Yesterday Pakistan’s government figured that youtube is the devil incarnate and decided to totally shut it off. This caused a shockwave of controversy all over the Internet; digg, reddit, stumbleupon, and various forums where all up in arms. To make things worse, a Pakistani ISP decided to reroute all the youtube traffic to some other website which brought youtube to it’s knees, everybody’s favorite video site was inaccessible globally! :(

Today, another web 2.0 website was sucked up by the Middle East censorship blackhole. I woke up today going through my usual routine of checking the rss feeds of Digg and Mixx. A front page story on Digg was a picture on photobucket, so I unwarily click on the link. Photobucket is service I have used many times, and I am very familiar with. Lo and behold, some jack ass over at the the ever-esteemed “censorship” agency decided that Photobucket is inappropriate for 25 million people and with a myopic sense of judgment pulled the plug on it! Just like that!


I wasn’t going to sit idle like that and see some foolish decision like that implemented on a whole nation. I contacted them, and here is what I had to say:

This is a photo hosting service that I have been using for years now in Saudi Arabia, why has it been blocked? I understand that some might misuse it in pornography and what not, but photobucket has a policy against that and IS moderated. I just don’t understand why block a totally legitimate website just because a few 5% minority might be “misusing” it. Please Unblock it!

Let’s wait and see what happens!!

Saudi Arabia Blocked Website