Ethiopia Criminalises VoIP Services

The Ethiopian government has passed legislation criminalising the use of VoIP services like Skype and Google Talk. Anyone using these services within the country now faces up to 15 years in prison. Ethiopian authorities argue that they imposed these bans because of national security concerns and to protect the state’s telecommunications monopoly. The country only has one ISP, the state-owned Ethio Telecom, and has been filtering its citizen’s Internet access for quite some time now to suppress opposition blogs and other news outlets. … Reporters Without Borders also reports that Ethio Telecom installed a system to block access to the Tor network, which allows users to surf the Web anonymously. The organisation notes that the ISP must be using relatively sophisticated Deep Packet Inspection to filter out this traffic — via Slashdot