Archive for the ‘Syria’ Category
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SourceForge Removes Blanket Block
In late January, on the same day as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's speech on Net freedom, open source community SourceForge blocked access to users from Sudan, Syria, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, in an effort to keep in line with U.S. Treasury export restrictions on those countries. On Sunday, SourceForge announced that they had revoked the ban, unveiling their new strategy for complying with U.S. law.
On-line Social Networks in Syria
Syria was among the last countries in the Middle East to introduce the Internet. On February 24, 1996, the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment (STE) received permission from the prime minister’s office to do so, and to serve as the body responsible for the Country Top-Level Domain Code (sy.). Two weeks later, ...
The Power of 140 Characters: Twitter in the Middle East
The massive, sustained protests in Iran this past month against the regime’s apparent falsification of the presidential election results was enabled by widespread employment of new communication technologies. Among them is Twitter, the micro-blog which enables its users to distribute short messages of no more than 140 characters ('Tweets') via ...
Syria: Blogger Kareem Arbaji Sentenced to Three Years in prison
On September 13, 2009, the Syrian State Security Supreme Court sentenced the young blogger Kareem Arbaji to three-years prison for "publishing mendacious information liable to weaken the nation’s morale," under article #286 of the Syrian penal code.
The thirty- one years old economics graduate, Kareem Arbaji, has been detained for over ...
Once again, Syria bans Facebook
Editor's Note: Facebook has been blocked in Syria consistently for the past two years; therefore, the statement that a ban will be "reintroduced" is incorrect. The linked article from 'Al Quds Al Arabi'," which has since been removed, did not actually claim that Syria planned to reintroduce a ban. The ...
While White-listing Syria, Linkedin Keeps Sudan's Internet Users Blocked!
After Linkedin the business social Network, blocked Internet users in Syria and then unblocked them and apologized (as ArabCrunch has reported.) It was confirmed that Internet users in Sudan (an African Arab country) still cannot access Linkedin, who were blocked by Linkedin since several months ago.
LinkedIn Restores Services to Syrian Users
Last week, Global Voices Advocacy broke the news that Syrian users had been cut off from LinkedIn's services. The business-oriented social networking site had stated in e-mails to several of its users that, "Under the User Agreement, LinkedIn Users warrant that they are not prohibited from receiving U.S. origin products, including services or software. As such, and as a matter of corporate policy, we do not allow member accounts or access to our site from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria."
