Although the Russian government has proven adept at restricting access to online content, the government recently endowed itself with broad new powers over online speech.  In July 2012, the Russian Duma passed an internet censorship bill. In general, free speech is protected under the Russian Constitution; the Constitution of 1993 declares Russia as a democratic, federative, law-based state, guaranteeing its citizens’ right of free speech in Article 29. These protections, however, leave room for the state to exercise police powers to ensure the safety of its citizens, and it is under that authority that the Duma enacted this law.  Ostensibly, the law aims to protect children from child pornography, drug use, suicide and other “harmful content.”  In order to effectuate the protection, the bill requires ISPs to block specific websites that appear on a secretive government blacklist.

Before the law was even implemented, a court ordered the shutdown of the entirety of LiveJournal  (not as part of the government blacklist) due to a single neo-Nazi blog entry among the thousands hosted on the popular site. Recently, the government censored LJRossia.org, formed to support freedom of speech, over two posts which contained stories involving motives of child pornography. Instead of blocking or removing the particular posts, the entire site was made inaccessible on at least one Russian ISP, RosTelekom. Additionally, the site hosted blogs of at least two prominent journalists who have often been critical of the Kremlin: Andrei Malgin and Vladimir Pribylovsky, the latter of whom published a database that exposed government corruption.

Once ISPs implemented the blacklist, among the first websites to be integrated into the blacklist and blocked was Lurkomore, a satirical equivalent of Wikipedia, along with a Russian 4chan based discussion board – 2ch. 2ch and Lurkomore are especially popular among the Russia’s tech and hacking communities, frequently focusing on discussion of questionable topics, mocking of the president, drugs and violence.  Despite the ban, the owners of these two sites circumvented the ban by switching to different IP addresses.  Subsequently the ban on Lurkomore was removed after the owners deleted the pages featuring information on illegal substances.

In total more than 180 sites have been banned since the law came into effect. Although it is not possible to see the blacklist in its entirety, it is possible to check if a specific site is on the blacklist through an official government portal.

It is already apparent that the government can use the blacklist law to restrict content far beyond that which is dangerous to children.  Despite this potential for overreach, Internet censorship in Russia has not yet reached China’s level of censorship. The Russian law does not yet criminalize use of proxy browsers that mask visited sites and keep browsing anonymous. This allows the use of software such as the Tor Onion Router to access restricted websites. The Duma has considered adding amendments to the law to include banning of services such as Tor, yet these amendments are currently unenacted.

It’s entirely possible that the Duma will only toughen the censorship laws in the future, particularly given the vibrancy of anti-Kremlin sentiment on online message groups and communities. However, even without amendments, the law could have substantial impacts on online speech in Russia.  Even before the law went into effect, the government had proven adept at censoring online content.  And in its current state, the vague language of the law allows wide-ranging interpretations and the censoring of websites in accordance with court orders.

Jean-Loup Richet, Special Herdict Contributor

His tragic death has strongly affected many of the communities in which Aaron was an important member.  And some of those hurt by his passing believe that his death was due to his harsh treatment at the hands of federal prosecutors. His father went so far as to say that his son “did not commit suicide but was killed by the government. Someone who made the world a better place was pushed to his death by the government.” It’s easy to understand why many viewed Swartz’s prosecution as overly harsh.  He had already spent most of his life savings on legal fees, and a conviction would have led to upwards of 35 years in prison and fines of up to $1,000,000. Even if the prosecutions’ offered plea bargain was harsh — under the offer, Swartz would have to plead guilty to every charge and face six to eight months in prison, after committing a crime that was purely for the benefit of the public.

As one of the creators of the Creative Commons copyright licenses, Swartz had been an advocate for the sharing of knowledge and creative materials. The vision of the Creative Commons license is to “realize the full potential of the Internet – universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity.” Swartz’s actions were in keeping with this idealistic vision.

Swartz’s death generated a lot of attention (and protests from groups like Anonymous), but in many ways it has overshadowed how many Internet activists have recently found themselves in the law’s crosshairs.  For instance, in the past few months, two British men were arrested in Britain for their involvement with Anonymous’ recent DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on PayPal (carried out due to PayPal’s refusal to process WikiLeaks donations).  And last year six people in the US were arrested in connection with Anonymous’ activities, including alleged leader Barrett Brown. Some proponents of DDoS attacks argue that the attacks are a form of civil disobedience, and have even gone so far as to ask the White House to recognize them as such.  But the law currently views DDoS as something more nefarious; participating in a DDoS attack can carry a maximum of ten years in prison in the UK and US.  Moreover, because participation is as easy as downloading a free program and pressing a single button, many people may participate in such attacks without fully appreciating the significant legal risks they are taking.  Those who do appreciate such risks may be dissuaded from engaging in this form of protest (for better or worse).

The security firm McAfee has predicted that participation in the Anonymous collective will decline in 2013, stating that too many “un-coordinated and unclear operations” are destroying the group’s reputation. The very fact that anyone can claim to be a member of Anonymous has created a situation where the group’s aims have become fragmented. To make matters worse, the main Anonymous Twitter account was hacked by rival group Rustle League, undermining its reputation.

Regardless of whether Anonymous continues in its current form, or splinters into many smaller groups, what is clear is that these forms of cyber protest will continue to become more prevalent as will the prosecutions for them. Considering Anonymous’ recent attack on PayPal was said to cost the company around $5m, it’s clear to see why businesses aren’t taking these attacks lightly.

The law, however, should leave room for digital protest.  Although some punishment is a necessary component of civil disobedience, that punishment should not be the same for protest and outright vandalism.  That said, distinguishing between protest and vandalism is not easy.  Vandalism, by definition, involves the deliberate destruction or damage of property, DDoS attacks are conducted only for a set period of time (usually a few hours), and leave the website undamaged afterwards. In Swartz’s case, he did not physically damage or delete JSTOR’s archives; he intended to do nothing but share its contents with others.  But his actions were not harm free.  He shared 4 million articles from academic journals, representing a financial loss for JSTOR.  JSTOR charges as much as $50,000 a year for an annual subscription fee, at least parts of which go to pay copyright fees to the owners of the articles in the databases.  Thus, were Swartz’s actions more like protest or vandalism?  According to legal expert Orin Kerr, the case was a reasonable application of the law and wasn’t an abuse of prosecutorial authority.

DDoS attacks can also have an economic impact through site downtime, lost customers, and lost sales, but in a digital world, how else can an angry public make its presence felt or its voice heard?  Anonymous is currently calling for DDoS attacks to be recognised as a form of protest, and punished accordingly with a token fine rather than a prison sentence. Jay Leiderman of the Guardian agrees that these attacks are in fact a form of speech and should be protected under the first amendment.  This right of protest, however, must be balanced against the potential harms that DDoS can have on online businesses and others uses of online content affected by DDoS.

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Diane Sori, a blogger for Patriot Factor, reports that she has repeatedly been blocked from posting. As an experiment, The Examiner attempted to post some content, and was warned to slow down before being blocked for two days. According to the website FacebookCensorship.com. Facebook has actively been censoring conservative content for some time now, while leaving left-wing and liberal content untouched, even if it could reasonably be deemed as offensive.

As counterpoint to the discussion of conservative censorship, Liberal Lamp Post presents examples of censorship of liberal posts, specifically in blocking links to a liberal guide to Republican talking points and other material, with blocks lasting for 15 days. Commenters on the site go on to note examples of apolitical areas of animal rescue, OxFam charity, and outside-US issues that have also been blocked under the banner of anti-spamming.

In October last year, Facebook came under fire for censoring an anti-Obama meme posted by the account Special Operations Speaks (SOS). While Facebook is known to have an automatic spam detection filter, it also has a staff of human moderators who manually check content for anything deemed offensive or inappropriate. The deletion of the anti-Obama meme was done by one of these moderators in accordance with Facebook’s policy.  Facebook subsequently reversed the decision and apologized for it. Because of these decisions and reversals, many people feel the policies are incomprehensible and/or inconsistently applied.  For instance Facebook has prohibited photos of breastfeeding mothers and drunk people sleeping with things drawn onto their faces, but not crushed heads, excessive blood, or humorously offensive content.

In December 2012, Richard Gage, the founder of an organization known as Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, found that his page had been taken down along with the pages of several of his peers. A reporter for the alternative news website Infowars, Darrin McBreen, has also had his page removed, having been told by Facebook that he “should be careful about making political statements” and that “Facebook is about building relationships not a platform for your political viewpoint.”

Facebook supposedly instituted the community standard policies in order “to balance the needs and interests of a global population,” and to protect its users from spam, hate speech, and abuse. This is a reasonable position given how quickly the user experience would degenerate if automatic spammers and abusive trolls were allowed to run amok on the network. The problem, of course, is that no organization can be completely neutral and that what constitutes offensive content is always subjective. Attempting to police the content of users who question the truth of 9/11, criticize Barack Obama, or spin Republican talking points certainly seems misguided, even if it is not politically motivated.

Used as a political tool, Facebook could be incredibly powerful. In 2010 and 2012 elections in the United States, Facebook allowed users to tell their friends when they voted.  According to Facebook’s research, this may have increased turnout by as much as 2.2%.  But as Harvard University Professor Jonathan Zittrain has pointed out, Facebook could use this power to try to influence elections; what if they only showed the voting message to people that they thought were from one party?  To be clear, Facebook hasn’t done such a thing.  However, this thought experiment demonstrates the risks if Facebook is not even handed in their content removal policies.  Couldn’t skewing the content removed (and the content that remains) influence the political leanings of users in the same way an “I voted” message would?

Going beyond systematic political censorship, is it appropriate for Facebook to impose any censorship through the lens of the sensibilities of the moderators? It’s difficult for individuals to maintain total objectivity in controversial areas once they are authorized to judge posts against vague policy that simply cannot provide rules for consistent treatment of every possibility. Personal bias is likely to creep into moderators’ interpretation of the already lengthy community standards. Moreover, in order to keep operations cost low, Facebook moderators are given only half a second to look at each page. As a result, they might miss controversial content or make mistakes when determining whether content is ‘appropriate’.

Facebook could avoid this problem by taking a more hands-off approach to potentially offensive content.  While Facebook has chosen to implement a comprehensive policy, outlawing anything which they deem to be violent or threatening, hate speech, bullying, spam, pornography, fraud, as well as anything which violates copyright or encourages self-harm, Twitter has chosen a far more liberal policy.  Twitter allows almost everything except pornography, copyright infringement, threats and impersonation of someone in a way that is meant to be misleading. Twitter does have a policy which allows them to remove content following a government request, but they don’t have to do so, and have already refused to do so several times. Rather than banning a user or deleting “offensive” content, Twitter instead helpfully suggests that users simply block users that they find offensive. It seems clear that this is a sensible option, which preserves the so-called offender’s right to free speech and allows each user to make a personal decision on what is and what is not acceptable.

Jean-Loup Richet, Special Herdict Contributor

While the order describes an expanded mode of information sharing from the government to private companies, it does not explicitly promote increased information sharing from private companies to the government. According to Wired, the order gives a nod to privacy concerns by “referenc[ing] established safeguards, such as the Fair Information Practice Principles” for data that private companies share with the government and calls for an assessment of the civil liberties implications of information-sharing programs. The executive order does not grant any exceptions to existing privacy law for private corporations, meaning that they are no more likely to share information with the government than they were previously. In this sense, the order is more sensitive to privacy and surveillance concerns than the roundly criticized CISPA bill, which was reintroduced in the House of Representatives last week and grants broad exemptions from privacy laws to companies that share cyberthreat data with the government.

The Verge worries that the definitions of “cyberthreat” and “critical infrastructure” as used in the executive order might be too broad. The White House has clarified that cyberthreats include “web site defacement, espionage, theft of intellectual property, denial of service attacks, and destructive malware.” Hence, “last month’s apparent hacking and defacement of MIT’s website in honor of late internet activist Aaron Swartz could be considered a ‘cyber threat’.” However, this seems like a faulty conclusion. The order addresses itself to information sharing about classified cyberthreats to critical infrastructure. MIT’s web site hardly qualifies as “critical infrastructure,” which the order specifies as “systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters.” Moreover, the hacking of MIT’s website was probably not a classified matter.

More broadly speaking, although acts of public protest or free speech may fall under categories like “web site defacement” or “denial of service attacks” and hence constitute “cyberthreats,” that alone isn’t enough to instigate information sharing under the executive order; the order is concerned with government sharing of classified information about cyberthreats to critical infrastructure. The information sharing program is voluntary: eligible private companies can opt-in to receive information from the government. It also seems that for now, companies retain discretion on how to act on received information, meaning that the government can’t coerce companies to act in a particular way.

The executive order itself only provides for one-way (from government to corporations) information sharing in the context of critical infrastructure, so the potential for harm to civil liberties is certainly mitigated. On the other hand, increased provision of information from the government to private corporations could in itself constitute a pressure towards action that corporations might not have otherwise taken. For instance, government notice of a speech act (like the MIT hack) as “cyberthreat” might strongly influence a private company to censor or delete simply because the “cyberthreat” label is so loaded. Furthermore, the order isn’t the end of the road, and it may open the gates to legislation less protective of privacy and free speech. Laws governing information sharing practices are still in flux, and invasive bills like CISPA are still being pushed forward.

One thing we are proud of at Herdict is that Twitter’s transparency report also includes data from Herdict.  The data we contributed is our crowdsourced accessibility data for the sites in Twitter’s queue on Herdict.  The data for the five countries with the most inaccessible reports for these sites is below:

We are thrilled to be able to support Twitter’s transparency efforts.  As Twitter has become a more central element of how we use the Internet (from following celebrities to organizing anti-government protests), it has also become a more frequent target of censorship, filtering, and other actions designed to make it harder to access.  (Of course, sometimes it goes down for innocuous reasons, too.)  It can be hard for a company like Twitter to know if an ISP in any given country is blocking their service.  By using Herdict’s crowdsourced platform to collect data about Twitter’s accessibility, Twitter can better understand where they are being blocked in real time.  And because Herdict data is public, searchable, and sortable, we all benefit from greater information about the extent and nature of various web blockages — for Twitter and the other 26,000+ domains in our database.

With so many online services becoming critical to our day-to-day lives, transparency about those services is also becoming critical.  For example, users of Skype are rightly demanding information about the confidentiality of conversations conducted over over Skype.  Real-time information about where and when a site or service may be inaccessible is just one piece of the bigger transparency picture, but it is an important piece.

We hope others will find ways to use Herdict data, either for improving transparency or for research.  We have built a variety of tools to make it easier to use Herdict data or to contribute to it.  Organizations can create queues of important sites, and we’ve built (and are continuing to improve) APIs for both filing reports and accessing our real-time data.  And we are always happy to work with others on new ways to use Herdict data or to make it better.

According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), much of this filtering stems from the Vietnamese government’s fears about political instability from citizen journalism. RSF’s 2012 “Enemies of the Internet” analysis of Vietnam states that “The regime’s attention is focused on the Arab world and its protest movements. Paranoid Vietnamese authorities have stepped up repression and control to stave off any possibility of a regime collapse.”

This increase in reports indicates a persistence of Vietnam’s filtering regime (and an expansion of Herdict reports from region), rather than an increase in filtering itself. According to the OpenNet Initiative, as of 2012, the filtering regime, albeit strict, is not particularly effective and is inconsistently applied across ISP’s in Vietnam.  Moreover, according to RSF’s report on Vietnam, “Filtering is no longer the main method used to curtail Internet freedom.” Instead, over the past two years, the Vietnamese government has focused its attention on monitoring, surveillance, and cyberattacks as a means of suppression.

Because Vietnam’s filtering regime has not greatly changed in intensity, the increase in reporting from Vietnam may reflect growing concern about the country’s political filtering.  The 2012 Vietnam data indicates that over two-thirds of the reports to Herdict were related to political or news sites. In contrast, very few inaccessible reports were about internet tools such as proxies, providing some confirmation that circumvention has historically not been difficult in Vietnam.

Though Google acknowledged its removal of the feature after GreatFire’s post, it has declined to comment any further. An anonymous Chinese source quoted in The Guardian said that the Chinese government’s efforts to disable the notification feature had rendered it “counterproductive” for Google to continue supporting the feature.

GreatFire speculates that Google removed the feature in order to ensure that Google services would be available in the large and potentially lucrative Chinese market. In the weeks leading up to the feature’s removal, the Chinese government became more aggressive in blocking Google’s services, culminating in a complete block for 24 hours on November 9.  Although service was restored, heightened intermittent blocking continued thereafter. At the time, the crackdown was attributed to the ongoing 18th Party Congress. Whatever the primary motivation for filtering, it was likely a significant disruption for Google and their Chinese users. GreatFire argues that Google may have removed its censorship-alert feature in order to placate the Chinese government and improve its standing in the Chinese market.

Wired suggests that removing the censorship feature is an attempt on Google’s part to improve user experience: “Essentially, no one is going to stick with your service if it keeps getting them booted off the internet or bothering them with pop-ups telling them things they already know.” This explanation, however, is not entirely sensible. First, one of Google’s motivations for the feature was to help its users avoid getting kicked off the Internet by alerting them about risky search terms before they became an issue.  Second, Chinese censors are ultimately concerned with restricting access to content and the search results that link to that content.  Even with the censorship-alert feature inactive, Chinese censors are just as invested in blocking access to search results, meaning that Google could prevent its users from getting “booted off” only if it self-censored its search results.

By no longer warning users about which search terms may disrupt connectivity, some people may find Google in China to be a more frustrating experience.  However, that may be a worthwhile tradeoff for Google if removing the alert means that Google services will be available more generally for Chinese users.

In a review of Herdict reports from China in the month periods before the Google outage, the month following the outage, and the month since Google remove the feature, we could not identify a clear trend in general Google accessibility in China.  Since December 8, the date by which the censorship-alert feature had been removed, Herdict has not received a significant number of inaccessible reports for google.com from China. However, services such as video.google.com, encrypted.google.com, youtube.com, and news.google.com have been reported as entirely or almost entirely inaccessible. We encourage Chinese users to continue submitting reports to Herdict regarding the accessibility of Google services.

The LA Times reports that the tech-savvy Internet users in China wishing to access social networking and other sites that are routinely blocked, such as Twitter, Facebook and also, more recently, the New York Times, could previously download VPN software that would allow them to bypass the “Great Firewall.” A VPN tool encrypts users’ web activity and ‘scal[es] the Great Firewall by logging on to a server overseas to use as a proxy to access the outside Internet’.

However, VPNs have been less effective of late.  According to some reports, users are experiencing problems including ‘access denied’ messages and even software crashes after a short period of usage. Many commercial VPN services have stopped working.

This apparent crackdown on VPNs seems in contrast to what appeared to be fewer restrictions on microblogging.  For instance, the largest and most significant Chinese microblogging site, Sina Weibo, began allowing users to search for top government leaders by name, a function which they had previously blocked.  Sina Weibo also allowed criticism of lower-level government officials to be more specific, which led to investigations and dismissals of several officials.

However, Michael Anti, the prominent journalist and commentator on Chinese social media, told Voice of America News that these changes did not in fact signal new openness for microblogging. “CCTV, the national TV station, has already had the function of criticizing and monitoring local corruption since the 1990s. Now they’re repeating the same thing on Weibo,” he says. “I don’t regard this as progress. It just proves Weibo is now becoming a part of central media.”  Anti points out that Weibo has a team of censors that filters out and rigorously monitors anything that could be classed as a threat, including any mention of China’s top leaders.

Following the legislature’s proposal on December 24 for requiring real identity registration before accessing online services (ostensibly to help prevent the occurrence of online fraud), experts suspect that Chinese censors have found a way to detect VPN connections and block them.  The VPN providers claim that these issues are due to apparent changes in the firewall, with state media responding that Chinese law does not protect them if they have not taken the required step of registering with the government.

While many were hoping that the change in China’s leadership, which takes place once every ten years, would result in greater freedom for the approximately 500 million Internet users in China, it appears that Beijing authorities may be tightening the existing restrictions.  Their actions suggest that the new leader, Xi Jinping, is at least as worried about online content as his predecessor.

The concern for those in power is that the publication of stories about government corruption pose a threat to government stability. “’[The powers that be] are still very paranoid about the potentially destabilising effect of the Internet,’ said Willy Lam, a politics specialist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. ‘They are on the point of losing a monopoly on information, but they still are very eager to control the dissemination of views‘”.

In addition to censoring content, regulators have proposed rules which would keep foreign companies from distributing items and material such as books, music, and news.  Both companies and Chinese scientists have complained that  this level of restriction does more harm than good. For example, according to the American Chamber of Commerce in China, 74% of companies said unstable Internet access “impedes their ability to do business.”

Unfortunately, Willy Lam (Chinese University of Hong Kong) says that Chinese leaders feel that the cost of Internet censorship is both sustainable and worthwhile, and that compromise the issue is unlikely to be reached any time soon.

Jean-Loup Richet, Special Herdict Contributor

As a crowdsourced project, Herdict data reflects the Internet usage of “the Herd” – the people who report to us through our website, Twitter, e-mail, or our browser add-ons.  Because it is crowdsourced, a significant level of inaccessible reports from a particular region or about a particular site at a given time serves as a real-time proxy for where filtering is taking place and what is being filtered, as experienced by the Herd.  The more users report on Herdict, the more robust and accurate of a proxy the platform becomes.

Substantial Increase in Reports in 2012:

In 2012, we saw a large increase in reporting, which is critical for building an informative and useful database of site accessibility.

Total Number of Reports for 2012: 97,931

Total Inaccessible Reports for 2012: 57,262

Total Accessible Reports for 2012: 39,538

By comparison, in 2011, we received 43,481 reports, of which 12,567 were inaccessible reports.  Herdict’s 2012 reporting represents a 125% increase in total reports compared to 2011 and a 358% increase in inaccessible reports. The increase brings our cumulative number of inaccessible reports to 140,323 and total reports to 311,804.

Many New Inaccessible domains in 2012:

In 2012 we collected 19,631 reports on unique domains.  Of those, 15,499 were domains that were new to Herdict.  This brings the total number of domains in our database to 26,636.

Among the top domains reported to Herdict in 2012, the most inaccessible site globally was Facebook.com (853 inaccessible reports), mostly coming from Vietnam and China.  This is not surprising given Facebook’s widespread popularity and the aggressive stances that Vietnam and China have taken to restrict access to the site within their borders.

Top 10 inaccessible domains in 2012 by reports:

1. facebook.com (853)
2. viet.rfi.fr (826)
3. viettan.org (815)
4. steves-digicams.com (772)
5. voanews.com (680)
6. bbc.co.uk (632)
7. danlambaovn.blogspot.com (503)
8. rfa.org (463)
9. x-cafevn.org (456)
10. danchimviet.info (437)

Also high on the list were the domains for YouTube (#12), Scribd (#18), and Twitter (#19).   With the exception of steves-digicams.com, Herdict’s top domains are all sites that we might expect to be filtered—domains for newspapers, social networking tools, and activist organizations.  When Herdict first began, some critics feared that spammers would overwhelm the site with meaningless data; however, our experience proves otherwise.

Among the sites with the largest increases in inaccessibility from 2011 was viettan.org, which had 781 more inaccessible reports this year than last.  This increase reflects a large growth in reporting from Vietnam in 2012.  In contrast, Facebook.com was relatively steady, with inaccessible reports declining slightly from 987 reports in 2011.  Among other sites with significant increases in inaccessible reports were Radio Free Asia, Human Rights Watch, Scribd, Freedom House, and the New York Times.

Among sites for which we have categories, in 2012 we received by far the most inaccessible reports for political sites (16,505 reports), which had more inaccessible reports than social sites (5,685 reports) and Internet tools (3,713 reports) combined.  That said, we received 30,817 reports for uncategorized sites, suggesting that we need to find a better way to assign categories to domains—a challenge given the increase in new URLs this year.

Most Reports from China in 2012:

In 2012 we received 30,831 inaccessible reports from China and 10,931 accessible reports.  A large part of this influx is due to our partnership with GreatFire.org.  This data-sharing agreement has granted us greater insight into what sites are and are not accessible in China.

Top 10 countries by inaccessible reports in 2012:

1. China (30,831)
2. Vietnam (20,639)
3. Thailand (1,333)
4. India (1,259)
5. United States (1,134)
6. France (206)
7. Iran (198)
8. Germany (195)
9. United Kingdom (193)
10. Cambodia (158)

The substantial difference between the number of reports coming from the first five countries when compared to the rest shows that we must do more work to increase awareness about Herdict.  I hope that you will help us in this effort, whether by reporting yourself or by encouraging others to help us.

Looking to 2013:

Both in terms of data and site functionality, Herdict saw great improvements in 2012.  In 2013 we will be adding a few more important features, including customizable lists that will allow you to create and share sets of sites that you care about.  These queues will allow users to focus on particular countries; you will be able to designate a few countries in which you are interested, and when we get visitors from those countries, we will encourage them to test the sites on your list.  This will strengthen the Herdict community around the world.

While this was a year of significant growth, we have much more to do.  We are dependent upon users’ reports, and we need more reports from more places.  I encourage all of you to help spread the word about Herdict to your friends, family, and followers. With more reports from even more locations, we will be able to provide ever more useful data about inaccessible sites in 2013!

Thanks,

Ryan