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According to the outstandingly grammatical image that loads in is place, "We apologize the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political, and moral values of the United Arab Emirates."
countries can block websites?
i had no idea.
im really surprised lj hasnt....
the uae has a government-monopoly isp, which routes everything through a proxy server. i'm only amazed it took them this long to get to facebook - they've been blocking lj on and off for years.
>i'm only amazed it took them this long to get to facebook
exactly... i remember when dubaiwalla told me flickr was blocked there b/c it was still opening in oman. i think in general, the uae is more anal about its censorship than oman is. really sucks that it's blocked. i kinda know what the feeling is b/c my employers have bit-by-bit blocked websites like facebook in recent weeks and at this rate they'll close bbc and wikipedia down too for time-wasting!
Flickr, too. There is, in fact, an entire Flickr group dedicated to posting pictures from the UAE, just out of feistiness because Flickr is so often blocked.
China blocks quite a lot of the web, too.
I suppose, on one hand, you should just be thankful that you even have teh interebs right now. Most of the country is still lacking, correct? You can always use any sort of forwarding proxy to pass the traffic back and forth, around the UAE filters. Hell cDc even created and entire OpenSource project to help miscreants from around the world sneak past draconian government filters (though it was mostly for the Chinese miscreants). It's aptly-named Peek-a-booty.
I don't know if anybody in the country is outright lacking interwebs, but it's been SO sloooow the last few days. Kind of a drag since I use the internet for photographs more than anything. Thanks for the link. =) New forwarding proxies appear all the time, and the UAE has them blocked within a few days. We use a tunnel, but it's the principle that gets me fired up. My domain ( katoributa.com) is still blocked here. >:( Facebook being blocked (now apparently unblocked - I haven't taken it out of my proxy.pac yet) is/was sucky because it's useful for me to get to know my colleagues better. There are so many of us, and we often meet once only and never again. But with almost 1,000 members in our Facebook community, it almost feels (to me) like we know each other. Oh, and HI!! You DO read LJ! I never see you on!
Yes, in fact, I regularly *read* LJ. I have just not been the contributing kind these days, much to the annoyance of Morgan ;)
She keeps trying to convince me to get online, update and start posting again...not a half bad idea.
hai2u too!
To prove just how special you are
I think this is the first comment he's left in
... over eight months.
You are loved!
One more reason not to move back if I have half a choice! We don't routinely get ultra-slow internets because of one cable breaking, either.
Yeah. I think it's happened (on average) once a year since we've been here.
Haha, Don was talking to ignant $%@!!s on IRC who insist that "IT CAN'T BE A COINCIDENCE! THE UHMERICAN GOVERNMENT IS TAKING OUT COMMUNICATIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST! MILITARY SHIPS WERE SEEN IN THE PERSIAN GULF AT THE SAME TIME! HOW CAN THAT BE A COINCIDENCE?!?!"
That's hilarious. I suppose there's no point in reminding them the US Navy has had a permanent presence in the Gulf since at least 1950. But if you spend enough time thinking about it, I'm pretty sure you could hatch a quick-get-rich scheme that takes advantage of conspiracy theorists who'll believe anything they read on IRC.
There's an even more beautiful conspiracy theory. It involves the NSA, and it goes like this:
1. Cut cable at point A, which takes time to reach
2. Cut cable at point B, distant from point A
2a. Note that (2) is undetectable, since the cable is out anyway
3. Splice cable at point B, including a little cabletap device
4. Wait for point A to be fixed
5. You now have a working cable you have a tap on
oh geez!
facebook sux anyway
as long as LJ doesnt get blocked!
is myspace blockeD?
The domain Myspace.com isn't blocked, but the other domains (where all the Myspace content actually is) are blocked.
LJ was sorta blocked for almost two years - no "SITE BLOCKED" screen of death, but it couldn't be loaded. It would immediately return a tcp error, as if it timed out. But it suddenly started working again, about a week ago.
The best thing about Facebook, here, is that people actually use it. The first couple of years I was here, people couldn't understand why I wanted to talk to people over the internet, and really couldn't comprehend that a lot of my best friends were people I knew first online. But everybody is inexplicably really into Facebook, so if I want to share pictures or anything, it has to be on Facebook if I want people to actually see them.
It's working for me, but the weird one is flickr, which is a website that has been blocked for a long time, but now it's open, but you cannot see any user pictures. I wonder if they are re-routing due to that cable problem?
Edited at 2008-02-08 09:00 am (UTC)
I think by the time you left this comment, Facebook had been unblocked; it was only blocked the morning of the 3rd. I don't know what they're doing to Flickr! Maybe blocking other sub-domains within Flickr, like static.flickr.com? | |
