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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.
... and nothing of value was lost.
(in either direction, IMO)
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
.. what websites all these backwards countries ban and block?
We get it. They're against anything that lets people speak publicly against Islam supremacy.
Ya, until they can either blackmail or threaten FB into compliance.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A little AI and a routine to overlay an abaya on any image that looks remotely female and all is well.
Have gnu, will travel.
and nothing of value was lost?
Yet more proof that religious folk are vulnerable to the creation of oppressive sociopolitical groups. It doesn't matter that (obviously) many folks in Saudi Arabi want to access Facebook. The powers that be say they can't, in the name of "God". Tell me how a group of atheists, or better yet, agnostics, could ever create something so ridiculous? Seriously, give me one example.
Ban Flash and you stop Farmville. Two wins with one action!
I'm not one to shed a tear for facebook but maybe ISPs should block Saudi Arabia entirely from the internet. See how they feel about censorship then.
It would be easy enough for these countries to simply outlaw use of such browsers. Sure it would be harder to enforce than blocking individual sites, but it would only take a couple dozen public stonings for the masses to capitulate.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
The internet will only be free when we make it free by technical means.
Yes, well, you can forget about it... until you cut the wire
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I think this could be accomplished with a few UI tweaks in Farmville. Zynga: You owe me royalties if I ever see an "Oilville" game.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
I think a good start would be a move to SSL everything. It doesn't make sites unblockable, but it makes it much harder to block them without being caught or causing the type of severe inconvenience that will get people to object (eg, censors wouldn't be able to block a single facebook profile - it would be all of facebook, or nothing at all). It's not a complete solution, but it's a start.
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.
Like
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
No, the difference is that Iran stones women, Saudi Arabia beheads them. Both agree that Facebook is immoral though.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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
SSL everything, then de-centralize DNS. The result would be anarchy, for the censors.
Well I read that Facebook's Saudi Arabian servers kept crashing when people searched for the name Mohammed, so its probably for the best.
Today I've discovered that The Pirate Bay website is blocked in Italy. Previously the italian providers were forced to configure the DNS to resolve it as 127.0.0.1, but that was easy to circumvent. Now, the IP is totally unreacheable from Italy. To look at TPB one has to use a proxy, a tunnel, etc.
A similar measure is in force for unauthorized gambling sites.
I don't gamble and I don't care too much for torrents, but the very idea that my government decides which sites I can visit and which I cannot sends a cold shiver down my spine.
When they came for the leechers...
They ban everyone for every reason unless and until they are given a reason why not.
The major difference between them (Wahabi) and the Taliban is that the Saud family have had money since the fifties.
I find the same mechanisms of oppressive paternalism are also occurring in North Korea, Burma(Myanmar) Indonesia,
Same (un)reasoning attitude.
Same appeal to the irrational.
Same hatred/fear of everything and everybody.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
First off, a little disclaimer:
Westerners often tend to conflate Wahhabism with Islam, but that is a critical mistake that undermines any clear understanding of the Middle East and Islam itself. The movement has taken Islam from being an unquestioned powerhouse of intellectual and cultural innovation to being perceived as a force of stagnation. Islam is not the problem, the cultural baggage that it is presently burdened with is the issue. Wahhabism itself is only a few centuries old, and in that time it has deeply undermined the perception of Islam in the Western world, and undermined the social, intellectual and economic development of those countries where it has taken root.
It's why women went from being the closest advisors to the Prophet himself, to being deeply despised and treated as subhuman in certain corners of the Islamic world. The najib, the bourqua, the many, many restrictions on women - these came from outside of Islam, and were integrated into the narrative of what Islam is about. Many in the West fail to understand that Wahhabism and the myriad of ancient tribal customs that were given an opportunity for resurgence are not found in the Qu'ran.
One can find the seeds of Wahhabism. The passages and the bits of text that would inspire such an interpretation, but to say it is a legitimate part of Islam would be false. (Wahhabists would strongly disagree. ;) )
But Wahhabism is a factor that must be dealt with regardless of how legitimate it is. So here we find ourselves looking at its biggest proponent - and it's largest victim - Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has siphoned its oil wealth off to fund the lifestyle of countless princes vaguely related to the royal family, while the rest of the young-skewing country faces unemployment and poverty.
The ruling class has tried to embrace the radical Wahhabist interpretation of Islam and use it as a uniting force in the country, while accumulating for itself the material pleasures of modernity purchased with the natural resources of the nation. It hasn't really worked. It's resulted in the aforementioned elites living the high life, while the impoverished masses watch the encroachment of western culture they are taught to despise.
It's a nation ruled by oppression and undermined with a deep-seated cognitive dissonance regarding technology, culture, religion and how it all interacts on a moral and practical level.
It's a climate that is intellectually bankrupt, as it crushes new ideas while longing for the modernity it simultaneously craves / despises. It wants to mesh 16th century mores with 21st century technology. So far it has operated under the illusion that such things are possible, as the country has simply purchased what it desires from the West. But it doesn't develop much of anything on its own. The culture of Wahhabism silences innovation. It creates an environment where fear, oppression, absolutely pathological misogyny are entrenched in the social and legal fabric of the nation.
Saudi Arabia has tried to improve its position by having students study overseas, but they quickly become deeply alienated from the world that stands so far apart from the one they come from. Ideally, the men (and they are almost always men) would return with new ideas and new perspectives. But they so often end up bitter radicals. They see how their nation is widely perceived as a backwards ocean of sand that is valued for its oil and little else. Furthermore, the Western world they encounter is full of temptations they have been groomed to hate, but the promise of economic prosperity they cannot hope to find at home.
The home they return to is a stifling environment of institutionalized corruption (the name Saudi Arabia literally means "Arabia that belongs to the House of Saud"), intellectual stagnation where new ideas are deeply frowned upon, and constant reminders of the morally corrupt world they've left behind.
What hope is there for a country like that?
Even if they didn't come back a
"I think a good start would be a move to SSL everything. It doesn't make sites unblockable, "
And use an anonymous proxy. Problem solved.
Marxist != Totalitarian Communist
Capitalist != Fascist
Stalin was not a Marxist. He was a totalitarian murderous dictator who claimed to be a Marxist. Just like Hitler wasn't a Christian, even though all of his soldiers had "Gott mit uns" or "God is with us" engraved on their belt buckles. Corrupt leaders will exploit whatever ideology is necessary in order to stay in power.
The result would be anarchy, period. You can bet your ass that the "decentralized DNS" record for fox.com would permanently point to goatse. As would any other record that any significant group of technically-minded people found objectionable.
Why are mineral wealth and cultural wealth inversely proportional?
Eventually, the arabs will run out of oil, and other countries will have all the oil (like the huge amounts in the upper mid west, Alaska & the gulf). When those idiots run out, their "power" will disappear and they can go back to being the idiots they were until the early 20's when oil was discovered there. The west set them up with all that oil, and what have we gotten from it? 70 years of trouble!
Yep that's why if you download any Christian torrents you just end up with Dimmu Borgir videos, and why accessing Fox News through Tor also leads to goatse. On a more positive note, darknets are 100% child porn free thanks to vigilante action.
For better or worse there is no way to prevent anything decentralized from turning into 4chan. No technical means of doing this whatsoever.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm sure the citizens of Turkey, Malaysia, Morocco, Bangladesh etc etc not to mention lots of moderate muslims happily living in the west would be very surprised to hear that. It's about as convincing as equating all christians with the Spanish inquisition.
On the other hand, they have the right to participate in public executions with human rights violators (not of, with)
But such "entertainment" is always part of islam, of course. It's close to the only allowed form of entertainment (which is why it is the only allowed use of sports stadia, for example, according to "the muslim students" (taliban in arabic))
If anything can be a "god" of sorts now, how do I know that you're actually an atheist?If anything can be a "god" of sorts now, how do I know that you're actually an atheist?
Somebody above answered that: "portraits of the prophets everywhere, worship rituals, religious processions (with mandatory attendance), holy scripture and a priest class"
Exactly. Thanks for the reinforcement.
I've travelled extensively in Morocco and Turkey (just returned from another journey through the former a week ago) and have got into innumerable discussions with the locals about religion. It is true that those countries are not Wahhabi. However, people who feel that Islam is a key part of their identity and who strive to practice it in their lives do agree with many of the problematic aspects of fundamentalist Islam. They do not believe that other religions or no religion at all should be permitted, and they want the state to silence opponents of Islam.
Turkey especially is tilting towards a situation like in Egypt where a secular state is hanging on to life even as the population goes towards a Muslim Brotherhood-like ideology. My secular friends, representative the ever-decreasing portion of the population who think that Atatürk's attempts to diminish Islam's power were a good thing, are now looking to emigrate so they aren't here when the revolution goes down.
I love responding to my overly-religious relatives when they start spouting fucking nonsense with "Even the devil can quote scripture, right? How do I know you're not the devil right now?"
No, it doesn't shut them up, because they're FUCKING IRRATIONAL. But, it does provide some levity for the rest of the family. :)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
One of us has a totally broken sarcasm detector, and I'm pretty sure it's you.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Of course, it must be me!
After carefully reviewing all posts, I'm confident yours is broken (everything in this post is false), and now you're just fucking with me.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Well you got that half right, anyway :) I just didn't see anything worth responding to in your initial comment, so I figured I'd have some fun with it. Next time, if you actually have some sort of point to make, put the sarcasm aside and just spit it out.
Torrents, darknets and mesh networks (and even BGP) are all examples of decentralized systems that aren't anarchic crazyfests. There are many technical methods of preventing tampering and vandalism on decentralized systems.
If you don't like sarcastic replies, avoid saying dumb things.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
> No, it doesn't shut them up, because they're FUCKING IRRATIONAL.
And so are you. All humans are.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Tyranny of this sort should be rewarded in the manner exemplified by Hassan-i Sabbh. But the people of Saudi Arabia won't rebel against this bullshit in any meaningful way, so it's not my concern.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Can we now please do this in America?
Yes, I know it sets a bad precedent, but it's friggin' FACEBOOK!
This was actually a German tradition. It was on belt buckles even in the first world war. It was not something Hitler started. He just didn't see a reason to change an old army tradition.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Bush will hold King Abdullah's hand while Obama bows to him, and everything will be OK.
Torrents, darknets and mesh networks (and even BGP) are all examples of decentralized systems
No, they're not, or at least not in the way that would be applicable to what's being discussed here. Torrent distribution may be decentralized, but the actual addressing and content management is handled by centralized servers. The quality of the service depends on the server. That's one of the big advantages that torrents have over, say, the gnutella network - you can chose a server that cares about - and controls - the quality of the data it distributes, whereas on a truly decentralized network like gnutella you're constantly inundated with crap. The best torrent experience comes from private trackers, the worst comes from randomly searching through google. The more tightly controlled the network, the more likely it is you'll find what you want instead of ending up with japanese midget porn and a fuckton of trojans.
As a side note - back when I ran my own botnets, I used to LOVE truly decentralized networks like Napster and Gnutella. I'd have a much tougher time pulling off that kind of shenanigans on TPB or Demonoid.
If you don't like sarcastic replies, avoid saying dumb things.
Sarcasm is the first refuge of the incompetent.
South Park is created by a small group of people who create and distribute provocative material for entertainment and occasionally social commentary.
Facebook is a platform where millions of individuals can write anything they want to their friends, and the content isn't created by Facebook, it's created by the users. Sure, Facebook occasionally encourages people to publish information that isn't necessarily limited to the choices the conservatives approve of (Interested in: Women. Status: It's Complicated. Politics: Anarchist Religion: Rastafarian) etc. But it's not the kind of thing that's pointed at the owners individually.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You can grab a torrent file from a darknet, get addressing information via DHT and receive the content from other peers. What part of that is centralized? Centralized torrent servers can deliver a better user experience, but that aspect would be irrelevant for a decentralized network protocol. From a technical standpoint a decentralized system can be just as good.
Sarcasm is the first refuge of the incompetent.
You are the second person in Internet history to say this.
However one other person in history shares your views on sarcasm:
http://www.remote-world.com/2009/08/15/dostoyevskys-take-on-sarcasm/
I think he had some "issues."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Is Allah weak?
Why Muslims are hell bent on protecting Allah from human rant?
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
The problem with Islam these days is the insistence of some to distinguish between a "fundamentalist" version of it, and a more "tolerant" one.
Rest assured that in the case of Morocco, the "tolerant" Islam is a myth. There is no freedom of worship, no gender equality (at least, not when it comes to inheritance laws), no freedom of expression, etc. While the world is focused on Iran and Afghanistan, there's a tendency to overlook the severe civil liberties violations taking place in light-theocracies such as Morocco. A Moroccan who isn't lucky enough to be born among the dwindling 3,000-strong Jewish community can be jailed for eating a sandwich or sipping from a water bottle in Ramadan.
The proxies would also be blocked. If accessing a forbidden site takes half an hour of googling or membership of a secret society to find one the authorities havn't, the censorship is working. Besides, how can you know the proxy is trustworthy? The authorities may be able to sieze the servers, or just subpoena the logs, or put a packet sniffer on their connection. Anonymous proxies help, but they arn't a solution in themselves.
Turkey is nowhere near a fundamentalist society. There was a huge fuss recently about the premiere's wife wearing a headscarf, because her role is seen as secular (as I'm sure you're aware). People openly drink, Mevlevi are tolerated, saints are worshipped, birthplaces of the Christian church are open for visitors and learning about early Christianity encouraged (at least for visitors), and there are no prohibitions on women in public life (though there are traditions which westerners would see as backwards in that respect). It is nowhere close to Wahhabi, and it will be interesting to see if it does become any closer to a theocracy because of Erdogan - he hasn't actually made any moves to make it more so, and joining the EU would require the opposite. Note also that secularism is currently enshrined in the constitution. I'd say that the country stands as good proof that this assertion:
Makes no sense, no matter how many fundamentalists (on both sides of what they see as *the* holy war) trumpet it.
As an atheist, I find this passage particularly puzzling. All monotheistic religions, including Christianity (dominant in the West), require their followers to follow only one God, and discount the gods of others as false idols. Taken to an extreme they all recommend killing infidels, and even interpreted mildly they imply disrespect and disregard for the beliefs of others. How is this problematic aspect of Islam any different from similar problematic aspects of Christianity (as practiced by fundamentalists)?
What you are actually defending here (and what your friends are worried about) is secularism, which has *nothing* to do with Islam, and everything to do with opposing any one religion taking over public life.
You can grab a torrent file from a darknet, get addressing information via DHT and receive the content from other peers. What part of that is centralized?
None - which is why darknets are just as full of garbage and malware as the napster and gnutella networks ever were. If you're trying to argue for decentralization, you're doing a horrible job.
From a technical standpoint a decentralized system can be just as good.
Sure, but we weren't discussing technology, we were discussing the human element.
I think he had some "issues."
Dostoyevski? If you mean that he was one of the greatest literary psychologists in history, then yea, he had some "issues". If you honestly think that it's an insult to lump me in with him, you must be a few nodes short of a network.
Iran under the shah was basically like Turkey is now: people believed themselves Muslims, but they drank, women didn't always wear the veil, Western culture was cool even if the American-backed government was not. Nonetheless, even if the people didn't strictly live by the precepts of Islamic law, there was paradoxically widespread support for the establishment of Islamic law. It was people who you'd call non-fundamentalists who welcomed back Khomeini and helped him win out over the secular revolutionary forces. True, perhaps individual Muslims are good, decent, harmless people, but at this point in history they tend to usher in harsh religious states when acting as a mass.
The establishment of a Christian theocracy is nowhere near as much of a threat as a Muslim one. It's been hundreds of years since a serious Christian state existed, and there isn't conveniently codified religious law that can be quickly put into force like schools of Islamic jurisprudence.
Furthermore, not all theocracies are equal. Sticking with the example of Turkey, even when under the Byzantine Empire there was a beautiful symphonia between Church and State, the practice of other religions was permitted. There were Muslim places of worship within the walls of Constantinople. Compare this to Muslim Turkey: even during its decades of secularism, Turkey has confiscated much land belonging to the Orthodox Church (including shutting down their only seminary), and is cracking down on house churches.
Incidentally, that ancient Christian churches are on display for tourists doesn't mean the country can't go radical. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, once it takes power, intends to keep a lot of ancient religious sites open to sustain the tourist economy even as it institutes a very strict law upon the people.
Yes darknets are full of garbage and malware. But that garbage and malware is delivered reliably and intact - just as both google.com and goatse.cx should be resolved reliably in a decentralized DNS system. The quality of the content, affected by the human element, is as irrelevant to a decentralized system as it is to a centralized one without some sort of censorship or curation.
Dostoyevski had a lot of personal issues. Isaac Newton did too, and if I say he had issues and compare you to him in this regard, I wouldn't be saying you're a brilliant scientist.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm sorry but none of this adds one shred of evidence to the assertion that all muslims are fanatics, any more so than Christians (for example). Lumping all muslims together as Islamists in some vast conspiracy to take over the world is naive and not at all useful.
Just like Christianity or Hinduism right now there are kooks and militant fanatics killing in the name of their religion and it's a mistake to take their claims of leadership or speaking for the wider community seriously.
Frankly the record of Christianity is at least as bad as Islam in last the millennia when it comes to abuse of power and slaughter in the name of religion - all fanatics should be distrusted, whatever their brand, and Islam is not special in this regard.
It's funny, yet sad, how you insist that Islamist political parties that enjoy wide support from the people are some kind of aberrant handful of people who don't speak for anyone. The poll numbers for the Muslim Brotherhood and for Ak Parti speak for themselves.
Hey content-restricting countries, wanna be safe? How about just blocking the entire internet? That'll make sure no online information you don't want people to read will be available.
I am not devoid of humor.
Next election, I'm going to support any Muslim candidate I can find.
Fixed for clarity. That's what you meant, isn't it?
You say that like it's a bad thing. ;)
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Aww, you think I'm a brilliant scientist? Thanks, you're a sweetheart :)
*previous message was received over a decentralized network. some confusion may apply.
Yeah, thanks for that, I guess, you really contributed now didn't you?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Oh really? Maybe you should have looked at the figures, which give the lie to your hysteria about the coming world caliphate:
Ak Parti share of the vote in Turkey: 46.6%
Muslims in Turkey: 99.8%
My assertion is simply that not all muslims are islamist - the statistics for Turkey bear that out.