Updates are still being worked on for the Symbian platform, it seems, with today's release of an update for Nokia Mobile VPN, to improve 'certificate chain parsing' in the future. If the last eight words mean nothing to you then move on, but it's possible that certificate errors were about to become a problem to Symbian-using enterprise customers, in which case update away, it's only a 500K download.

From the update listing:

Nokia Mobile VPN is an IKE/IPSec based Virtual Private Network client that enables access to intranet services. Nokia Mobile VPN is compatible with various IKE/IPsec VPN Gateways.

v45.0.6 contains improvements to certificate chain parsing, earlier versions might have problems in the future with complicated certificate chain structures.

When it comes to official censorship, Iran doesn’t appear to distinguish friends from foes.

The Persian-language website of “Voice of Russia”-- the international broadcaster financed by the Russian government -- said in a statement that it has been blocked in Iran since February 13.

According to the statement, access to its website in Iran is now possible only by using antifiltering software and proxy sites, which Iranians use to access “blocked Western websites.”  

Even the most open, democratic governments have sought laws and new forms of surveillance that many see as a new wave of censorship -- and that includes the United States.

The U.S. government asked Google for data on its users more than 31,000 times in 2012 alone, for example. And the government rarely obtained a search warrant first, Google recently revealed; in nearly all cases, the company ended up turning over at least some data.

Some argue that heightened surveillance, restrictions on Internet freedom and even censorship are necessary to protect intellectual property rights, prevent cyberespionage, fight child pornography, and protect national interests such as nuclear power plants from hackers. And here the U.S. is far from alone.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) minister Miao Wei announced yesterday (link via Google Translate) that the Chinese government plans to increase the number of households with broadband access, with more than 70 percent of China’s Internet users getting 4M broadband service by the end of 2013. The initiative is part of the 2013 Broadband China project, which aims to increase FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) coverage by more 35 million households this year.

The United States is the country most targeted by cyber-attacks in the world, according to the National Intelligence Estimate, a report produced by the U.S. government based on feedback information from its intelligence agencies.

The Washington Post has recently published a report called "The foreign spies stealing U.S. economic secrets through cyberspace." Until now, the question was mainly addressed from the standpoint of military or counterintelligence, the concern becomes also about US competitiveness. Of course on the other side stand China and Russia, becoming the great powers of industrial espionage through IT.