19 October, 2005

The swarm - Glenn Reynolds - MSNBC.com

The Insta-guy explains why Secret Dubia maybe shouldn't be too concerned about being blocked in the UAE or blocked from entering. Didn't local bloggers swarm to her defense?
Posted by John B. Chilton at 8:36 pm

2 comments:

secretdubai said...

The problem is though that I'm not local. I could blog what I liked in my own country, and they couldn't deport me, but they could here. Hence the need for caution.

But I do agree that trying to silence certain things on the net just creates massive publicity and awareness for them.

Either way, it is really great that so many people are blogging. It is a good way for people to use and practice communication skills, it's a way for the lazy/web-shy to create a homepage to help family and friends overseas keep in touch, and it's a way of learning other points of view and empowering people that are otherwise voiceless.

Bearing in mind that it is still only a very small, privileged sector of society here that has access to the web/computers/blogging. How many of those poor labourers have signed up to blogspot do you reckon? One day...

19 October, 2005 21:11
samuraisam said...

The UAE's population of 4.041 million, At the end of September 2005, the number of lines in service are 1,222,905 for telephone, 4,305,821 for mobile and 4,698,17 for internet. Mobile penetration now exceeds 95 per cent.

Either there are a striking number of people in the UAE with 8 internet/phone lines each, or Etisalat bloats its figures (:

Over the last few years internet access for the poorest of the poor has increased dramatically due to the springing up of hundreds of internet cafe's around deira etc.

there have been many cases in the past few years of etisalat blocking information which has just created more and more demand for it.

i.e. dubaiescorts.com, a rather entertaining website that was not blocked 6 months before i found it on google, as soon as etisalat blocked it, people wanted to know about it.

People naturally want what they can't have, there are many news articles etc, that mysteriously get blocked, or get deleted somehow from websites, this just creates more and more demand for the information.

Thankfully blogspot is a free service which does allow it to be easily usable by anyone.

A prime example of this is Bluetooth. The polices rather entertaining stance against it, was, well, entertaining.

I've seen plenty of videos that show stuff that shouldnt be shown, like police men hitting labourers etc etc etc, i trust that these matters were investigated....

There is quite a large trade in copies of videos that otherwise wouldnt be sold in the UAE, like team america: world police.

Also reading material is a prime example of this; the book "dubai" in particular.

19 October, 2005 21:54

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