Twitter reports image blocking in Venezuela

Posted on Friday, 02.14.14

Twitter reports image blocking in Venezuela
BY FRANK BAJAK
ASSOCIATED PRESS

LIMA, Peru -- Twitter said Friday that Venezuela had blocked images on
its service following an anti-government protest that turned bloody, and
it offered a workaround for users who want to get tweets via text
message on their cellphones.

Hacktivists, meanwhile, defaced and knocked various government websites
offline, organizing and choreographing online denial-of-service attacks
that flood sites with traffic, making them temporarily unreachable.

Twitter spokesman Nu Wexler said Friday via email in response to an
Associated Press query that "Twitter images are currently blocked in
Venezuela." He included the text of a tweet the company sent explaining
the workaround, but did not respond to follow-up questions.

Users told the AP that it appeared the blockage had ended by Friday
morning. They said it was most intense Thursday, the day after two
students were killed by gunfire that appeared to come from government
supporters.

Venezuela's main telecommunications company, CANTV, is government-run
and handles the overwhelming majority of Internet traffic.

In a statement released Friday evening, CANTV "denied emphatically and
categorically involvement in the failure" users experienced in receiving
images Thursday on Twitter.

Video and still images that circulated via Twitter after the killings
purported to show police and pro-government activists shooting at
protesters. The images' authenticity could not be confirmed.

Media coverage of the protests was limited inside Venezuela, where the
socialist government dominates the airwaves. Even international media
faced harassment as police smashed and confiscated cameras.

Venezuela's government also suspended broadcasting inside the country on
Wednesday night of the regional news channel NTN24, claiming it was
trying to incite citizens to overthrow the government.

On Friday, the director of Venezuela's telecoms regulator, William
Castillo, tweeted that the government had blocked "various connections
from which public websites were being attacked."

He said "cyberattacks against Venezuela were continuing from various
parts of the world."

A Venezuelan engineering student, Andres Azpurua, said he tracked the
government's blocking on Thursday of the domain twimg.com, which Twitter
uses to serve up images on the social network. He sent screenshots of
tweets in which authors' thumbnail images were also missing.

Venezuela has been blocking websites that track the black market rate
for the country's currency for months, and for some weeks late last year
hindered access to the popular Bitly service that shortens Web addresses.

The New York company said such restrictions had only previously been
seen in China.

Activists said they believe the Twitter image blocking was designed to
censor images that President Nicolas Maduro's government did not want
Venezuelans to see.

Bill Woodcock, research director at the nonprofit Packet Clearing House,
said Venezuela has "a pretty tight control over the Internet compared to
other countries. Not as tight as Cuba, but probably tighter than anybody
else."

The San Francisco-based researcher said Venezuela is in some ways more
restrictive than China, India or Pakistan, closer to Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait because government Internet
providers can selectively block access for specific customers.

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Associated Press writer Luis Alonso Lugo contributed to this report from
Washington, D.C.

Frank Bajak on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fbajak

http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/02/14/3936140/twitter-reports-image-blocking.html