KEMS Blocks Blogger in Kuwait!
I was just writing a long article about Blogger accounts being blocked by KEMS. Just before I hit the Publish button I thought of giving it another shot, and it worked. This still doesn’t explain the silly move of blocking it. How did this block happen? By mistake? I doubt. Either they quickly decided to roll back after the kuwaiti blogs got full of complains, or they were trying to block some specific Blogger account (for some reason) and somehow they made the mistake of blocking the whole service!
What I’m sure of is that, those kind of things don’t happen by them selves. No way the KEMS filter only would by mistake block all Blogger accounts. They must’ve been planning for something when this stupid block happened. It is worth mentioning that Blogger is the biggest blogging community online, and Google Official Blog, the blog of the world’s #1 search engine and one of the top 3 sites in the world resides there and was blocked in the move.
In the past few months, we have seen other stupid blocking moves from the ISPs, some were pushed for by the government as well. Kuwaiti blogs were blocked, political sites blocked and brought down, Meta Cafe, some of YouTube videos, and even once I saw snapshot of the official Kuwait Stock Exchange Market site being blocked by FastTelco! I wonder how that last one happened. Our neighbors, Bahrain blocked Google Earth by government orders. The decision was soon reversed however under global pressure.
It’s not yet that bad, but it’s on the way of becoming another China.
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Comments
Well I do believe that SOME sites should be blocked (and I’m thinking of illegal sites here), there is no reason to block others. Why would anyone block something like Blogger? Afraid they might get “dates” online? Hell, I use blogger, I only get occasional emails about my blog or comments. Never had a Britney Spears-wanna-be send me nude photos of herself or something.
Weird.
According to Fonzation’s blog, it’s been fixed.
Errrrr….The Manny Calavera sketch. Click on it so it enlarges.
Sorry I’m being so clingy about it, need an opinion of someone who is a huge fan of Grim Fandango.
According to my blog as well, it was only blocked.
I looked at the sketch, I just didnt know where to post my comment ;/.
I really like it good job. The phrase is not bad as well. Just manny is kind of thin down the wrist. his body in the game is more of straight.
Will fix :) I don’t like the phrase, personally, but I’ll change it when I finish the game – which I recently bought.
There’s a new “Drawings and Gallery” in my blog, you can comment on drawings there.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again:
“ISPs in Kuwait love to play *god* with the Internet”
I wonder if it is somebody playing the fool with the filter settings? as for proxies can someone verify this: I think Qnet is *filtering* any inbound traffic on port 80 and 8080 so even when an external proxy is used with these ports it will still be subject to filtering.
Hmm… not sure. I do notice even with proxy some sites when I do POST request it fails.
Good to have you back by the way.
Some time ago, Flickr and Youtube were momentarily blocked too. Maybe they’re abusing the blocking system to lower bandwidth usage :P
That is true for BitTorrent. It is known that because of the intensive use nature of BitTorrent, many ISPs around the world started dedicating lower bandwidth for BitTorrent!
Anyways, if you take a look at kuwaitblogs today they will know how bad it was for them. It was full of complains. Hope that delivers a clear enough message.
man sometimes it because the content filtering . sometime `3a9eeeeeeeeeb :P . we dont want ppl to talk . jezak Allah kher
[...] Well, today I got to work and as I do every morning while having my coffee, is to write something personal and then start checking out what other bloggers have had to say lately. The first two blogs I usually like checking are Sita and Blue Ice. And then dozens after that. First I get this prohibited access on both blogs and then all other blogs on blogger. Don’t know if it is some stunt pulled by our IT department, but I doubt it cos we have our own “blocked’ message or is there something wrong with the net. WordPress blogs are working fine though. Either way, this better not go on for long, it will ruin my daily morning routine. {Read more on this on Bashar’s post} Note: Sorry to all blogger users if you dont see me commenting today. [...]