Slashdot Mirror
YouTube Blocked In Pakistan
kokoko1 submits this snippet from The Telegraph, which reports that Facebook isn't alone — now YouTube, too, is being censored in Pakistan. "The blocking of YouTube comes a day after a Pakistani court blocked Facebook amid a growing row over a competition on the social networking website to design cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad." Update: 05/20 18:58 GMT by T : According to an anonymous reader, Wikipedia and Flickr are out, too.
Update: 05/21 12:11 GMT by KD : And now add Twitter to the blocked list. This post claims that more than 1,000 sites are being blocked in Pakistan.
Update: 05/21 12:11 GMT by KD : And now add Twitter to the blocked list. This post claims that more than 1,000 sites are being blocked in Pakistan.
This is great that people are pushing to force governments to drop their censorship. But it's not going to work, at least, not in the short term. The reason? Pakistan will be able to find at least a few people or companies that will build local versions of social networking sites, search engines, etc. that comply with their censorship requests. It's how capitalism works, only the government is saying "we've made you a captive market if you only play by our rules".
Ultimately censorship will be killed by end to end encryption and onion routing.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The non-overly religious pakistani that WE - the westerners, should very, very much care about. Because they are the only thing that stands between nukes and religious fanatics.
If that isn't a reason enough for anyone living in the West, I don't know what could possibly be one.
If only fluff pieces like this could bring attention to the more real issues in Pakistan. Like the recent assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the first and only head of a muslim state. It's unfortunate in the extreme that the country's court has now been more effective and interested in this youtube and facebook ban than it's pursuit of Benazir's killers.
This ban is not the only thing that has been more important to many of Pakistan's leadership either. Since Benazir's widow became president, the entirety of the country's opposition parties, courts and media have given more attention to corruption charges against Benazir's widow than to the pursuit of her killers.
Former dictator Musharraf is a leading suspect as a co-conspirator in her assassination. The latest news from him is his intent to return to Pakistan, at the head of a new political party that will include the PML-Q. The PML-Q is one Pakistan's strongest conservative Islamic parties, and one the ones advocating the strongest for this ban, for charges of corruption against Benazir's widow, and one of the quietest about her assassins still running free.
Well, I guess that's my small part in trying to draw attention from the 'fluff' over this ban to the real problems it is a symptom of.