D I A R Y O F A W I C K E D

Friday, April 14, 2006

Supreme Court ban silences Pakistani bloggers by Salman Siddiqui (Appeared in Herald magazine April issue) Here's the unedited version: "On 27th February, Pakistan’s Telecommunication Authority (PTA) issued instructions to all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country to block 12 websites that contained material that was termed blasphemous. Ten of the sites showed the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), while one had lampooned Jesus and the other satirized both religious figures. However, following this action millions of websites other than the original 12 were blocked in the process. This was caused mainly due to the blocking of one particular site address in the PTA list that was hosted on a popular server owned by Google called BlogSpot on which millions of people from around the world including Pakistan maintain weblogs or blogs. Instead of banning just that one particular address hosted on BlogSpot, Pakistan’s Internet Exchange (PIE), a subsidiary of Pakistan Telecommunications Limited, which filters 90 percent of the country’s Internet traffic, blocked all sites that ended with ‘blogspot.com’ in the site address. With ISPs not divulging any information to confused bloggers in the days following the ban, speculations on the timing of this action, which was taken just a week before President Bush’s visit to Pakistan, was rife especially as many blogs contained anti-Musharraf views with some covering sensitive issues such as the Balochistan insurgency. An example of one such site is http://freeBaloch.blogspot.com, which is openly critical of government policies. On March 2, it became clear that the issue behind the ban was the row over the Danish cartoons. The Supreme Court, in response to two petitions filed against the accessibility of the blasphemous cartoons on the Internet by Dr Imran Uppal and seeking registration of cases under blasphemy law by Maulvi Iqbal Haider, directed the government to block websites that contained sacrilegious cartoons. The federal government, Ministry of Telecommunication, PTA, PEMRA, Yahoo Inc. USA, and the websites themselves were cited as respondents in the petition. Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudry is reported to have observed in the preliminary hearing, “We will not accept any excuse or any technical objection on this issue as it concerns sentiments of the entire Muslim Ummah”. In the next hearing on 13th March, PTA informed the court that the list of 12 sites provided by the petitioners had been blocked throughout Pakistan. On 20th March, Maulvi Haider’s counsel also asked the court to prosecute PTA for criminal negligence since the websites remained available in Pakistan for seven months and called for registration of cases under Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code according to which the death sentence can be awarded to those using derogatory remarks against the holy Prophet (PBUH) by words, writing or any imputation. Despite the ban, the 12 websites and any others ending in blogspot.com can still be viewed in Pakistan even now, since the technical nature of the Internet is such that one can use a number of tools such as proxy servers to circumvent the ban. Also, apart from those 12, there are millions of other websites that contain similar if not more offensive material that remain openly accessible; this makes the ban look ironic since sites such as the Church of Satan website which enlists devil worshippers online continues to be accessible to the Pakistani netizens. The truth is that one can’t ban all such sites because once one starts doing that, firstly the Internet speed of the entire country slows down since each website browsed by everyone at any part of the country at any time would first have to pass through a filtering process. Secondly one might ban a million website on one given day but the very next day the same or millions more new websites carrying similar offensive material might crop up and huge resources, not to forget huge funds, would have to be allocated to constantly monitor and update the blocked sites databases. Thirdly, millions of other harmless sites, such as in the current case of BlogSpot, get unnecessarily banned as a result in the process. The fact is that moral policing, at least in the online world, doesn’t work. Ever since the Internet was launched in the country, the government tried its best to block pornographic material available online and still maintains a database running into thousands to block such sites at PIE’s end, but even now pictures from Amazing Hotties Club and the likes remain just a click away for anyone’s viewing. Unfortunately, as absurd as it may sound, the only way to ensure complete blockage of any such objectionable material online is to ban the Internet from the country altogether. But is that the right solution in the interest and benefit of the people of Pakistan? The court case continues and shall rule over that. "

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Sinner blogged @ 12:31 AM

Thursday, March 23, 2006

the mother fuckers@ PTA have blocked all blogs in Pakistan....so I wont b posting

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Sinner blogged @ 8:27 PM

Monday, February 13, 2006

Organisers say 20,000 plus activists due at forum in Karachi KARACHI, Feb 13, 2006 (AFP) - More than 20,000 anti-globalisation activists were expected to meet in Pakistan's volatile port city of Karachi next month under the World Social Forum, organisers said Monday. Prominent rights activists are expected to participate in the first such gathering in Pakistan, they said. "We hope to draw a large number of activists and groups from Asia-Pacific and other countries," chief organiser Karamat Ali told a news conference. "So far we have 20,000 confirmed participants but expect further rise in registrations," he added. The six-day forum, starting from March 24, was earlier scheduled in January but had to be postponed due to a devastating earthquake on October 8 which killed 73,000 people and left more than three million homeless. The World Social Forum was established in 2001 as a counterpoint to Switzerland's World Economic Forum of political and business leaders, for discussions on issues ranging from immigration to land and water rights, women's issues, militarism and subsidised cotton. The Forum will hold its meetings at a stadium in Karachi's poor neighbourhood of Lyari. With the slogan "another world is possible" the organisers also plan to highlight the good points of Karachi which has witnessed a string of terrorist attacks against Western targets over the past few years. "The gathering would not only dispel the negative impression but also send positive signals to the world that Karachi is abode of friendly and tolerant people," Ali stressed.

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Sinner blogged @ 9:40 PM

Monday, January 30, 2006

Bryan we worship you man!! yesterday was probably one of the best days ever in my life...god bless Bryan Adams for that :-)-i've never eva had more fun in my life ....so many memories of mine are associated with his songs, and god did they all came back this night ....every song that he sang was a hit number....and man the gr8 company of my friends made it even better, i love u all...u guys bring out the rock spirit in me :-D....ive never been much of a dancer, but man this night i just let my body go and do rock ...it was an awesome feeling....my soul was free....we love you Bryan...i know i do....and for all of those who didnt make it to the concert, this is wat i have to say to u: go fuck urselves losers....:-D You got it Back to you Bryan's Killer guitarist Cuts like a knife but it feels alrite... fireworks was quite a befitting way to end things great show!

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Sinner blogged @ 12:20 PM

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Sweet Insults 1. Any similarity between you and a human is purely coincidental! 2. Are you always so stupid or is today a special occasion? 3. As an outsider, what do you think of the human race? 4. At least there's one thing good about your body. It isn't as ugly as your face! 5. Brains aren't everything. In fact, in your case they're nothing 6. Careful now, don't let your brains go to your head! 7. I like you. People say I've no taste, but I like you. 8. Did your parents ever ask you to run away from home? 9. If I had a face like yours. I'd sue my parents! 10. Don't feel bad. A lot of people have no talent! 11. Don't get insulted, but is your job devoted to spreading ignorance? 12. Keep talking; someday you'll say something intelligent! 13. Don't you love nature, despite what it did to you? 14. Don't think, it may sprain your brain! 15. Fellows like you don't grow from trees; they swing from them. 16. He has a mechanical mind. Too bad he forgot to wind it up this morning. 17. He has a mind like a steel trap-always closed! 18. You are a man of the world-and you know what sad shape the world is in. 19. He is always lost in thought-it's unfamiliar territory. 20. He is dark and handsome. When it's dark, he's handsome. 21. He is known as a miracle comic. if he's funny, it's a miracle! 22. He is listed in Who's Who as What's That? 23. He is living proof that man can live without a brain! 24. He is so short, when it rains he is always the last one to know. 25. He is the kind of a man that you would use as a blueprint to build an idiot. 26. How come you're here? I thought the zoo is closed at night! 27. Calling you stupid would be an insult to stupid people. 28. Anyone who told you to be yourself couldn't have given you worse advice. 29. Do you want people to accept you as you are or do you want them to like you? 30. Don't you have a terribly empty feeling - in your skull? 31. Every girl has the right to be ugly, but you abused the privilege! 32. Hi! I'm a human being! What are you? 33. I'd like to see things from your point of view but I can't seem to get my head that far up my ass. 34. • I'd like to kick you in the teeth, but why should I improve your looks? 35. Keep talking; someday you'll say something intelligent!

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Sinner blogged @ 10:03 PM

Londoners find love is a serious business LONDON, Nov 8 (Reuters) For Londoners, grey matter is the new black. Speed dating and clubbing just don't seem to fill the void for many lonely hearts any more. "Intellidating" is being acclaimed as the hot new way to romance. Debating societies, art classes and poetry readings -- all are thriving in the British capital as dating turns cerebral. The trend has been spotted by a wide range of social commentators and even prompted the heavyweight magazine The Economist to declare: "Seriousness is booming." The appropriately named Sebastian Shakespeare wrote in London's Evening Standard newspaper: "Debates and poetry readings are fast becoming London's most romantic nights out." One entrepreneur acting on the trend is Ginny Greenwood, whose Futures Squared club aims at cash-rich, time-poor singles. "You are not concentrating on what is happening from the navel to the knee -- you are connecting to the grey matter," she told Reuters. "They have got the income and the intelligence: they just need someone to organise their social diaries." "I think intellidating is a great phrase," she said. "I'm sure it will end up in the dictionary. If you are an intelligent person in an important position at work, you are not going to hang out in a bar or go speed dating." If music is the food of love, then poetry feeds the soul as novelist Josephine Hart discovered when organising her sell-out Poetry Hour in the hallowed confines of the British Library. "It really has quite an important effect on people," said Hart who has offered Bob Geldof reading Yeats, Ralph Fiennes on Auden and Roger Moore reciting Kipling. "The mind is stretched," she added. "People have wept at some of the evenings. "I do hope that intellidating does enter people's consciousness. There is such a dearth of anything that is profound," she told Reuters. "Young people are very hungry for something that has depth and importance." John Gordon and Jeremy O'Grady set up Intelligence Squared because they wanted to make debating sexy. So far every debate they have organised, at the Royal Geographical Society, has sold out in advance. "I think there is a hunger for this stuff in a world that is both more complex but also dumbing down," O'Grady told Reuters. "There is an awful gap in one's emotional needs." So cerebral daters out for rarefied seduction are treated to mind-stretching debates like "Better rough justice than another 9/11" and "The rise of China spells the decline of the West." "Whether it is dating or debating is debatable but this represents an opportunity for people who want intelligent dating," O'Grady said. "There is such a lack of institutional for a other than the dance floor or the club for them to meet. It is all so hideously difficult."

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Sinner blogged @ 10:01 PM

China cracks down on sex and violence on websites BEIJING, Nov 8 (AFP) - China's media watchdog has launched a monitoring system to step up surveillance of illegal websites with sexual and violent content, state press reported Tuesday. The General Administration of Press and Publication has already issued warnings to 53 websites that provide downloads for pornographic games, the communist party mouthpiece People's Daily reported. The 14 games included "Lives filled with the blessing of sex," "Love the sisters" and "Artificial young girls," it said. The move was launched in a bid "to safeguard the order of the Internet, purify the web environment and to protect the physical and mental health of the youths," the report said. The media watchdog will issue warnings to any websites found to have "unhealthy" content and will punish those that do not delete the material within 24 hours, it said. Regular offenders will have their licences revoked and risk having their websites closed down, it said. China has stepped up its policing on the Internet in recent months in a bid to stem what it sees as an unhealthy influence on the young. Although the campaigns mainly target sites that contain sex and violence, those with sensitive religious and political content are also often banned. The Chinese government announced revised Internet rules in September that require Internet operators to re-register their news sites and police them for content that can "endanger state security" and "social order." Any content that "harms national security, reveals state secrets, subverts political power, (and) undermines national unity" is also banned. The regulations further prohibit posts that "instigate illegal gatherings, formation of associations, marches, demonstrations or disturb social order."

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Sinner blogged @ 9:59 PM

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 7 (Reuters) A group of social investment funds from Western countries on Monday called for Internet companies to refrain from supporting repressive human rights practices in China and other nations. In a letter by 25 investment funds based in the United States, Switzerland, Canada and Australia that manage a total of $21 billion in investments, fund managers warned companies ranging from Yahoo to Cisco of the risks in "collaborating to suppress freedom of opinion and expression". The investor group said it was responding to a recent controversy over the role allegedly played by Yahoo's Hong Kong unit in providing evidence that human rights campaigners say led to the imprisonment of a dissident Chinese journalist. In September, Paris-based Reporters Without Borders charged that Yahoo helped Chinese authorities to link journalist Shi Tao to a U.S.-based Web site, leading him to receive a 10-year prison sentence for revealing state secrets in April. "We take this issue very seriously," Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said in a statement on Monday. "While foreign-based companies must adhere to local laws in all the countries where they operate, we understand that there are unique and inherent challenges to doing business in China," the Yahoo spokeswoman added. Signatories to the letter included Domini, Calvert Group, Walden Asset Management, various U.S. Catholic social investment funds, Ethical Funds Co. of Canada, Fondation Ethos in Switzerland and Conscious Investors Pty Ltd. of Australia. "This is essentially a lockdown on freedom of expression," Amy Domini, founder and CEO of Domini Social Investments LLC of New York and a leading U.S. social investment campaigner, said in a phone interview. Domini decried what she said were violations of basic notions of privacy rights, arguing that Internet access should be free from government snooping just as private mail or conversations in cafes. "The Internet is now the way people chat with each other," she said. Other companies singled out at a joint news conference in New York held by investment groups and Reporters Without Borders included Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. No one from Google, Microsoft or Cisco Systems was immediately available to comment. The letter called on Internet businesses "to make information public that will allow investors to assess how each firm is acting to ensure that its products and services are not being used to commit human rights violations". The group also plans to target companies that distribute products or services that enable Internet censorship, surveillance or identification of dissidents. Leading global makers of communications network gear such as Cisco and Nortel have long faced criticism for their role in supplying technologies that allow the Chinese government to maintain tight censorship controls over the domestic Internet. Reporters Without Borders said the scope of the campaign for free Internet expression extends beyond China to include companies such as Fortinet, which it said installed filters on the Internet for Burma's military government, or Secure Computing Corp., whose filtering technology is used in Tunisia. "Some businesses help authorities in repressive countries to censor and mount surveillance of the Internet, and others turn a blind eye to the use made of their equipment," the investment fund letter states. Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo seeks to balance legal requirements against its belief that the company can contribute to the country's modernization of communications, commerce and information access, Yahoo spokeswoman Osaka said.

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Sinner blogged @ 9:50 PM

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Cigarettes & Tampons A man walks into a pharmacy and wanders up and down the aisle. The salesgirl notices him and asks if she can help him. He answers that he is looking for a box of tampons for his wife, so she directs him down the correct aisle. A few minutes later, he deposits a huge bag of cotton balls and a ball of string on the counter. She says, confused, "Sir, I thought you were looking for some tampons for your wife?" He answers, "You see, it's like this, yesterday, I sent my wife to the store to get me a carton of cigarettes, and she came back with a tin of tobacco and some rolling papers, 'cause it's so much cheaper. So, I figure if I have to roll my own, so does she."

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Sinner blogged @ 5:09 PM

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Thanks to corporations, instead of democracy we get Baywatch It was claimed that the internet and satellite TV would topple dictators, but commercial interests are making sure they don't.'Several of this cursed brood, getting hold of the branches behind, leaped up into the tree, whence they began to discharge their excrements on my head." Thus Gulliver describes his first encounter with the Yahoos. Something similar seems to have happened to democracy. In April, Shi Tao, a journalist working for a Chinese newspaper, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for "providing state secrets to foreign entities". He had passed details of a censorship order to the Asia Democracy Forum and the website Democracy News.The pressure group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was mystified by the ease with which Mr Tao had been caught. He had sent the message through an anonymous Yahoo! account. But the police had gone straight to his offices and picked him up. How did they know who he was? Last week RSF obtained a translation of the verdict, and there they found the answer. Mr Tao's account information was "furnished by Yahoo Holdings". Yahoo!, the document says, gave the government his telephone number and the address of his office. So much for the promise that the internet would liberate the oppressed. This theory was most clearly formulated in 1999 by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. In his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman argues that two great democratising forces — global communications and global finance — will sweep away any regime which is not open, transparent and democratic. "Thanks to satellite dishes, the internet and television," he asserts, "we can now see through, hear through and look through almost every conceivable wall. … no one owns the internet, it is totally decentralised, no one can turn it off … China's going to have a free press … Oh, China's leaders don't know it yet, but they are being pushed straight in that direction." The same thing, he claims, is happening all over the world. In Iran he saw people ogling Baywatch on illegal satellite dishes. As a result, he claims, "within a few years, every citizen of the world will be able to comparison shop between his own … government and the one next door". He is partly right. The internet at least has helped to promote revolutions of varying degrees of authenticity in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Argentina and Bolivia. But the flaw in Friedman's theory is that he forgets the intermediaries. The technology which runs the internet did not sprout from the ground. It is provided by people with a commercial interest in its development. Their interest will favour freedom in some places and control in others. And they can and do turn it off. In 2002 Yahoo! signed the Chinese government's pledge of "self-regulation": it promised not to allow "pernicious information that may jeopardise state security" to be posted. Last year Google published a statement admitting that it would not be showing links to material banned by the authorities on computers stationed in China. If Chinese users of Microsoft's internet service MSN try to send a message containing the words "democracy", "liberty" or "human rights", they are warned that "This message includes forbidden language. Please delete the prohibited expression." A study earlier this year by a group of scholars called the OpenNet Initiative revealed what no one had thought possible: that the Chinese government is succeeding in censoring the net. Its most powerful tool is its control of the routers — the devices through which data is moved from one place to another. With the right filtering systems, these routers can block messages containing forbidden words. Human-rights groups allege that western corporations — in particular Cisco Systems — have provided the tech­ nology and the expertise. Cisco is repeatedly cited by Thomas Friedman as one of the facilitators of his global revolution. "We had the dream that the internet would free the world, that all the dictatorships would collapse," says Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders. "We see it was just a dream." Friedman was not the first person to promote these dreams. In 1993 Rupert Murdoch boasted that satellite television was "an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere". The Economist had already made the same claim on its cover: "Dictators beware!" The Chinese went berserk, and Murdoch, in response, ensured that the threat did not materialise. In 1994 he dropped BBC world news from his Star satellite feeds after it broadcast an unflattering portrait of Mao Zedong. In 1997 he ordered his publishing house HarperCollins to drop a book by Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong. He slagged off the Dalai Lama and his son James attacked the dissident cult Falun Gong. His grovelling paid off, and in 2002 he was able to start broadcasting into Guangdong. "We won't do programmes that are offensive in China," Murdoch's spokesman Wang Yukui admitted. "If you call this self-censorship then of course we're doing a kind of self-censorship." I think, if they were as honest as Mr Wang, everyone who works for Rupert Murdoch, or for the corporate media anywhere in the world, would recognise these restraints. To own a national newspaper or a television or radio station you need to be a multimillionaire. What multimillionaires want is what everybody wants: a better world for people like themselves. The job of their journalists is to make it happen. As Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Mirror, confessed, "I've made it a strict rule in life to ingratiate myself with billionaires." They will stay in their jobs for as long as they continue to interpret the interests of the proprietorial class correctly. What the owners don't enforce, the advertisers do. Over the past few months, AdAge.com reveals, both Morgan Stanley and BP have instructed newspapers and magazines that they must remove their adverts from any edition containing "objectionable editorial coverage". Car, airline and tobacco companies have been doing the same thing. Most publications can't afford to lose these accounts; they lose the offending articles instead. Why are the papers full of glowing profiles of the advertising boss Martin Sorrell? Because they're terrified of him. So instead of democracy we get Baywatch. They are not the same thing. Aspirational TV might stimulate an appetite for more money or more plastic surgery, and this in turn might encourage people to look, for better or worse, to the political systems that deliver them, but it is just as likely to be counter-democratic. As a result of pressure from both ratings and advertisers, for example, between 1993 and 2003 environmental programmes were cleared from the schedules on BBC TV, ITV and Channel 4. Though three or four documentaries have slipped out since then, the ban has not yet been wholly lifted. To those of us who have been banging our heads against this wall, it feels like censorship. Indispensable as the internet has become, political debate is still dominated by the mainstream media: a story on the net changes nothing until it finds its way into the newspapers or on to TV. What this means is that while the better networking Friedman celebrates can assist a democratic transition, the democracy it leaves us with is filtered and controlled. Someone else owns the routers.

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Sinner blogged @ 1:06 PM