Global Voices Advocacy » Yemen blocks Maktoob blogging platform

posted by Sami Ben Gharbia on Mar 26, 2008
categories: Yemen

Maktoobblog.com, one of the most popular Arab blogging platform, has been recently blocked in Yemen cutting off Yemeni Internet users from the more than 46960 blogs the service hosts. According to MaktoobBlog, there are currently 1226 Yemeni blogs hosted by the service. All of them disappeared from the Yemeni Internet.

On the pan-Arabic Al Hayat newspaper, Mr. Yasser Al-Eimad, from the Public Telecommunication Corporation, has denied the information that Maktoobblog.com was blocked. But the OpenNet Initiative testing has confirmed yesterday, through technical investigation, that the blog hosting service has been blocked by Yemennet ISP, a service of the government’s Public Telecommunication Corporation (PTC):

ONI technical investigation verified that the service has been blocked by Yemennet, Yemen’s government-run ISP. Access is blocked to the entire domain maktoobblog.com, effectively to every blog hosted by the service. Interestingly, users who attempt to access the site receive a network error message instead of the standard blockpage, which is served when users attempt to access sexual content.

This significant blocking is expected to hinder Internet users in Yemen from blogging and reading blogs because maktoobblog.com is home of one of the largest blogging communities in the Middle East and North Africa.

3 Responses

Global Voices Online » Yemen blocks Maktoob blogging platform

[...] hosts. According to MaktoobBlog, there are currently 1226 Yemeni blogs hosted by the service. All of them disappeared from the Yemeni Internet. Share [...]
posted on March 26th, 2008 at 2:45 am - #8933
Armies of Liberation » Blog Archive » Yemen Blocks Matoob Blogging Platform

[...] a blog.” And apparently he really is. In a rather Stalinist reaction to growing civil unrest, Yemen blocked 1126 Yemeni blogs. Maktoobblog.com, one of the most popular Arab blogging platform, has been [...]
posted on March 26th, 2008 at 4:44 pm - #8940
Austrolabe » Banning and Blocking

[...] dead founder of the Turkish Republic. Secret Dubai is now banned in Dubai. And Yemen has just blocked over 1,000 blogs. Related PostsPolicing ThoughtAndi and the HypocritesWhere are the Muslim [...]
posted on March 28th, 2008 at 3:35 pm - #8965