the U.S. requested the removal of search results that link to an employee's blog posts about unjust and unfair treatment.

We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove. Separately, we received requests from a different local law enforcement agency for removal of videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. We did not comply with those requests, which we have categorized in this Report as defamation requests. The number of content removal requests we received increased by 70% compared to the previous reporting period.

We received a request from a Canadian politician to remove a blog criticizing his policies. We declined to remove the blog because it did not violate our policies.

A list of tools that enable you to watch Flash videos on your iPad without jailbreaking.

Apple has come out with all sorts of reasons around why it’s not a good idea to allow Flash to play on iDevices, however with its almost 10-inch screen and portable frame, the iPad is the perfect device to watch video clips, TV shows, movies, and browse the web while away from home. The demand is there, and, as always, a handful of developers have stepped up to overcome the challenge. Here is a list of apps and software that circumvent Apple’s restrictions and enable you to view Flash videos and websites on your iPad.

iSwifter - Free ($4.99 after 7 days)

iSwifter allows you to unlock Flash content on your iPad, leaving you free to watch Flash videos, browser Flash websites and use interactive Flash applications, including games. You can use the app in place of or in addition to the iPad’s Safari app, and it’s free to download and try iSwifter for the first seven days, after which you need to make a $4.99 in-app purchase to carry on using it.

Skyfire - $2.99

Like iSwifter, Skyfire acts as a replacement for alternative iPad browsers. Specifically designed for users to watch Flash videos, Skyfire also contains a Video Recommendation Engine, which suggests other videos you might enjoy. The app only caters for Flash videos, so doesn’t support Flash games or applications, however if you’re looking for an app primarily to watch video clips, Skyfire is a popular choice.

Photon Flash Browser - $4.99

At $4.99, Photon Flash Browser is one of the pricer apps on the list, however it has a range of features that will make the $5 worthwhile to many Flash lovers. As well as supporting Flash videos, and use Flash games and apps, Photon Flash Browser allows you to multi-task using multiple tabs, turn on private browsing, share content through Facebook, print using AirPrint, and save your favorite pages as bookmarks.

Cloud Browse - $2.99

Cloud Browse provides a full Firefox browsing session on your iPad, and supports both Flash and Java content. The app works by hosting a desktop Firefox session through your device, overcoming Apple’s Flash restrictions and providing a fast browsing experience in the process. The basic version of Cloud Browse costs $2.99, and this provides you with 10 minutes of secure, anonymous browsing per session. For unlimited secured browsing, and to get rid of the adverts, you need to pay a monthly subscription, which starts at the equivalent of just over $4 per month.

iOS Flash Video - Free

iOS Flash Video is slightly different from the other items on this list in that it’s a bookmarklet you can add to your iPad’s browser rather than a stand-alone app. Consequently, the set-up process is slightly more complex than simply downloading an app. To use the bookmarklet, you have to download OPlayer or OPlayer Lite from the app store. Then, save the iOS Flash Video page as a bookmark, edit the code slightly, and you’re ready to start watching Flash videos. This bookmarklet only supports certain video sites, however several big names make the list, including Facebook, Dailymotion, Vimeo, MegaVideo and Blip.tv.

hannah@zeropaid.com

We've been following the latest developments of UK mobile censorship closely; documenting when a website is found out to be censored on so-called 'adult filters'. After documenting several websites that got censored, the next one to be found on the blacklist turns out to be us.

At ZeroPaid, we pride ourselves on trying to post the most accurate stories possible. That is why whenever we learn of a news story, we cross-reference with numerous other reliable sources to ensure that what we report is the most accurate story possible. The question, in this case, boiled down to "What if every reliable source that looked at a specific story was wrong?"

In October 2010, Limewire was forced to shut down after a judge in the Federal District Court ruled that its main filesharing functions be disabled, but the RIAA is still actively pursuing its owners for damages. Given that the combined wealth of the entire planet is around $60 trillion (£38 trillion), the RIAA likely has no hope of securing this in damages, but believe this is what it is owed, reports Computerworld.com. In the suit, the RIAA says that given that the courts have identified over 11,000 songs as "infringed" material, and, as each song has probably been downloaded thousands of times, it should be compensated for each individual download. However, the presiding Judge in the case, Judge Wood, disagrees and has said that the music industry is entitled only to a "single statutory damage award from Defendants per work infringed" for several reasons, including one that suggests that any other decision could lead to "absurd results".

It's the gift that keeps on giving for opponents of internet censorship. As the list of censored websites grow, so does the list of websites that don't deserve to be censored. This time, the public relations nightmare continues as a mobile ISP blocks The Telegraph as a pornographic website.