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Up to date information concerning the state of the proxy in the United Arab Emirates.

If you think a certain website has been un-necessarily blocked, please email here.

Monday, April 09, 2007

last.fm

Yet another stupid block that has been complained about literally hundreds of times over the course of the past few months; last.fm described as "an Internet radio station and music recommendation system" is unblocked, however user profiles remain blocked for some reason only known to the folks at Etisalat (who are idiots) and the folks at Secure Computing (who list the last.fm domain as "entertainment" and the user subdirectory as 'dating').
How exactly one would go about dating someone based upon musical taste is beyond me, perhaps Etisalat care to answer?

It'd be really nice if Etisalat could take 5 minutes out of their busy tea-boiling schedule to unblock the following URL:http://www.last.fm/user
Thanks.

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Thursday, March 08, 2007

Torrent sites

Dear Secure Computing,

Currently the following websites are listed as "Criminal Skills", "Hacking and/or P2P/File Sharing;
http://www.thepiratebay.org
http://www.piratebay.org
http://www.demonoid.com

Listing these websites as "Criminal Skills" is fairly innaccurate. It is only a crime if someone downloads pirated material that they have no legal right to on those websites, but who is securecomputing to say what rights people may or may not hold? and furthermore, by labelling them as "Criminal Skills" it automatically places any legal material unavailable to many. Listing these sites as "Hacking" seems pretty inaccurate too.

While the sites above are listed as Hacking/Criminal Skills, sites like http://www.torrentspy.com are listed only as being P2P/file sharing.

Also, please note that two of these URLs (www.thepiratebay.org and www.piratebay.org) point to exactly the same content; how can they have different categorizations?

Thanks.

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Resources

Internet Censorship Explorer
Open Net Initiative study on the UAE
Open Net Initiative updates on the UAE
Open Net Initiative article on internet censorship in general
Secure Computing
Wikipedia: Etisalat
Wikipedia: Secure Computing

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