Qatar Residents Banned from Wikipedia
Visual Aid for the Ignorant Average American:
Qatar, the vaguely phallic country thrusting into the Persian Gulf, has been banned from making changes on Wikipedia, the decidedly unphallic online reference. From Techcrunch:
Qatar has a single ISP, Qtel, with a single IP address shared by the entire country. Wikipedia has blocked that IP address for anonymous edits, but is allowing users of that IP address with actual Wikipedia accounts to continue to edit articles. There’s one problem, though. You can’t create an account if you enter Wikipedia from that IP address. It’s a bit of a Catch 22, and users will be forced to either use a proxy to enter the site (many of which are also banned), or simply stop editing altogether.
While that makes perfect sense we’d like to pretend this is a conspiracy by conservative cartographers from the military/industrial complex. They hope to eliminate countries they deem NSFW from their puritan digital utopia. Following this non-logical thought through we can only conclude that Dijibouti is next.
Administrators later set up a workaround to allow Qatari posters to edit the site, and the block was later removed, according to an update from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
January 13th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
[…] Having just visited the mideast for a bit of geek outrage earlier this week we’re just as surprised as you are to return to the region. But when the iPod serves as inspiration for a multi-million dollar tower (cleverly named the iPad), you know we’ll be there. From Boing Boing: Dubai-based real estate firm Omniyat Properties plans to construct a tall building in Dubai modeled after the Apple iPod. The name of the 24-story tower: iPad. Architects James Law Cybertecture International will design, and the structure will sit over a six-degree-angled “docking station,” just as the ipod does on its docking station. […]