livejournal blocked

So finally livejournal has been blocked (again) in the UAE (thanks to anon for tip)

A few weeks back I wrote a post on the website www.vimeo.com; I actually complained to Etisalat about the site and was told that they didn't care/it was against policy because it was categorized as 'dating' (which leads me to believe no matter what website it is, if some company in the US lists it as dating they dont care at all and don't seem like they even review the website themselves).

I suggested to securecomputing that the website was not dating and they have since recategorized it (which means vimeo is now unblocked in the UAE).

Unfortunately there are 3 websites (that I know of) which are commonly complained about for being blocked (www.last.fm, www.twitter.com and now www.livejournal.com); as you can see from this screenshot, securecomputing lists them all as social networking/dating, so if a website is social networking it is automatically considered a dating website too. This seems like quite a severe limitation. It is also quite unfortunate as all four of these websites have very little to do with dating (vimeo is a video website like youtube with a policy against adult material, last.fm is so people can share playlists of what music they're listening to, twitter.com is much like blogspot/blogger, and livejournal.com is like blogger too)



3 cheers for Etisalat.