Check it out: Wired News, "A Sneak Peak at a Fractured Web"

Last week members of the OpenNet Initiative convened at Berkman to review its research findings before setting to work on a comprehensive, annual study it will publish this spring. The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) is a joint collaborative project between the University of Toronto, Cambridge University, Oxford University, and Harvard Law School. Mark Anderson interviewed five ONI researchers, including Helmi Noman, Elijah Zarwan, Nart Villeneuve, and Stephen Murdoch. From the article:

The spectrum of internet censorship, the researchers found, ranged from transparent to utterly murky. Perhaps the country with the most accessible filtering system was Saudi Arabia, said Berkman Center research affiliate Helmi Noman. "On their website, they have all the information of why they block and what they block," he said. "And they invite contributions (of other sites to be blocked) from the public."

Vietnam, on the other hand, floats decoys. As ONI first documented this summer and confirmed in this year's study, the Southeast Asian regime purports to censor sexually explicit content. But ONI's computers found no such blocking in place. They did find, however, plenty of unadvertised censorship of political and religious websites critical of the country's one-party state.

Sometimes a censoring government tries to conceal its filtering behind spoofed web-browser error messages. ONI discovered that Tunisia, for instance, masks filtered pages by serving a mockup of Internet Explorer's 404 error page. These supposed error pages stood out, because ONI doesn't use IE. "Rather than getting a page that says 'This page has been blocked,' you get a page saying 'Page not found,' designed to look exactly like the Internet Explorer 404 page," said Cairo-based ONI consultant Elijah Zarwan.

Sometimes a censoring government apparently dips into the bag of tricks more commonly used by online extortionists and script kiddies. ONI researcher Stephen Murdoch of Cambridge University points to denial of service (or DoS) attacks on multiple opposition-party websites preceding countrywide elections in both Belarus and Kyrgyzstan.

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