The Saudi Arabian government broke the Arabic record for the fastest time to block a new website, clocking in at just 15 hours. On 25 April, they blocked a US- based site created by Egyptian activists The Egyptian Association for Change, eacusa.org, only 15 hours after it launched. Tunisia was the previous record holder, blocking www.yezzi.org in 18 hours after it went live in 2005.
On 20 April, Wikileaks tweeted claiming that their Facebook fan page was deleted by Facebook for violation of the Terms of Service. According to Wikileaks,the page had been disabled because it “promotes illegal acts“. A Facebook spokeswoman said the group, which had 30,000 members, could have been taken down for a number of reasons, most likely because it had received a complaint from a member about objectionable content.
In a report yesterday by the New York Times(NYT), an anonymous source identified some of the information stolen in the December cyberattack on Google. The hacks prompted the company’s withdrawal from the Chinese market. Google has only specified that “intellectual property” was compromised in the attack, but the NYT claims its sources have confirmed that a password programme called Gaia, which allowed Google employees and other users access to a range of its web services, was one of the targets. No personal Gmail passwords or account details were breached, but the attack revealed vulnerabilities within Google’s own security system. To date, Google has refused to commented on the situation. US Foreign Secretary Hillary Clinton has called for a “transparent” Chinese inquiry into the incident.
The Bahrain Ministry of Information and Culture announced a ban on sharing local news with BlackBerry mobile devices last week. A ministry official, Abdullah Yateem, said the ban was to prevent the “chaos and confusion caused by such news among the public”. Immediately after the ban, the BlackBerry news provider “Breaking News” was forced to stop sending their free six-page daily newspaper to 13,000 subscribers in the country.