Ever get the feeling you are wasting your breath? Yep, after all the thousands of (mostly angry) words written about internet censorship in the UAE, by dozens of journalists, bloggers and so many others, the cack-handed  efforts at web blocking by the TRA and the duopoly still go unnoticed on the worldwide stage. China’s Green Dam and Iran’s cyber-revolution make headline news, but the fact that we can’t use flickr goes unnoticed (it’s an outrage!)

The UK newspaper the Guardian has compiled this map of global web censorship, in association with the Open Net Initiative - but there’s no data available on the UAE…

The good news is, that the paper is asking for more information on any countries that it has missed - so getting posting data to them straight away.

The internet censorship adds to a couple of other notable crowd-sourcing projects from the Guardian lately. They’ve roped in readers to comb through hundreds of pages of UK MP’s expenses and have also launched a campaign to track and identify those detained or killed in Iran’s recent election protests. Which, sadly, any one accessing from the UAE won’t be able to see all of the results from, as the Guardian is asking its volunteer community to post ideas for visualisation of the data on to flickr…

I’d like to thank du for making my job more difficult than it has to be.

While Etisalat has blocked image sharing site flickr.com for some time, presumably on the grounds that we might see some rude pictures on it, du hadn’t also followed suit and blocked the site, until this week.

While the total lack of co-ordination or common sense around blocking of web sites is clearly the fault of the TRA, I’d held a vague hope that du might just be following a more sensible policy than Etisalat and the TRA.

But no. They’ve blocked it. A site that is used by Cisco, EMC and a host of other IT-savvy companies as a convenient and efficient way to share images of corporate events and launches is blocked, because we might see something naughty. No pictures of Cisco’s UCS launch for us, I’m afraid.

Have these people ever done a search on the web? Seriously, an image search for just about anything will turn up illicit content (Rule 34 of the Internet…), no need to bypass the proxy or use any other tricks, just a plain old unfiltered search will do. Their attempts to block ‘inappropriate’ material are up there with King Cnut trying to turn back the tide.

This time, just for fun, I’m going to put in a request to du to unblock Flickr. The forms are here, if you’d like to join in. But I’m not holding my breath that it will work…

New Internet blocking policy, new warning

Hot on the heels of the all new Internet Access Management policy comes the all new Site Blocked warning screen! The new warning screen, introduced today, isn’t massively different to the old one, with the exception of a link to a .pdf that spells out some of the details of the new policy…

Continue reading … ‘Move along, nothing to see here’

The saga of UAE web blocking lumbered into a new phase this week, as Etisalat started to unblock a number of sites that were previously banned. The changes were made without any particular announcement by either Etisalat or the TRA, although they came just ahead of an apparent deadline to unblock ‘one thousand’ web sites by 29th August.

As usual, its a case of more questions than answers though, as no official list of unblocked sites has been released and no explanation was given for why some sites are now considered OK, while similar sites are still blocked.

So far it looks like at least a half dozen high profile sites like Twitter and Live Journal have been opened up, along with less well known sites like Bright Kite, but with notable exceptions such as Orkut and Flickr, which remain blocked… Confusing to say the least. Without any master list of blocked sites, working out what’s no longer blocked is just about impossible.

There’s also no word yet from the TRA on what changes, if any, have been made to the how and the why of web blocking policy in the UAE, and there’s also no explanation as to why Etisalat blocks some sites that du doesn’t.

We’re still trying to speak to the TRA about this, so perhaps they might shed some light on the situation.

In the meantime, for all those that were worried that they were missing out on some essential Web 2.0-ey social interaction, feel free to twitter away to your heart’s content.

The Olympic Games have kicked off in China, and as the world turns its attention to Beijing, its not just the sport that has come into focus. Along with China’s infamous pollution and political repression, its policies towards online freedom have also been put under the microscope.

At the weekend I was listening to the Guardian’s excellent Tech Weekly podcast, which was discussing the so-called Great Firewall of China and many of the issues around the web in country. The Olympics are seen by some as a chance to nudge China towards more openness, and by others as an opportunity to expose the lack of freedom in the online world in the country.

What struck me most about what was being said however, was how many parallels there are with what happens in China as there are with what goes on in the Middle East, and how much less global concern there seems to be about abuses of freedom in this part of the world.

Continue reading … ‘All eyes on China’