UAE Internet Filtering Study

Internet Filtering in the United Arab Emirates in 2004-2005: A Country Study

 The OpenNet Initiative announces the release of its study documenting Internet filtering in the United Arab Emirates. ONI tested over 8000 Web sites in the past six months, finding that UAE blocks material viewed as culturally
inappropriate or offensive to the state’s perception of Islam. The study notes that UAE relies on American software (SmartFilter) to implement its filtering, and points out that UAE’s system suffers from considerable overblocking that
prevents its citizens from accessing content unrelated to the state’s expressed goals.

The full country study is available here.
…expect more of these country reports soon.

Hacking the Kyrgyz Internet during Parliamentary Elections

Our ONI team has just put out this press release on the Kyrgyz parliamentary elections, which we monitored from afar and in the field. Websites belonging to political parties and independent media were subject to unexplained technical failures and deliberate hacking that suggest a deliberate attempt to interfere with the functioning of the Internet during election period. Some good work by Nart and our friends in the field.

Georgewbush.com Geolocational Filtering

We just released another Bulletin (007), this one examining the rather curious geolocation filtering by the official georgewbush.com website.
It seems for security reasons they didn’t want these countries looking at their website.
Not sure anyone there would have wanted to look at it anyway, but if they did they could have just used the IP address instead. However, the practice of geolocational filtering is one we’re following closely.