Gil Scott Heron has an amazing poem from the early 70s states that "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" .. in places like Sudan, it won't be televised and it won't be internetized either.
Many sudanese youth have joined the Facebook group "Unblock Youtube In Sudan Now" and expressed their disagreement with the blocking. and many helped by posting proxies and IP addresses that are not tracked by the National Telecommunication Corporation.
Still nobody knows the reason behind NTC's blocking for youtube, some would assume it's because of pornographic videos, in other words it's blocked for moral reasons. but why does Youtube have porn in it? well, it doesn't, Youtube team removes any video with sexual content, but I guess it can't define arabic text, but reporting abuse or "Flagging" a video is enough to have it removed. NTC filtering system works in a similar way, it searches keywords from the title, tags, or even the comments to block certain pages/videos on Youtube or anyother website, I've seen this happen before. but why blocking the entire website now? without even explaining why, I think it's just another attempt to suffocate freedom of speech, specially in times like these, with the international court after Omar, they don't want someone with opposition to the official story about how every sudanese citizen supports Omar. they don't want us to see the documantries that have been posted lately about the "ghost houses" created to tourture individuals who didn't support the "salvation revolution", and with the elections coming, they don't want any anti-kizan* campaign, which is something not allowed on local newspapers, and the national TV is on their side 24/7, but Youtube, facebook, and blogs give a free space for the truth, and this is what THEY fear the most.
this is not a moral issue, it is political. they have always profited from ignorance, and web 2.0 is against ignorance and those fascists really hates it, so I won't be surprised if they blocked facebook or myspace next. if they did, we'll have to do more than just creating a group on the web.
To open Youtube use this proxy: https://www.megaproxy.com/freesurf/
you can also open it by typing this IP address: 208.65.153.253
and watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8eDuH1SCQ0
* Kizan is a nickname for the National Islamic Front and the ruling party the National Congress members.
Friday, July 25, 2008
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1 comments:
"not a moral issue, it is political" Think you're right. Be very suspicious of censorship "for your own good" .
Salaam from Denmark
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