An Egyptian court has recently banned pornography Web sites, labeling them "venomous and vile," according to The Sydney Morning Herald. Egypt, which strictly bans offline pornography, already has a regulation which requires Internet cafe users to sign a form saying...

Iran’s Internet censorship regime is generally accepted to be one of the most aggressive in the world, yet according to the New York Times, by autumn 2008, more than 400,000 Iranians were able to access an uncensored web thanks to a...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has just released a list of the ten worst countries in which to blog. Topping the list is Burma, followed closely by Iran, Syria, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Tunisia, China, Turkmenistan, and Egypt. In determining...

According to BBC News reports, top executives from major Internet companies including Google, YouTube, Twitter, Howcast, and Meetup visited Iraq last week in order to assess how their technologies might assist in the ongoing fight against corruption. The companies will...

According to reports in Business Intelligence—Middle East, Google has no intention of engaging in an Internet censorship program with the United Arab Emirates. Google admitted to having recently met with Dubai Police authorities along with several other “entities spanning government,...

In addition to technical filtering and surveillance practices, more countries in the Middle East impose restrictions on Internet use in cyber cafés. The latest example comes from Saudi Arabia where Internet cafés have been ordered by the Ministry of Interior to install...

Herdict Web, the proud child of ONI, has just launched its new Arabic user interface. In the past 24 hours since the launch, the Herdict team has been thrilled to note a high number of reports coming from the...

In an unprecedented move, the Telecommunications and Regulatory Authority (TRA) of the UAE is giving users the opportunity to submit feedback over the blocking a number of sites, including Flickr. Internet Service Provider (ISP) du, followed larger ISP...

Commander-in-Chief of Dubai police Lt General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim called (full article in Arabic , English summary) this week for the blocking of the social networking Web site youtube because, he said, the site contains religiously inappropriate...

Countries in the Middle East continue to block online content deemed offensive to Muslims. The latest example comes from the United Arab Emirates which blocked access this week to the Web site Ahmed and Salim, an Israeli Web site which...