The moves follow Pakistan’s temporary ban imposed on Facebook in May that drew both praise and condemnation in a country that has long struggled to figure out how strict a version of Islam it should follow.

Both the Facebook ban and the move announced Friday were in response to court orders. The sites to be monitored include Yahoo, Google, MSN, Hotmail, YouTube, Amazon and Bing, said Pakistan Telecommunication Authority spokesman Khurram Mehran.

“If any particular link with offensive content appears on these websites, the (link) shall be blocked immediately without disturbing the main website,” Mehran said.

An example of one of the 17 sites being blocked include islamexposed.blogspot.com, Mehran said. That site features postings with headlines such as “Islam: The Ultimate Hypocrisy” and links to anti-Islam online petitions.

Mehran said that, under instructions from the Ministry of Information Technology, the authority had begun the process of barring and monitoring the various sites.

(Source: MSNBC)

This is the first time that any court of Pakistan has ordered such a large number of search engines to be banned.

An officer of Federal Ministry of Information Technology told BBC that that they have received the judicial orders to implement ban on search engines and web sites. He also said that a special committee has been called on Friday in which the several aspects and monitoring of websites will be discussed to reach the final decision.

Lahore High Court on Thursday ordered Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA) to ban more than half a dozen search engines across the Pakistan.

It merits mentioning here that  the Lahore High Court, ruling Pakistan government, had previously ordered to ban FaceBook – a  social interaction website.

Lahore High Court order was made at the request of a company which said that Facebook was making sketches of the Prophet Muhammad being competitive, so this website should be banned.

Whatsoever was the scenario after the ban on FaceBook but this time the ban on 9 big websites will result in big push back for the internet community as well as e-economy of Pakistan.

The participating blogs were scrutinized and judged by 14 experts from different fields. The main categories were technology, politics, education, humor, business, science, health care, Urdu blogs, celebrities, automobiles, literature, sports, photo blogs, music blogs, video blogs, food blogs and many others.

The competition was hard-hitting among blogs of different categories; one blog in each field was chosen among them and awarded as the best blog. More than 300 people, including bloggers, technology experts and industry specialists participated in the awards distribution ceremony and enlightened the evening.

Head of Marketing for CSMB at Dell Pakistan, Nubla Iftikhar stated, “Dell is happy to have pioneered the concept of recognizing talent in Pakistani blogs; there’s a lot of enthusiasm, skill and the urge to create interesting content.”
Nubla Iftikhar was also one of the judges from the panel of the blog awards.

Hundreds of protesters marched through Dhaka demanding action against Facebook while users said the government should have blocked specific links instead of blocking the whole website.

A man was arrested in Dhaka for posting “obnoxious” images of the country’s political leaders, including Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and opposition leader Begum Khaleda Zia.

The ban was imposed because Facebook was carrying caricatures that might hurt the religious sentiments of people in Bangladesh, where about 85 percent of the 150 million people are Muslim, Ahmed said earlier.

The commission said the U.S.-based company also agreed to remove “obnoxious” images of some of the country’s political leaders, including Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and opposition leader Khaleda Zia.

Without revealing the exact data, they said the SMS traffic in the working and late night hours surged marginally on the different networks, thanks to bundle of packages.

According to an estimate, more than 96.23 million registered subscribers to various companies exchange nearly 14 million SMS on mobile phones network every month in Pakistan. They also said the number of cellular users increased marginally during the late night calls package in the last two weeks.

The number of Pakistan users on Facebook is estimated at 2.5 million. A significant number of subscribers believed to be devoted users of the networking sites, using it for interaction with friends. Besides, other websites such as Twitter is not popular in the country.

As per Alexa, a web information company, Facebook is ranked third as the most visited website in Pakistan whereas Twitter is ranked tenth on the same note. “The voice traffic has been increased but it did not cast any significant impact on the revenues of the mobile phone companies as SMS charges are lowest particularly on bundle packages,” an executive of mobile phone operator said.

(Source: Peninsula)

As soon as the LHC directed PTA to lift the ban on facebook, ISP’s started working, as we got news from different sources regarding the facebook working fine on different ISP’s including LinkDotNet and Wateen.

PTCL seemed to be more reluctant in lifting the ban as it’s been two days after the order and the victim was still behind the bars. But now it has finally been confirmed that facebook is also unbanned on PTCL broadband.

Important to note is, majority of the internet users in Pakistan are subscribers of PTCL Broadband because of its availability in far flung areas and in those exchanges where other broadband ISP’s haven’t reached yet.

Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) detained Mahbub Alam Rodin (30) at Ranking Street in the Wari area of the capital, Dhaka early Saturday on charge of posting ‘offensive’ cartoons on government high-ups and making ‘derogatory’ comments about them on Facebook, the elite force said.

Even though the government did not offer any official statement, local media quoted the state-run Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission (BTRC) saying that the posting of some anti-religious and pornographic links by users across the globe are among the reasons for restricting the access.

“The access to facebook will resume when the data operators find a way to block such anti-social content,” a high official of BTRC told the Daily Star, a local newspaper.

The BTRC earlier asked Mango Telecom and Bangladesh Telecommunication Company Limited, the two international Internet gateways, to find out a way to block anti-social contents posted by facebook users.

On Friday, three Islamic political parties–Islami Oikya Jote, Islami Andolan and Khelafat Andolan– demanded immediate ban on Facebook for a recent campaign by some users inviting people to draw images of Prophet Hazrat Mohammad (SM).

(Source: AHN)

Rehman Malik announced on his twitter page that cabinet has agreed to lift the ban on complete sites while keep blocked the infected pages and contents.

This turns out to be a real action as we see now YouTube working on PTCL Broadband but the facebook is still banned. So YouTube is available but uptil now, Facebook is thought to be opening on 31st of May.

Quoting the blog post by Ray King clearly verifies that the Lahore office has been closed now.

Thoughts about change are on my mind today as we shut down our office in Lahore, Pakistan.

We’ve worked with our Lahore colleagues for three years. They are terrific people who have done some really good work for AboutUs, and we’ve enjoyed a great relationship with them.

As a small, venture-backed company, we’re constantly evaluating options and tradeoffs. Sometimes we’re faced with a tough choice about where to focus our resources. The decision to shut down our Lahore office is one of those tough choices. We’re moving fast on new product development, and all our time, attention and resources need to be focused on these efforts here in Portland.

We’re grateful for the work and friendship we’ve shared with our Lahore colleagues. We hope their experience with AboutUs will serve them well in the next chapter of their working lives.

As you google “Lahore High Court” you get warning from the search giant that “This site may harm your computer”. And Google’s browser Chrome won’t even allow you open that site.

Above image is a downscaled version of original image which can be viewed here.

Going through the source code of Lahore High Court’s Website i.e. www.lhc.gov.pk, complete story gets revealed.

LHC website is found to be linking with some highly malware effected websites, and the chain goes on.

Above image is a downscaled version of original image which can be viewed here.

Following are the sites:

• gtstyle.insaweb.co.kr
• blog.seelenland.at

and finally you land on LHC’s website.

But the story does not end here. www.naxis.com seems to be kind of consultancy and advertising website, because as you go through their services, there is nothing like web development but on LHC’s website, some of the pages are even hosted on nAxis’s website.

Above image is a downscaled version of original image which can be viewed here.

Following the link “Cause List” at LHC’s website takes you to http://www.naxis.com/LHC/causelist/index.htm which in turn is a malware effected website.

Which links to:

• moadonet.com
• killerpilze.bplaced.net

Using Google’s Safe Browsing Tool, we can easily check the status of these websites. Following is the result what Google says:

Safe Browsing

Diagnostic page for lhc.gov.pk

What is the current listing status for lhc.gov.pk?

Site is listed as suspicious – visiting this web site may harm your computer.

Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 8 time(s) over the past 90 days.

What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 3 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 2 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2010-03-05, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2010-03-04.

Malicious software includes 4 exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 1 new process(es) on the target machine.

Malicious software is hosted on 7 domain(s), including insaweb.co.kr/, atlastaxi.qc.ca/, dreamznevents.com/.

2 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including iways.net/, naxis.com/.

This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS2914 (NTT).

Complete results can be viewed at the following links:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://lhc.gov.pk

and

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://naxis.com

and the Google search

http://tinyurl.com/yb5nefu

Twitter blog said that:

Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)

Kevin Weil of the Twitter analytics team said that the chart of tweet growth does not include spam, but didn’t give much other detail about how the tweet spread breaks down. Like how many tweets are from bots, how many from celebrities, how many from what countries, how many from the long tail, about which Twitter has promised to reveal afterwards.

“People are spending less time navigating the Internet on their own and are now navigating the Internet based on their friends’ recommendations or their friends’ activities,” said Dave Yovanno, chief executive of Gigya Inc., a Palo Alto firm that offers social-media services. “That’s one of the big trends we started picking up on probably four or five months ago.”

For years, Web content creators had to worry whether they had the proper level of search-engine optimization to make sure search engines listed them among the top results. Now, they have to consider what companies like Gigya offer – social-media optimization.

“Marketers must focus on social marketing in addition to traditional search, as customers have a multi-pronged way of finding information,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a Web strategist for the Altimeter Group, a San Mateo consulting firm with clients like Gigya. “The clear-cut channels of yesteryear are now an intricate set of connections.”

Using a snapshot of Web traffic from December, Compete’s director of online media and search, Jessica Ong, found that 15 percent of traffic to major Web portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL came from Facebook and MySpace. The lion’s share of that traffic, 13 percent came from Facebook.

Google, which has profited handsomely from directing Web surfers to their destinations during the past decade, was third with 7 percent, just behind e-commerce site eBay, which had 7.61 percent. MySpace was fourth with just under 2 percent.

DELL Pakistan has cupid showering the best ever surprise this Valentine’s Day offering one of the latest and most classic of laptops introduced by the company recently. Couples and those ‘in love’ have been invited to visit www.facebook.com/dellpakistan and get additional information about the smashing offer.

All you have to do is to fill in the form, available at dell outlets,  suggesting a tagline for your loved lone containing the word “DELL” and  drop it in the box at dell outlet, visit Dell Pakistan’s facebook page to see result.

Nubla Iftikhar, Marketing Manager, Consumer and SMB for DELL Pakistan said, “Dell Consumer is determined to add value to the lifestyle of the end customer. The Dell Mini is specifically positioned for the youth and people on the go. In seven exciting colors it is quite a catch at the most reasonable price point.”

DELL is the leading consumer brand for notebooks in Pakistan and has captured a growing number of young customers in recent years. The product is of world-class quality and users have a swell time experiencing the unique features of its cutting-edge dual core technology, longer battery life, more memory and a choice of exciting lifestyle colors, including the special ‘red’ for Valentine’s Day!

For more details, visit

http://www.facebook.com/DellPakistan

All Facebook reported early Wednesday that Farmville users, who plant crops and raise animals on their virtual plots of land, had sent 220 million virtual gifts to each other in 18 hours (Valentine gifts are free, although other things within Farmville can cost money). A check with a press spokesman from Zynga found that in the 48 hours since the launch at 6 a.m. PT Monday morning, more than 475 million had been sent. “We sent about 255 million yesterday and about 220 million the day before, for a total of about 475 million,” Lisa Chan said in an email.

Even though the valentines themselves didn’t cost money, the size and power of these kinds of virtual economies (Farmville players helped to raise $1 million for Haitian relief efforts) have led many to wonder what they can tell us about online spending in other ways.

(Source: GigaOm)

Whatsoever is the official status but the screenshot clearly shows restricted site.

The picture shown is a resized version of original screen shot.

The case is only with Pakistan as youtube is working like a charm on all proxies, so clearly uptil now, it is a local ban in Pakistan by country’s backbone broadband provider as a lot of other sites have also been banned like this on PTA’s notice.

Though the number of youtubers in Pakistan are quite low yet the viewers got a large queue. Wait for any official notice or wait for the rebirth of YouTube!!

UPDATE:

YouTube is back and working, so the show is over!!

UPPDATE 2:

This seemed to be an effort to block anti-government videos as all the videos under “shut up zardari” are still restrcited.