The launch of the six strikes anti-piracy scheme in the United States has boosted demand for VPN services and BitTorrent proxies. Data from Google reveals a big surge in searches for terms such as “BitTorrent VPN” and “BitTorrent proxy” over the past two weeks. Some VPN providers see the scheme as a clear invasion of privacy and are encouraging people to protect themselves.

Last year a study in Sweden showed that many people respond to tough copyright enforcement measures by signing up for VPNs and other privacy services.

Instead of stopping their defiant habit, these file-sharers take measures to hide their IP-addresses and bypass the monitoring. The researchers predicted that this would also happen with the launch of the six-strikes system in the United States.

Chinese netizens finding it increasingly difficult to bypass the Great Firewall after a recent crackdown on virtual private network (VPN) services have found an unlikely ally in a new public relay VPN service from Japan.

The VPN Gate Academic Experiment Project (h/t TechInAsia) was set up by researchers at the Graduate School of Japan’s University of Tsukuba with a mission to "expand the knowledge of ‘Global Distributed Public VPN Relay Servers’."

Iranian authorities have blocked the use of most "Virtual Private Networks", a tool that many Iranians use to get around an extensive government Internet filter in the country, three months ahead of the presidential election.

The Iranian government is still allowing citizens to use a short list of approved VPNs which could potentially be more easily monitored for unwanted behavior. Whether Iranians will actually use the government-approved VPNs remains an open question.

In an effort to prevent students from accessing inappropriate material on school computers, public school districts in Rhode Island are trampling on the First Amendment rights of both their students and teachers.

At least, that’s the conclusion reached by the Rhode Island branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a new report released this week titled “Access Denied: How Internet Filtering in Schools Harms Public Education.”

March 12th is the International Day against cyber-censorship. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) organization takes the most of this key date, each year, to update its "Report against the Internet Enemies". The 2013 edition of this report presents the top 5 countries but also top 5 companies which collaborate with these countries to establish or expand cybercensorship.

The five countries distinguished, which are indeed the worst ones are: Bahrain, China, Iran, Syria and Vietnam.