China's censors have a favorite new tactic: If you don't like what people are saying online, shout louder.

Faced with the unprecedented explosion of information available to citizens over social media - some of it exposing corruption - officials have realized that simply deleting posts is not enough. They need to push positive propaganda as well.

At a closed-door meeting this week, Beijing's propaganda chiefs rolled out a new plan to have 2 million propaganda workers spread the Party line on microblogs, according to the Beijing News.

The instructions issue orders for all workers to "read Weibo, open a Weibo account, write Weibo posts, and study Weibo." (Weibo is the Chinese term for Twitter-like social media.)

Beijing propaganda boss Lu Wei told attendees that all government offices should open an account, with the goal of inundating the Chinese internet with positive tweets about anything the Communist Party deems sensitive: inequality, food prices, economic hardship, unemployment, the runaway real-estate market.

"The strategy has always been to make sure that the voices that are approved by the government are the loudest and clearest and easiest to hear - on all platforms," says Jeremy Goldkorn, a Chinese media expert in Beijing. "That's Leninist media strategy adapted to the modern age."

In its ceaseless campaign to control dissent in China, officials have made clear they are no longer content with simply trying to censor and police online writings; they want to guide the debate as well.

The blocking of the online newspaper El Diario de Cuba signals a troubling trend toward increased internet censorship in Venezuela. Freedom House condemns this censorship and calls on the Venezuelan government to adhere to its international commitments to protect press freedom and access to information, including on the internet.

Beginning January 14th, a high number of internet users of state-owned and private telecommunication company CANTV were denied access to El Diario de Cuba’s site. The blocking followed the website’s publication of a number of stories on President Chavez’s health. Only a few days before the access issues, El Diario de Cuba’s website visitor access reached a peak of 68,000 visits from Venezuela. By Monday, the number had fallen sharply indicating an access problem.

A variety of firewall, spam filtering, and VPN hardware products sold by Barracuda Networks were hit with a security exploit this week which allowed user accounts to become compromised.

Those products contained undocumented backdoor accounts that allows for easy remote access to "multiple Barracuda Networks products".

The SSH backdoor is hardcoded into the associated products, and the discovered exploit can be implemented to gain shell access to vulnerable Barracuda equipment, according to an advisory published Thursday by SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab.

Geo-blocking – or geo-gating, as the networks prefer to call it – is how content providers such as Hulu, Pandora, NBC, CBS, FOX, ABC etc who are moving their television, radio and music content online, restrict access to their online videos outside the territories where they hold the rights. Anyone outside of the U.S. who has tried to watch a show on Hulu, or outside of the UK who has tried to watch a show on BBC iPlayer, are just two examples.

Despite the convenience of free public Wi-Fi networks like those found in Starbucks and McDonald's they are also a serious risk when it comes to your data and personal information.

There is a Firefox plug-in that makes it even easier for tech novices to snoop wireless traffic, making it even more crucial than ever that users understand the risks and take precautions when using Wi-fi hotspots.