Last week President Nazarbayev urged the Kazakhstanis to buy housing now, when the prices have decreased. Slavasay is wondering [ru]:

Obviously, neither me nor any of my friends having income “above average”, do not belong to the “people”, which the president means. I don’t have money to buy an apartment in Almaty at these prices. I have even less desire to mess with the construction companies now, when thousands of people are not able to get their flats for which they paid – and which were never built.

Russia – the closest ally and the Kazakhstan’s neighbor with which it shares the longest border line – follows the steps of Kazkahstan, blogger megakhuimyak says [ru]. Russian leader Medvedev delivered his first state of the nation address and suggested extending presidential term up to 6 years, parliamentary term – up to 5 years, and to extend the powers of both institutions:

“Kazakhstan today is Russia tomorrow!”. Last year Kazakhstan extended the term of presidency – now Russia does the same. Last year we’ve got crisis – now look at Russia. You can taste the validity of this slogan”.

schriftsteller addresses the issue of integration between the two countries [ru]:

Against the background of financial crisis, the talks about Russo-Kazakh integration resurrected – they say cooperation can be an effective tool in fighting crisis. But if you take a look at the facts, it can be seen that integration has been undermined – large Russian companies refused to let Kazakh business enter the market and blocked all projects, which could have promoted integration. Ultimately, integration is the ability to share with the neighbor.

Alim-atenbek, however, is not too happy with the direction in which the country is moving [ru]:

Sometimes it seems to me that all public officials, police officers, judges et al. get employed with the state structures because they are not intelligent enough, or just want to make money out of their positions, or – rarely – desperate patriots. When these people get power, they get infected with superiority complex of a man who rules the world. The country gets rotten in the official lawlessness and we often contribute to its further corruption.

Finally, here is a brief update on Livejournal accessibility from Kazakhstan. Yesterday, Livejournal was moving onto another server facility in Montana, United States. Of course, the IPs have changed during this procedure. And at night Kazakhstani users were able to reach their favorite website without proxies and anonymizers. Pycm imagines what happened next [ru]:

Then the censors came to their office, had some tea for a start. And at 10.25 a.m. switched Livejournal off again.

In this regard, rosvet remembered [ru] a Stalin-era aphorism: “If you are still not in jail, it’s not your desert. It is our omission”.

Programmila says [ru] that repeated blockage means censorship “by order from the upper levels” – so, technical problems with the routing are not an issue any more. Adam-kesher stresses [ru] that it is not serious for Kazakhtelecom to deny their implication in blockage, because it is clearly an IP filtering.

Also posted on neweurasia.net

Here's the video:

And here's what Ben Gharbia, who is Global Voices Advocacy editor, wrote:

Here is a great video explaining the role of the egyptian blogsphere in exposing human rights abuses and the role of the social-networking website Facebook and the micro-blogging platform Twitter in organizing demos and strikes, such as the April 6 strike and the May 4th General Strike.

The video features, among others, blogger and activist Noha Atef, editor of Tortureinegypt.net blog, Gamal Eid, the executive director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, blogger and journalist Abdel Monem Mahmoud, and Facebook activist, Ahmed Maher.

Over 50 bloggers, students and netizens participated in the flash mob last Friday at Avenida Paulista, one of the city's most important avenues and financial centers. The protest was organized through blogs and mostly twitter. Lúcia Freitas reports:

A postos, mostramos nossos cartazes. alguém de dentro do ônibus acena. Pessoas param nas calçadas de ambos os lados. Motos e carros buzinam. Ao comando, viramos para o outro lado (ímpar) da avenida. Os fotógrafos fazem farra. A gente diz em alto e bom som: Não!

In fact, due to bad weather and terrible traffic, many people only managed to get there late. Political Scientist Sérgio Amadeu [pt] says that these late comers demanded to be part of the protest, so a quick decision was made for another performance, this time attended by over 100 people:

Bom, como uma manifestação auto-organizada ela resolveu se auto-constituir de novo. A flashmob virou uma refreshmob.

Photo by Paulo Fehlauer who also has a video showing the protest at Avenida Paulista

On the day before, a public hearing was held in Brasília and some bloggers took the time to attend the debate (see a video and twitter reactions). They had their mouths closed with sellotape to protest against the over-surveillance on the Internet that the bill may bring if approved. Daniel Padua [pt] was there and said it had a positive outcome as the case against was very well laid by both specialists and members of parliament:

A força dos argumentos foi uma surpresa pros defensores do projeto, que acabaram soando ridículos e despreparados - como no caso do delegado da PF (alguma coisa Sobral) - que apresentou uma história na qual a PF tinha os IPs de suspeitos de pedofilia, mas só conseguiu prender 1/5 deles pela falta de um processo jurídico adequado, e foi questionado pelo deputado Paulo Teixeira: “bom, a PF tinha os IPs, não? então se vocês já conseguem os IPs das pessoas, porque precisam desse projeto de lei?”

Marcelo Träsel [pt] says that a battle was won but the fight goes ahead. He unveils whose interests are in fact behind the bill:

Porque no fim das contas é disso que se trata: os bancos estão tentando impor uma legislação estúpida para deixarem de assumir a responsabilidade por tornar seus sistemas de transação eletrônica mais seguros. Afinal, garantir a segurança de dados custa dinheiro. E dinheiro é o que os bancos deram, coincidentemente, para a campanha a senador de Azeredo e muitos outros deputados. Estão pouco ligando se vão emperrar o processo cultural ou o avanço da inclusão digital no Brasil.

According to João Carlos Caribé [pt], this public hearing, virtually the first open debate about the bill, was made possible through liaising by the organizers of an online petition [pt] in defense of freedom and progress of knowledge on the Brazilian Internet. It has been signed by over 121,400 citizens, which is not much, considering Brazil's nearly 200 million population. Gabriel Sadoco [pt] writes about it at this Saturday's blog carnival [pt] about politics and says that people should not be so apathetic regarding this and others issues:

E a esses brasileiros que não se incomodam com o que acontece no seu país. Que preferem assistir as tragédias do jornal antes da novela das oito e só servem pra fazer peso no mundo, acordem para a realidade e comecem a protestar, porque você ainda tem direito a isso. Não ao vigilantismo.
Privacidade e liberdade pra todo mundo!

Mário Amaya [pt] has designed the poster that many bloggers have been carrying with them, which can be downloaded and printed out. He is also the designer of many of the online banners that have spread on the blogosphere.

Freedom on the Internet