Kuwait bans the use of cameras in public places, joins Syria in the club of ridiculousness

prasmick:

The image you see could get it’s photographer in serious legal trouble in Kuwait after authorities there have banned the use of DSLRs in public places unless you’re part of the press. Which is just ridiculous.

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Speaking of things that are “sort of” banned in the Middle East, here in Syria you cannot access the following without doing some computer nerdery:

• facebook.com (or any of its subdomains, eg m.facebook.com)
• youtube.com
• skype.com (are you serious?! you can still use Skype, you just can’t visit the website or download the latest version of the software)
• wikimedia.org (you can access Wikipedia just fine, but because all its images and web style sheets are hosted on wikimedia.org, the Wikipedia pages look all lo-fi and broken)
• the entire Android app market
• amazon.com (although amazon.co.uk works just fine)
• all blogspot.com blogs
• 150+ other websites deemed by the government as too politically sensitive for Syrians to handle (including websites of political parties, Arabic newspapers, reform oriented groups, and individual journalists and bloggers — both internal and external to Syria)

To access these websites, you must go into your web browser’s connection settings and define an off-shore proxy server (the ones we’ve been using are located in Cyprus and Sri Lanka, I think).

The OpenNet Initiative’s profile of internet censorship in Syria states the following:

The telecommunications market is Syria is the most regulated in the Middle East and is among the least developed…

The vast majority of Syrian users get online at Syria’s ubiquitous Internet cafés, and from houses using dial-up connections via landlines…

Repressive legislation and the imprisonment of journalists and bloggers for their activities online have led many Syrians to engage in self-censorship. Meanwhile, the government continues to promote the growth of the Internet throughout the country.

By comparison, Kuwait’s internet media is said to be some of the most outspoken in the Middle East, and besides a few politically sensitive and extremist/pro-terrorist sites, pornographic websites are about the only ones that are blocked by the Kuwaiti government on the basis of content. In Syria, on the other hand, you regularly find men in internet cafes clicking through photos of naked women. Maybe that’s why the lights are always so dimmed in these places — to get you in the mood?

What do you think? Comments