It seems the company has gone on a rampage categorizing websites left, right and centre as anonymizers and translators (two categories which are blocked in the UAE)…
Firstly…
www.live.com
Microsoft’s search engine (the default home page in Windows Vista); seems to be unblocked when you visit it. Type something in the search box and enjoy the proxy screen…
Why? It is categorized as an anonymizer/translator service
Secondly…
http://whois.domaintools.com
A free service used to track the owners of IP’s on the internet; all very standard stuff.
Blocked… Why? It is categorized as an anonymizer/translator service
Thirdly…
Everyone’s favourite page counter service; www.statcounter.com
Securecomputing has taken the opportunity to go and block several of its subdomains which most probably host your page counter image (meaning in the last few days you’ve probably seen a ginormous drop in traffic due to this block)
Blocked… Why? It is categorized as an anonymizer/translator service
Just great.
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8 comments:
You are right .. statcounter did act funny few days ago
please report this kind of nonsense to etisalat and securecomputing. make sure to email them expressing your dissatisfaction as well as filling out the form to get URLs re-examined. This censorship nonsense HAS to change. YOU CAN BUY ALCOHOL IN THE UAE! FREE SPEECH NOW! ~f
Late last night I also discovered this was blocked:
http://download.mozilla.org/
How do they categorize THAT?
Etisalat outsourcing the job of policing moral values to an American company.
Thats nice . . .
even this site
http://en-us.start.mozilla.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
bin3li is right, try downloading the RC2 release of Firefox 2.0 from the mozilla download site and you are greeted by the proxy page.
Yahoo News has all its images blocked. They are just not visible. Using Firefox right click on an image and choose View Image. You get the proxy page again :-(
Why are TRANSLATORS against the ethical, moral, social, urban, rural, religious or whatever values of etisalat?
md:
when you use a translator it accesses the site on your behalf to do the translation; then it copies it temporarily on its server so you can access the translated page...
if a site (say arabtimes.com) is blocked in your country and then you want to access it, a side effect of translation services is you can access teh blocked site (excluding images)
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