Kuwait blocks DailyMotion, CollegeHumor, and more…
If there is one ministry in Kuwait that is working hard, that would be the ministry of communication (MOC). And man I hope they never did. In a strong massive campaign it seems, several popular sites have been blocked by Kuwait ISPs after orders from the MOC. DailyMotion.com, CollegeHumor.com have been found blocked in the past few days. Why they block it you ask? According to them, those sites offer offensive content against our beliefs and religion. I only visited CollegeHumor once and the main page didn’t have offensive content, DailyMotion is a video streaming service just like YouTube. Soccer fans love it for what it has to deliver in that area, ofcourse the site has sexual content as any other video site, but the general theme of the site, visiting main page, you don’t normally find offensive content.
On a different scale, Ali from Deera Chat podcast has been reporting that 3 action movie clean DVDs are held by customs for clearance. I have seen the tracking record, it’s been standing there for over 20 days! 20 days to clear 3 DVDs? What age are we living in? I bet that’s a trick from government to help local business owners make more money, as the difference in price between Kuwait and outside is becoming more obvious to many people. I get my stuff from outside for literally half the price or more. Few hundreds is saved on one order. Business dealers here don’t want to lower their prices, and yet they still want everyone to buy from them.
What if the government is really interested in protecting people from offensive harmful content that will affect our beliefs and manners, and that we are only looking at it from our short angle? Well in that case I suggest the government simply takes a look at our subscription channels like Showtime. Over there I’ve seen things I never saw anywhere else. Things disgusting. Things unbearable. You see sex scenes, offensive scenes, Passions of the Christ movie which was banned from Kuwait Cinema, Da Vinci Code as well. Movies that mock the Holy prophets and accusing Saint Meriam (Mary) of adulteress, God forgive me for just passing it. I never heard anything against those channels. No censoring, no banning, no auditing. Why? Because it’s difficult or even impossible for those channel owners to censor the movies as they come from outside, and banning them would cost those business owners a lot of money.
So in summary, after much study (or actually just little short one), I was able to formalize the two conditions the government follows in their ban and censoring of content and services:
- Does it cost us money? Block it!
- Is it against our tradition, beliefs, interests, moods, and blocking will not cost us money? Block it!
Why my blog is still not blocked then you ask? They just don’t care enough… yet!
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Comments
K.TheKuwaiti: They must have been white listed again then as I double checked them both they were blocked on Qnet.
forzaq8: Thanks for confirming it. I am not a visitor of CollegeHumor, but the concept of blocking any site they feel like is really annoying!
Just a clarification, ISPs rely on filtering software to do all the blocking. They just select the categories they want to block.
From what I know, the blocked categories are Pornography and Nudity.
Enter the URLs you want to check and see the categories:
http://www.securecomputing.com/sfwhere/
DailyMotion is categorized as porn, and Collegehumor as nudity :(
Bojacob: That’s new to me. Thanks a lot
But you know, those databases seems to act as movie ranking in a way. If it has so much offensive language, it will be ranked as +17 or +18 if it has some bloody scenes for example. The cover of the DVD explains why it’s +17, for having some explicit language for instance.
So those databases would mark DailyMotion as pornography because it contains such videos. It is not however a porn site by it self, so I still think there should be some smarter way of filtering other than this.
Again, thanks for this enlightening comment.
Those websites aren’t blocked on Qnet…