Stop Internet Censorship

I think certain amount of censorship is understandable. Many countries such Singapore and China are enforcing restrictions but very sensibly. I think that is the main problem with QTEL is that they do not understand the customers needs and concerns. Many of the sites blocked are not indecent or harmful and they need to do something about that. will they? I doubt it.

But even more desperate, is the poor service and high prices for services. All this is due to that fact that it is the only telecom company.

Easy

Qwerty, I have had the same response on some searches... and only in the last day or two.

Sensibly!? Hahaha....ever heard of the Great Firewall of China? Try to Google it...but just not on google.cn where it will probably be censored!

Yes, so I heard that censorship is fierce in China...(Easy! get your facts, man!)

I also disagree that a certain amount of censhorship is good, cos then you would start to wonder where to draw the line. Censorship has to come from the reciving end. So if you are unconfortable with certain things poping up on your screen or you want to protect your children, then many sofwares are available in the market nowadays for that purpose.

Of course certain things are banned and are a criminal offense in western countries, and it should continue like that. Other than that, Censorship endorsed by governments, can be a very dangerous thing.

If you have the remotest idea of what you are doing then you can get access to any material you want on the web despite these blocks.

Furthermore pornography is widely available on satellite TV here in Doha (in fact a lot easy to get than in the UK)

Ah.. MEN. You have managed to turn this blog into a pornography debate.

(Watcha Qatari, now that this website contains the word "pornography" it might be closed down)

This is not about pornography guys. This is about ME (or you, or anyone) being a mature adult being with capacity of choice and only MYSELF should decide what is acceptable for ME to view or what information I want to access. NO-ONE should be taking these choices for ME. I am in charge of MY own decisions and I decide what is offensive for ME and My mentality and what I will not find offensive.

NO-one should be telling ME - you cannot see that because is offesive. That choice should be mine and only mine.

See what I mean?

Butterfly,

I do admire and appreciate your concern and you have expressed my feeling very very well. I would like to thank you very much for this. However, we are in the wrong country to raise this kinds of issues and when it comes to freedom of speech, expression and even seeking information what I would like to posses is unthinkable here. So our only choice is to play by the rules of the game here, no matter how painful it is to admit.

To Butterfly
It is a flag of Ethiopian. Rastaffarians, JAH The King of King, The Lord of Lord. Ethiopia

Qtel uses "SMARTFILTER" as a kind of censorship "robot", i.e. Qtel has a preset list of categories that they'd asked a third party company to automatically deny access to. of course the most obvious categories are anything related to pronography or internet crime. But since we're talking about an automated system for censorship here the errors are almost inevitable. you could be trying to access a website as harmless as the YMCA one and find out that it got blocked cause its' description contained the word "sex" however context it was delivered in.

I know it's kinda useless, but DO try to contact Qtel's internet helpdesk at 125 if you think a website was mistakenly blocked. But don't be an airhead and tell them to unblock porn websites or any of the sorts cause we all know the cultural taboos imposed on people in this country.

Oh and by the way..that google is message is a GOOGLE message. Whenever there's a viral outbreak of some kind you might get that message on major search engine websites. has nothing to do with Qtel.

And hey it can't be that bad. VODAFONE IS COMING TO TOWN VERY VERY SOON!!! :D

cheers

With all due respect I would have to disagree with you on this one. The first time I turned a T.V on my flat there was a porn station staring back at me! I looked at my husband and said"We are living in Qatar now, right?" Needless to say we were both shocked, and didn't do anything to our reciever. We moved a few weeks later as the flat was a company one and only good till you found your place. When we moved into our next flat there it was again, and again we were not seeking it out in any shape or form!
With respect,
Charlene

BoingBoing, one of the coolest blogs is being censored in Qatar, UAE and Saudi...you would be able to look at it here but you won't see it!

Re: China, I understand there are about 30,000+ censors checking internet content/emails and stuff. I reckon that's probably about right. I know someone who sent an email with a few paragraphs, one paragraph mentioned an incident he'd witnessed in Tian'anmen Square where some Falungong protesters got arrested. He sent it to a friend and when the reply came back, quoting the original email he had sent, it was missing that particular paragraph. Hmmm...

But more generally, there is a major problem across the web, also known as 'the scunthorpe problem'. Actually, I don't know if that will show up, because this site doesn't allow naughty words, so I'll spell it out.

There's a town in England spelled s-c-u-n-t-h-o-r-p-e, and because of letters 2-5, any websites related to that town were filtered out. And there were problems for people living in the town trying to register with, e.g. AOL, for email addresses and so on.

That's why it's called 'the scunthorpe problem', because legitimate words get caught up in it. It's a problem that also affects places like Sussex S-u-s-s-e-x and so on.

Also, there are numerous instances of funny website addresses. I know one international convention that was originally called News Exchange (a journalists shindig) that had to change it's name to News Xchange when they realised what their URL was going to be and the problems it might cause. They didn't want to be fending off lots of emails from people wanting sex change surgery!

There are lots of innocent situations where content gets blocked (and this doesn't just happen in Qatar by any means), and it may be that this is the problem with some of the sites you are having problems accessing.

If that's the case, report it to the appropriate authorities.

And if not, then try using proxy servers. ;)