World Website Blocking

A U.S.-based search engine that had been gaining popularity in China for its privacy-protected search results has become a target of Chinese censors.

According to Tech In Asia , a technology news blog, Chinese authorities have not only blocked access to DuckDuckGo from Chinese servers, but they even appear to be censoring any mentions of the search engine online as well.

Founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg explained that DuckDuckGo is a search engine that boasts real privacy by not collecting or sharing personal information from its users.  On Weinberg's personal blog , he goes into a little bit more depth about how important Internet privacy is to him, even opting out of the commonly used Google services, not only because they are competition but because he believes in privacy policies that do the minimum collection needed as opposed to the maximum collection possible.

Indonesia has been censoring sites that it found to be contrary to their government's view of the world. This has led to some rather odd choices. Over the weekend the government there decided that the popular video sharing site, Vimeo, was to be added to the list of websites that should be blocked. The rationale being that this site could serve of pornography and other such things.

The religious leader of Iran has banned online chatting between men and women who are not related, repressing the hopes of singletons trying to find love on the internet.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei published a fatwa against the practice on his own website, claiming it to be somehow immoral .

Iranian authorities also blocked WeChat, an app similar to WhatsApp with more than 100million users that enables access to social networks. Both Facebook and Twitter, as well as other social networks, are banned in Iran.

Despite this ban, many Teheran officials have both Facebook and Twitter accounts, including President Hassan Rowhani who has 163,000 followers on Twitter.

A localised YouTube service will be available in Pakistan. But users are far from happy

Who would've thought the news earlier this month of YouTube?? being finally made accessible in Pakistan , albeit as a local search engine, would open a floodgate of criticism?

Minster of State for Information Technology and Telecommunications, Anusha Rehman certainly did not. She probably thought she had done a good turn --- wooed many young digital rights activists who had long been demanding unblocking of the website and calmed others who had demanded blocking of objectionable content from it.

Instead of installing costly filtration mechanisms, Google will easily be able to block blasphemous content on the request of the Pakistan government, Rehman told the Senate's Standing Committee on Information and Technology. Saudi Arabia and Malaysia have also reached a similar arrangement with Google, she added.

But Farieha Aziz, director at Bolo Bhi, a not-for-profit geared towards advocacy, policy and research in the areas of gender rights, government transparency, internet access, digital security and privacy, dismissed the news out right saying: There is no arrangement between the company and the government, unlike the perception the government is projecting.

I don't want a localised version. Remember what became of Disney in India with everything getting dubbed in Hindi! I would definitely prefer the original version, said a resolute 12-year old Khadeja Ebrahim, a YouTube buff. I love YouTube, my entire school loves YouTube and we hate the people who have blocked it, she added vehemently.