مدونة رامي رؤوف حليم

From time to time people decide that they no longer need to keep a piece of information. For example, your backup copies of a particular file are sufficient, and you want to delete the master, what is the best way to do so? When you delete a file, even after you empty the Recycle bin, the contents of that file remain on your hard drive and can be recovered by anyone who has the right tools and a little luck. From a purely technical perspective, there is no such thing as a delete function on your computer. Of course, you can drag a file to the Recycle Bin and empty the bin, but all this really does is clear the icon, remove the file's name from on your computer, and tell Windows that it can use the space for something else. Until it actually does use that space, the space will be occupied by the contents of the deleted information, much like drawers of files with labels on each drawer, what happens is removing the label but the drawer still contain the files. This is why, i...

Amnesty International issued a public statement   today (22 of July 09), calling on President Hosni Mubarak to order an immediate and unconditional release of Musaad Abu Fagr and Karim Amer, prisoners of conscience who have both been held for more than 18 months. Musaad Abu Fagr continues to be detained without charge or trial despite repeated court orders for his release, while a leading UN human rights body has declared Karim Amer’s imprisonment “arbitrary” and called for his release. Karim Amer, is a blogger who was sentenced to four years in prison in 2007, is also held at Borg al-Arab Prison. He too is a prisoner of conscience. He was tried and imprisoned for criticizing President Mubarak and Egypt’s al-Azhar religious authorities in his blog. He was convicted of “inciting strife and defaming Muslims on the internet by describing the Prophet of Islam and his comrades as murderers, which disturbs national peace”; and “insulting the Preside...

On the 30 th of June 2009, the security officers at Cairo International Airport have detained an activist blogger , Wael Abbas , who frequently writes about torture cases and police abuse in Egypt. Mr. Abbas was also frisked and the officers confiscated his laptop computer and other belongings. By this conduct the police violated the following articles of the Egyptian constitution which says: Article 41:"…no person may be arrested, inspected, detained or his freedom restricted or prevented from free movement except by an or necessitated by investigations and preservation of the security…" Article 42:"…Any person may not be detained or imprisoned except in places defined by laws organizing prisons…" Article 45:"…wires, telephone calls and other means of communication shall have their own sanctity and secrecy and may not be confiscated or monitored except by a causal judicial warrant…" Actually confiscating personal devices such as mobiles, laptops, camer...

Movement Under Control, Brutal Repression of Social Movements, Constant Pressure on the Media, NGOs Under Surveillance... The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, a joint programme of the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) launches its Annual Report 2009 . Several countries in the region – Syria since 1963, Egypt since 1981 and Algeria since 1992 – remained under a state of emergency. Inherent emergency legislation provided a legal framework for certain attacks on human rights, especially the right to a fair trial. Indeed, civilians, including human rights defenders, continued to be tried by special courts set up through emergency legislation (Egypt, Syria).

In the last couple of weeks, several governments started direct and clear online war on social media tools such as Blogs and Twitter. This kind o f online repression and banding attitude by the governments is considered as an indicator for the real positive effect achieved from employing the new media tools in democratic transformation and political reform. Actually this kind of media tools cause s kind of political embarrassment for the government specially when it comes to violating human rights and aborting any social mobilization. In China ,from few days, Google was blocked for two hours, including search, Gmail and other applications. Although some ISPs have restored the access in couple of hours, a number of Tweets said that Google has still been blocked in some parts of China. And a serious development has been approached by the Nigerian government , when it budgeted $5 million to face new media tools and bloggers, which makes blogging difficult on the practical leve. I...