Tag archive: Pakistan

No phone and no internet might make Jack a dull boy, but Osama found a way around the disconnect–through pornography and couriers. In an Associated Press report, government officials learned how Osama bin Laden conveyed email messages to his followers worldwide, despite having no internet access. He would type up email messages and save them to USB thumb drives. Then his trusted courier would copy the message and send it out at an… Read More

The US Navy's super-covert black ops crew, SEAL Team Six, used a pair of secret stealth Black Hawk helicopters during its mission to take out terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, the Army Times reports. According to an unnamed retired special operations aviator who spoke with the Army Times, the secret chopper “really didn’t look like a traditional Black Hawk.” Instead, it had “hard edges, sort of like an … F-117 [stealth… Read More

In last night's reporting of Osama bin Laden's death, Twitter took center stage as the fastest, most comprehensive news source. But long before Keith Urbahn, former chief of staff for Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, first revealed to the world in tweet that “they have killed Osama Bin Laden,” two men inadvertently captured the entire US military raid on Bin Laden's Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound in a series… Read More

Osama bin Laden is dead. The leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, responsible for the deadly September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, was killed today in a fire fight in Pakistan, President Barack Obama confirmed Sunday night. “Tonight I can report to the American people and to the world, that the United States has conducted an operation that has killed Osama bin Laden — the leader of al-Qaeda and a… Read More

The Lahore High Court has lifted an oder blocking access to the popular social networking site Facebook in the country, on the condition that access to specific pages deemed derogatory won't be accessible to users in Pakistan. Among the pages to be blocked are things like “Everyone Draw Muhammad Day” which encourages visitors to post drawing of the prophet Muhammad, an act that's considered blasphemous in many Islamic… Read More

Last week, Pakistan's government decided to block access to the popular video sharing Web site YouTube for offering material that it deemed was blasphemous and offensive to Muslims. Now, Pakistan's government has relented…a bit. Pakistan will again permit its citizen to access YouTube, but will block access to specific videos it deems objectionable. Pakistan is still blocking access to the social networking site Facebook… Read More

Yesterday, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority raised hackles all over the world by blocking access to the popular social networking service Facebook for carrying a group sponsoring a contest to draw pictures of the prophet Muhammad. Now, the regulator has extended the crackdown to include Google's video sharing service YouTube along with more than 450 other sites and Web pages deemed to be offering derogatory and sacrilegious… Read More

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has orderd ISPs in the country to indefinitely block access to social networking giant Facebook because of an online contest set up to draw images of the prophet Muhammad. In Islam, any representation of Muhammad is considered blasphemy and un-Islamic. According to reports the PTA had initially planed to order ISPs to block only access to the particular Facebook page showing the cartoons and drawings,… Read More

It’s a major discovery, a cyber spy network that’s infected 1,295 computers in 103 countries, according to the Information Warfare Monitor (IWM), which is made up of researchers from Ottawa-based think tank SecDev Group and the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies. That might not seem like a lot of computers, but those machines are in foreign ministries and embassies. The discovery occurred after… Read More

Pakistan wants to send a message that it takes terrorism seriously&mdsah;even so-called cyber-terrorism. A new decree signed by Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari, the Prevention of Electronic Crimes law (PDF), makes causing death through any act of cyber-terrorism punishable by death. According to a copy of the ordinance, “Whoever commits the offense of cyber-terrorism and causes death of any person shall be punishable with death… Read More

Pakistan yesterday lifted the ban on YouTube that had existed in the country since Friday, and which had caused a global blackout of the Google-owned video-sharing site for a couple of hours following an error.   The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority told ISPsthey no longer had to restrict access to the site. The ban had been put in place, it was said, because the site showed material offensive to Islam, which some believed to be a… Read More

It was a small mistake with major consequences. According to the BBC, in a domino effect, a decision by Pakistan to block YouTube led to the site being unavailable globally for over an hour yesterday.   Reportedly, the country blocked the site because it contained content deemedoffensive to Islam, although no one seemed absolutely certain what that was. Some believed it was because YouTube had the Danish cartoons regarding Muhammad that… Read More

Intel and Microsoft have inked a deal to supply Libya's education ministry withh 150,000 of Intel's Classmate PC laptop computers. The systems are designed for educational use in developing markets and compete with the One Laptop Per Child project; like the OLPC XO's final pricetag, the Classmate PC costs about $200 to build. According to Reuters, the deal was announced in the Libyan press in August, but Intel and… Read More

Few people would argue that getting computers and communication technology into the hands of children in developing countries is a good idea: by enabling children to express themselves, connect to information in the wider world, and share their experiences and views with a global community not only benefits the individual children—many of whom receive little formal education—but ultimately helps their societies develop and… Read More

A year-long study by the OpenNet Initiative, detailed at a conference in Oxford, England, examined the practices of 41 countries to learn about online government surveillance and censorship. The results? Where five years ago only a handful of states were filtering Internet content, the study found 25 of the countries it examined were engaged in state-mandated filtering and censorship of online content, and the filtering is becoming more… Read More