Sunday, March 16, 2008

Just Unblocked (for Now) and Semi-Blocked

On her blog, Secret Dubai has a link to a petition to unblock Single in Dubai. On his blog, samurai-sam reports that Secret Dubai is blocked.

Single-in-Dubai was blocked last summer, but, when I went to check the status of Secret Dubai, I also checked Single-in-Dubai, and both Secret Dubai and Single-in-Dubai are unblocked, at least for now, i.e., as of midnight, 17 Mar 2008 (which would have been St. Patrick's Day, only the Irish moved it officially to last Saturday, since today is Monday of Holy Week ; however, the US is still having St. Patrick's Day today, since US law does not allow any week to be Holy).

Last week, however, the Gulf News (which does not put its comics on-line) declined to print the comic strip 'Dilbert,' semi-blocking it, since the TRA still allowed me to read 'Dilbert' on-line.

So it appears, prima facie, that the Gulf News deletion of 'Dilbert' ('sorry, this comic is unavailable today,' repeated all week) was another example of self-censorship, rather than official censorship, or the TRA would have concurred by blocking the website.

Yet another case where the UAE prohibition of Emerson's hobgoblins is operating normally.

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3 Comments:

Blogger secretdubai said...

Ah well. I can still be accessed here here or presumably via any RSS feed.

Dilbert is ace, I love that strip!

11:20 am  
Blogger samuraisam said...

For the majority of internet users secretdubai and sex in dubai are both blocked (I've had this confirmed through numerous sources); there is a small percentage of the UAE with certain IP addresses who have no proxy (or at least didn't 2-3 weeks ago); to make matters worse there is another percentage of Dubai who cannot access blogger/blogspot at all (some du users say they can, and some say they can't)

As proof of the secretdubai block you can read these glorious quotes from the TRA

10:00 pm  
Blogger Send Flower Pakistan said...

Just for study purpose you can unblock all sites by using this link Unblock All Sites

5:21 pm  

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