Pakistan enjoys nothing more than proving the wisdom behind the cliché ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’. It is entirely appropriate that the phrase can be traced back to a time in Europe when women would mutilate themselves in order to protect their ‘purity’, since all our most self-destructive actions involve misbegotten notions of honour and morality. For
ISLAMABAD: In a nondescript, creeper-draped building in the capital of Islamabad, a small team of men is purging Pakistan’s Internet. Shadowy government officials are blocking thousands of pages deemed undesirable. But they are not fast enough. So the government is now testing Canadian software that can block millions of sites a second. The censorship helps shape the views of 180
We have now completed a full year with the YouTube ban in place, forcing some to do without one of the most popular internet sites in the world, many others to resort to proxies of various kinds, putting up with the nuisances these ‘by-pass’ mechanisms cause. So, what has the ban, slapped on after an offensive film was loaded on
ISLAMABAD: The ministry of information technology was upbeat about lifting the ban on video sharing website YouTube after having finally acquired the ‘missing’ filters to block blasphemous content within days but it seems that the matter will consume more time. On August 22, State Minister for Information Technology Anusha Rehman revealed during a briefing that Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL)
ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has so far blocked over 21,000 websites containing blasphemous material and while the process is still continuing a report will be sent to the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Monday to decide if the YouTube should be reopened. After verifying the strength of the response mechanism placed by the PTA to handle blasphemous material on the
Social media website You Tube was banned in Pakistan in September 2012 after a blasphemous video titled “Innocence of Muslims” was uploaded on it which caused mass scale protests/riots leading to loss of life/property across the Muslim world and the operator of the popular webpage Google, refused to remove it. This was not the first offense of the website, which
By: Zaair Hussain I had been considering writing on this topic for a while, but I foolishly believed it to be ‘trivial’ or ‘unimportant’, or even ‘so incredibly stupid that my brain hurt to dwell on it for more than a moment’. But our elected leadership and our guardians of justice have managed to open my stubborn eyes. If they
By: Rafay Mahmood KARACHI: The government’s ban on video-sharing website YouTube has been protested on Twitter and Facebook time and again by everyone from ordinary citizens to journalists and musicians in the past four months. While most have tried to live a life without YouTube — either by using Vimeo and Dailymotion — or around it by using proxies, the
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