This from a Bahraini blogger. Hope it is something I wrote that upset them!
Saudi blocks Blogger and Flickr
Tue, 04 Oct 2005 21:18:56
In a country that is renowned for censorship, I fail to understand why people make it easier for authorities to switch them off. That's truly like putting all your eggs in one single basket.
No wonder really then that the Internet Services Unit, the only internet supplier in Saudi has switched off both popular services, and I really really doubt that they will switch them on again no matter how much entreaties and "pressure" is applied. Saudi is a bit more remote than Mars, so authorities don't give a tinker's cuss what the "world at large" think of them or their practices.
But, in the spirit of applying judicious international pressure in order for someone up there sits up and takes notice, here goes nothing:
Reporters Without Borders today called on the Internet Services Unit (ISU), the agency that manages Web filtering in Saudi Arabia, to explain why the weblog creation and hosting service blogger.com has been made inaccessible since 3 October, preventing Saudi bloggers from updating their blogs.
“Saudi Arabia is one of the countries that censors the Internet the most, but blog services had not until now been affected by the ISU’s filters,” the press freedom organisation said. “The complete blocking of blogger.com, which is one of the biggest blog tools on the market, is extremely worrying. Only China had so far used such an extreme measure to censor the Internet.”
Reached by Reporters Without Borders, the ISU recognised that it had blocked access to blogger.com but did not give any reason.
Reporters sans frontiers
hat tip: Global Voices
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