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A Pakistani court has ordered the authorities to temporarily block Facebook due to a contest that calls for caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
The court order follows a petition by a group called the Islamic Lawyers’ Movement, which complained that the contest was “blasphemous.” A search on Facebook reveals two sites featuring such caricatures: one supporting Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who created the caricature of the Prophet, published in Danish newspapers in 2005.
The other group is openly calling for caricatures of Prophet Muhammad, claiming in the group descriptions that it has noble intent. From the description: “This group is for everyone, regardless of nationality, political or religious believes, who believe in and want to defend freedom of speech and the foundation of democracy wherever it is being threatened in the world!” In the photo section of the group, one can indeed find several caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
Facebook is to remained blocked in Pakistan until May 31. Justice Ejaz Ahmed Chaudhry of the Lahore High Court ordered the department of communications to submit a written reply to the Islamic Lawyers’ Movement petition by that date. In 2008, Pakistan blocked YouTube, also because of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that found their way onto the video-sharing site.
(с) Mashable.com
Well, Big Brother’s ambitions are just astonishing. These days FBI Director Robert Mueller made an interesting statement. As it turns out, he is going to strive for the idea that the US providers should log the Internet history of their users. At the same time the data storage term (attention!) should be two years. Besides that the providers should submit this data to the authorities at their first request, literally, without any court decisions, etc.
It is clear that it means the record of IP addresses, domains, web sites the user visits, etc. This data should be accessible, according to Mueller’s idea, to federal authorities, state and local authorities. Shortly speaking, with the corresponding desire any authority representative can penetrate into a private Internet life of any American and dig out whatever stuff he wants.
The argument provided by Mueller is as follows: before the Internet appeared, FBI had access to any information about telephone calls of the US citizens. As of today a bigger part of personal communication between people has shifted to the Internet and there is no chance to track it down there because there is no corresponding law.
Do you know why FBI needs all that? Correct! To fight child pornography. If it’s not the case of Al-Qaeda, then it’s child pornography. And the issues of national security are also mentioned here.
Fortunately it’s too early to speak of a global logging – the corresponding laws were not adopted. But if they are … Americans (and it also concerns us to a certain extent) should start reading or re-reading Orwell, his “1984”.
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One of the biggest sites for open source software developers SourceForge.net was blocked for users from “banned locations”, as Arab Crunch reports. The black list includes Cuba, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and North Korea.
The paragraph informing that users from the mentioned above countries were included into the black list appeared in resource ToS. Besides that the residents of these countries are blocked from the access to GoogleCode. These bans initiated by the US government authorities in fact put the developers from “black list” countries in the dark, not allowing them to contribute to open source development.
It’s worth mentioning that the event took place almost simultaneously with the US secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech about Internet freedom where she reported that “all of humanity has equal access to innovations, knowledge and ideas”. Just to remind you, the US is currently in active contradiction with China about Google freedom. According to some analysts, the whole story was made up with a special purpose – to allow Hillary make a great speech for her US secretary job position anniversary. To put it simply – it was necessary to create an enemy image, exactly to the date January 21st.
Thus we can see that nobody cancelled double standards of American politics. However this time it involves the programming: the blocking of developers from “banned locations” contradicts to the idea of open source software creation itself and makes it not really open now.
As you all know SmartHide’s goal is not only making people have the ability to communicate without a fear of repression or third party listening to their conversations, but also allowing people to use their democratic rights for freedom of speech and Internet, no matter what country they live in.
We support the words of Hilary Clinton, saying that “all of humanity has equal access to innovations, knowledge and ideas”, but we don’t have double standards…
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