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The most ambitious net censorship project since China's Great Firewall is no more: Pakistan's Ministry of Information Technology has indicated that they are canceling plans for a 50 million+ URL net filtering regime.

The most ambitious net censorship project since China's Great Firewall is no more: Pakistan's Ministry of Information Technology has indicated that they are canceling plans for a 50 million+ URL net filtering regime. Earlier this week, the Pakistani government announced that they were canceling plans to build a national Internet filter similar to China's “Great Firewall.” The massive firewall would have blocked up to 50 million URLs and, if completed, would have been one of the largest online censorship projects in history

This and more important news from your Fast Company editors, with updates all day. Google Launches Disaster Response Website .

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine Did the United States organize a fake vaccine campaign in Pakistan to try and ensnare the world's top terrorist? In true spook fashion, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) isn't saying, but the rumor alone could set back already fragile vaccination efforts in the troubled nation of 180 million, according to public-health researchers from the region. The story, which first appeared in The Guardian on Monday, alleges that the CIA sent vaccinators into the Pakistani city of Abbottabad in the months before the raid by US special forces that killed Osama bin Laden

When the U.S. military attacked Iraq in March 2003, it brought to bear the most advanced technology then available for identifying potential terrorists by their physical features. The equipment measured all sorts of physical features--from fingerprints to images of the retina--but it was not particularly easy to use.