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Saudi Arabia Bans Facebook
gandhi_2 sends in a brief Associated Press piece on Saudi Arabia's blocking of Facebook. "An official with Saudi Arabia's communications authority says it has blocked Facebook because the popular social networking website doesn't conform with the kingdom's conservative values. ... He says Facebook's content had 'crossed a line' with the kingdom's conservative morals, but that blocking the site is a temporary measure." Some reports indicate that at least some individual Facebook pages can be reached from inside the kingdom. There hasn't been an official announcement; the source noted above requested anonymity. Earlier this year when Pakistan and Bangladesh banned Facebook, it was over particular content — cartoons of Mohammed — and the Saudi ban may prove similar once more details emerge.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40166219/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/
Why? Who knows. Does it really matter?
Well, I live in one of those internet black holes, myself. Tunisia. In Tunisia, Youtube, Dailymotion, and many sites were, since 2007, blocked due to "offensive" content (read: politically dissident). What that caused was two things, mainly: More dissidence, and the banalisation of proxies. Right now kids in elementary schools know how to fiddle with proxies and DNS settings to get around the blockade, and despite the govt's sincere efforts, we still watch our vids on youtube (http://www.tekiano.com/net/web-2-0/2-7-1719/youtube-15eme-site-le-plus-visite-en-tunisie.html French blog, sorry). At some point, FB was blocked too, but this nearly caused a riot (Yes, people didn't riot because of a tax increase but they started getting angry when they couldn't play Farmville). This, of course, tought our gov't one thing: being all official about blocking FB is an open invitation to a riot. Thus, they decided to do it diferently and now they block Tunisian IPs from certain pages with... delicate content. (this, I guess, was done hand to hand with Facebook's teams). I do not expect the Saudi gov't to hold on their bloackade for too long, they should play it the smooth way and learn rom their fellow retarded govts.
everyone,
I am a saudi who lives in saudi and here is my point of the story.
Saudi's (communications and information technology) has a solution of the shelf that blocks pornographic sites automatically (we got VPN so dont worry we get our pr0ns).
This solution keeps its own database and that external database messes up sometimes and blocks stuff that should be blocked. google and secondlife were blocked before and were unblocked. Further more, political website and radical islamic websites are blocked as requested by the government for national security.
facebook's url that was blocked today was (www.facebook.com/home.php) but if you use (www.facebook.com) it works perfectly. so it apparent that the blocking was due to a mess up in the database of the off the shelf solution.
any questions? :D
Bahrain is another "entertainment center" for Saudis. The joke in Bahrain is, "Allah cannot see across the causeway."
I guess now they can go there for alcohol, prostitution, and Facebook.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.