ISLAMABAD: Universities and research institutes across the country as well as million of students remain deprived of essential educational contents available on YouTube, the world’s largest video-sharing website, as the government is unwilling to spend Rs3 billion required to install filters for blocking the blasphemous and offensive contents on the website, The News has learnt. […]
ISLAMABAD: Ignoring all reservations of the citizens’ Joint Action Committee on Cyber Crime Bill 2015, the National Assembly Standing Committee on Information Technology and Telecommunication adopted the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Bill 2015 on Thursday and referred it to parliament for the final nod. If the parliament approves the “controversial” bill, then on the one […]
ISLAMABAD: As a parliamentary panel prepares to take up government proposed legislation on cyber terrorism on Thursday (today), IPPs, entrepreneurs and civil society called it an attempt to put a ‘gag’ on freedom of expression and to give the spy agencies unbridled powers. Headed by Captain (retd) Muhammad Safdar, the son-in-law of Prime Minister Nawaz […]
Governments of Pakistan in the last decade have shown a propensity to inflict self-harm when it comes to new technologies, particularly the internet. The YouTube ban that was imposed more than two years ago has become an irrelevant laughing-stock. The ban has given rise to a reported acceleration in the development of proxies that may […]
ISLAMABAD – While Ministry of Information and Technology is busy in reviewing the proposed prevention of electronic crime bill 2015, the stakeholders believe that cyber crime was not really the core issue for a country like Pakistan, where a mere 10 percent population use internet, but cyber terrorism and cyber wars. “We have no updated […]
ISLAMABAD: For those who have been able to access YouTube in the last a few days, the joy is short-lived. “The reason why YouTube was accessible in certain parts of the country was because of a technical fault which will be fixed,” said Minister of State for Information Technology Anusha Rehman on Friday. The rumours […]
There was a recent news item suggesting that the ministry or governmental authority or whatever had declared that the ban on YouTube was not going to be lifted in Pakistan any time soon. The reason given was that improper content could not be removed from it. By improper content we all know what is meant. […]
Pakistan is becoming more Orwellian by the week. The ban on YouTube has now been announced as “indefinite” as the government has been unable to find a way to block blasphemous content. For me the ban was inconvenient for around 10 minutes — the time it took to find a free Virtual Private Network (VPN) […]
ISLAMABAD: The government told the Senate on Friday that there was no way to block blasphemous content on video-sharing website YouTube without banning the entire site itself. However, the fact that hundreds of Internet users across the country continue to bypass the official ban and access YouTube through their computers, smartphones and tablets on a […]
In the United States, everyone — from a school girl to Lady Gaga, from a young boy to President Barack Obama — posts stories from their lives on social media outlets. Even the Central Intelligence Agency, one of the world’s top spy agencies, got itself a Twitter account recently. But Pakistanis can only dream about […]
“Twitter Institutes Country Withheld Content Tool in Pakistan for the First Time,” read the headline of a post published on the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse website on May 18, 2014. In it were details of five requests made to Twitter by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), seeking to restrict `blasphemous’ and`unethical’ tweets and user accounts, which […]
KARACHI: “You don’t kill a story if you Kill a journalist,” said multimedia journalist and trainer Terry Anzur during a session at The Second Floor on Thursday. The session titled ‘strengthening broadcast journalism’ revolved around experiences and expressions of two journalists currently on a training tour organised by the US state department. Anzur with over […]
ISLAMABAD: The four cellular service providers bidding on licences for next generation mobile technology emerged the winners of Wednesday’s bidding war, with Mobilink, Telenor and Ufone picking up licences for 3G services while Zong being the only bidder to acquire a licence for both 3G and 4G services. Mobilink and Zong bid for the ‘superior’ […]
PESHAWAR: The banned outfit Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has created its own website for the purpose of streaming videos and publishing articles, interviews, statements etc. According to media reports, a statement released by the information and publication wing of the TTP said that ‘Umar Media’ has sponsored the website. In August 2008, the TTP was declared […]
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