Yemen Blocks Matoob Blogging Platform
I have a tee shirt that says, “Ali Saleh is scared of a blog.” And apparently he really is. In a rather Stalinist reaction to growing civil unrest, Yemen blocked 1126 Yemeni blogs.
Maktoobblog.com, one of the most popular Arab blogging platform, has been recently blocked in Yemen. The OpenNet Initiative testing has confirmed yesterday, through technical investigation, that the blog hosting service has been blocked by Yemennet ISP, a service of the government’s Public Telecommunication Corporation (PTC):
ONI technical investigation verified that the service has been blocked by Yemennet, Yemen’s government-run ISP. Access is blocked to the entire domain maktoobblog.com, effectively to every blog hosted by the service. Interestingly, users who attempt to access the site receive a network error message instead of the standard blockpage, which is served when users attempt to access sexual content.
This significant blocking is expected to hinder Internet users in Yemen from blogging and reading blogs because maktoobblog.com is home of one of the largest blogging communities in the Middle East and North Africa.
People get the network error message for this blog too. My article on internet censorship appeared at the Yemen Times earlier this month.
