New York Times

The authorities in China have made Google’s services largely inaccessible in recent days, a move most likely related to the government’s broad efforts to stifle discussion of the 25th anniversary of the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 3 and 4, 1989.

In addition to Google’s search engines being blocked, the company’s products, including Gmail, Calendar and Translate, have been affected.

“This is by far the biggest attack on Google that’s ever taken place in China,” said a co-founder of GreatFire.org, who asked to remain anonymous to prevent retaliation by the authorities. “Probably the only thing comparable is when the Chinese government first started blocking websites in the 1990s.”

While Internet users in mainland China could reach international versions of Google search until a few days ago, “all Google services in all countries, encrypted or not, are now blocked in China,” GreatFire.org wrote. These include the Chinese-language version based in Hong Kong, Google.hk, and Google.com, Google Australia and others. Unlike the websites of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and The New York Times, which are reliably blocked by the authorities, Google services are being disrupted in a way that affects about 9 out of 10 Chinese users, according to GreatFire.org.

By allowing some access, “the Chinese government is trying to pin the blame on Google,” the GreatFire co-founder said. Google says that it is not the problem. “We’ve checked extensively, and there are no technical problems on our side,” said a Google spokeswoman, who declined to elaborate. Google’s traffic from China on all its services just fell 50 percent, according to the company’s transparency report.

The Supreme Court has turned down an appeal from James Risen, a reporter for The New York Times facing jail for refusing to identify a confidential source.

The court’s one-line order gave no reasons but effectively sided with the government in a confrontation between what prosecutors said was an imperative to secure evidence in a national security prosecution and what journalists said was an intolerable infringement of press freedom.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond (VA), ordered Risen to comply with the subpoena. Risen has said he will refuse. “I will continue to fight,” Risen said.

His lawyer, Joel Kurtzberg, urged the Justice Department to hold its fire. “The ball is now in the government’s court,” Kurtzberg wrote. “The government can choose not to pursue Mr. Risen’s testimony if it wants to. We can only hope now that the government will not seek to have him held in contempt for doing nothing more than reporting the news and keeping his promises” to his sources.

Google released statistics on the make-up of its workforce, providing numbers that offer a stark glance at how Silicon Valley remains a white man’s world.

Thirty percent of Google’s 46,170 employees worldwide are women, the company said, and 17 percent of its technical employees are women. Comparatively, 47 percent of the total workforce in the United States is women and 20 percent of software developers are women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of its United States employees, 61 percent are white, 2 percent are black and 3 percent are Hispanic. About one-third are Asian -- well above the national average -- and 4 percent are of two or more races.

Of Google’s technical staff, 60 percent are white, 1 percent are black, 2 percent are Hispanic, 34 percent are Asian and 3 percent are of two or more races. In the United States workforce over all, 80 percent of employees are white, 12 percent are black and 5 percent are Asian, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Google’s disclosures come amid an escalating debate over the lack of diversity in the tech industry. Although tech is a key driver of the economy and makes products that many Americans use everyday, it does not come close to reflecting the demographics of the country -- in terms of sex, age or race. The lopsided numbers persist among engineers, founders and boards of directors.

Billy Hawkes might be the most important tech regulator you’ve never heard of. When Hawkes took over in 2005 as Ireland’s data protection commissioner, he said, it was a relatively quiet job focused on local issues. But in the years since, Ireland has become a preferred spot for giant tech companies to place their international headquarters, largely because of the country’s low corporate tax rates.

That has put Hawkes at the center of a growing debate over how these companies use people’s online data. Hawkes is tasked with handling privacy complaints about any company based in Ireland, leaving him responsible for protecting around a billion Internet users -- both European citizens and those further afield. “The biggest change is the number of controversial companies that fall under my remit,” said Hawkes, who will step down from his role. “It’s a shift from a domestic to an international focus.”

The role of Ireland’s data protection regulator is set to expand even further under proposed privacy changes in Europe expected to be approved in 2015. The legislation will allow companies that meet the data protection requirements in one European Union country to operate freely across the Continent. Now, companies like Microsoft and Google have to comply with regulators in each of the union’s 28 member states, which often take different views on how local privacy rules should be enforced.

ConnectEDU, a popular college and career planning portal in Boston that had collected personal details on millions of high school and college students, filed for bankruptcy. Now federal regulators want to stop the company from selling off students’ names, email addresses, birth dates and other intimate information as assets.

Jessica Rich, the director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, argued that such a sale would violate ConnectEDU’s own privacy policy, a potentially deceptive practice. The company’s privacy policy states that, in the event of a sale of the company, it “will give users reasonable notice and an opportunity to remove personally identifiable data from the service.”

“Information about teens is particularly sensitive and may warrant even greater privacy protections than those accorded to adults,” Rich wrote. “These users, as well as their parents, would likely be concerned if their information transferred without restriction to a purchaser for unknown uses.”

Rich recommended either that ConnectEDU give each student who had registered for its sites the choice to remove his or her personal records from company databases in advance of a sale -- or that the company destroy the entirety of the personal details it had collected.

YouTube’s plans for a subscription music service have stalled over a dispute with independent record labels, which contend that the online video giant has offered unfair licensing terms and threatened to block their music from the site.

Members of the Worldwide Independent Network, an umbrella for various trade groups around the world, complained that the contracts YouTube had offered independents are “out of step with the marketplace for streaming,” and less favorable than those that have apparently been agreed to by the three major labels -- Universal, Sony and Warner.

Negotiations between independents and YouTube, which is owned by Google, have dragged on for months. But according to several people with direct knowledge of the talks, the indies’ decision to speak out was driven by a recent warning that if labels failed to agree to YouTube’s licensing terms, music on the indies’ official YouTube channels would be blocked.

In addition, those labels would be unable to collect advertising revenue from user-uploaded videos that included their music. In response, a YouTube spokesman said, “We have successful deals in place with hundreds of independent and major labels around the world; however, we don’t comment on ongoing negotiations.”

[Commentary] Amazon is confirming its critics’ worst fears and it is an ugly spectacle to behold. For years, authors and publishers have warned that Amazon, Jeff Bezos’ book-selling giant, would one day use its power for ill.

Sure, so far, Amazon has marketed itself as a book buyer’s best friend. It sells books at terrifically low prices, it delivers them amazingly quickly, and it constantly invents new technologies to improve the way we read. Amazon has also invested heavily in publishing new authors and it has pushed exciting new formats made possible by electronic distribution. Yet the literary community has always greeted Amazon’s moves with suspicion.

The fear is mostly about the future. What will happen to books when Amazon controls the entire industry? How will authors and publishing houses reckon with Amazon’s unchecked power? Most recently, as part of a contract dispute with the publisher Hachette, we’re seeing Amazon behaving at its worst. The company’s willingness to nakedly flex its anticompetitive muscle gives new cause for concern to anyone who cares about books -- authors, publishers, but mainly customers.

At least five times in May, a Pakistani bureaucrat who works from a colonial-era barracks in Karachi, just down the street from the former home of his country’s secularist founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, asked Twitter to shield his compatriots from exposure to accounts, tweets or searches of the social network that he described as “blasphemous” or “unethical.”

All five of those requests were honored by the company, meaning that Twitter users in Pakistan can no longer see the content that so disturbed the bureaucrat, Abdul Batin of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority: crude drawings of the Prophet Muhammad, photographs of burning Qurans, and messages from a handful of anti-Islam bloggers and an American porn star who now attends Duke University.

The blocking of these tweets in Pakistan -- in line with the country-specific censorship policy Twitter unveiled in 2012 -- is the first time the social network has agreed to withhold content there. A number of the accounts seemed to have been blocked in anticipation of the fourth annual “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” on May 20.

This censorship comes as challenges to Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy law have become increasingly deadly, amid a flurry of arrests, killings and assassination attempts on secularists.

Amazon, under fire in much of the literary community for energetically discouraging customers from buying books from the publisher Hachette, has abruptly escalated the battle.

The retailer began refusing orders for coming Hachette books, including JK Rowling’s new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” -- a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it -- is suddenly listed as “unavailable.” In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons’s new novel, “The Girls of August,” coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $60).

The confrontation with Hachette has turned into the biggest display of Amazon’s dominance since it briefly stripped another publisher, Macmillan, of its “buy” buttons in 2010. It seems likely to encourage debate about the enormous power the company wields. No company in American history has exerted the control over the American book market -- physical, digital and secondhand -- that Amazon does.

[Commentary] Should a speedy Internet be available to everyone equally or are some users, in Orwell’s terms, “more equal than others”? Should there be “haves” and “have-nots” on the Internet, with the winners being large corporate or commercial users, as opposed to small businesses or regular people?

That’s the essence of the debate behind the high-stakes subject of “net neutrality,” which the Federal Communications Commission voted on recently.

“I’ve long become accustomed to news articles as well as editorials in the Times asserting that black is white or white is black, but for you to insist that the actions of the FCC will protect and enhance Internet neutrality is way over the top,” wrote one reader, William Edwards. And another, Robert Ofsevit, wrote a detailed critique, comparing the headline in The Times, “FCC Vote Paves the Way for New Open Internet Rules” unfavorably with a more direct headline on a Reuters story that ran on Huffington Post: “FCC Votes for Plan to Kill Net Neutrality.”

He wrote: “The writer denigrates and marginalizes ‘some opponents’ of Chairman Wheeler’s plan, and “net neutrality purists” who view the plan as killing net neutrality. In fact, these are not fringe views held only by ‘purists.’” My take: I’m with the critics on this one. While I’m no expert, I don’t think the issues here really are all that muddy. Maybe this makes me a purist, but as I see it, this FCC vote was a clear strike against the commonly understood idea of net neutrality, and The Times should have written and presented it that way.