Tag: MIDDLEEAST

A computer scientist at the University of Buffalo has developed a new program capable of taking automated translation beyond the literal. Rohini Srihari began working on her software in the hopes of improving computerized translations of Urdu -- a linguistic blend of Hindi and Persian that is widely spoken in Pakistan, and by many Muslims in India. Urdu is a particularly difficult language ...

Authorities in Bahrain have released a dissident blogger, just one day after arresting him at his home. Mahmoud al-Youssef was taken into custody early Wednesday morning, as part of a nationwide campaign against opposition activists and protesters. The 50-year-old al-Youssef, who blogs in English, has long criticized the Bahrain regime for restricting freedom of expression, and has been an ...

Retreating from its previous stance, Facebook yesterday announced that it had pulled a page calling for a Third Palestinian Intifada. Israeli Cabinet Minister Yuli Edelstein wrote Mark Zuckerberg last week to request that the page be shuttered, but Facebook initially refused to do so; the company claimed that there was nothing overtly violent about the page, which was established as a call for ...

When the Middle East erupted in revolution earlier this year, many regimes responded to the upheaval by ramping up their online censorship efforts. And, according to the Wall Street Journal, a lot of them had help from American software companies. Throughout the region, governments have been using technologies and tools developed by U.S. firms to clamp down on the Web. McAfee reportedly ...

The revolutions across the Middle East may have ushered in a new era of U.S. intelligence-gathering -- one that could even include Google. Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, an instructor at West Point, and Joshua Goldstein, from Princeton, recently used Google Trends to analyze the terms that Web users in Egypt searched at the height of the country's recent upheaval. "What we did was a comparison of ...

During a speech at Cambridge University yesterday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange suggested that his whistleblowing organization played a significant role in the recent protests across the Middle East and North Africa. According to Assange, WikiLeaks' diplomatic cables may have convinced Middle Eastern leaders that they wouldn't be able to rely on U.S. assistance if military forces were to ...

[While] the recent round of uprisings may seem spontaneous to western observers – and therefore as magically disruptive as a rush-hour flash mob in San Francisco – the actual history of popular regime change tends to diminish the central role commonly ascribed to technology. By emphasising the liberating role of the tools and downplaying the role of human agency, such accounts ...

Three years ago, some of the world's leading tech companies agreed to participate in the Global Network Initiative (GNI) -- a code of conduct designed to protect online speech and privacy around the world. The initiative was originally launched in response to brewing tensions in China, where some Internet companies were accused of complying with government censorship policies in order to pursue ...

The list of nominees for this year's Nobel Peace Prize includes plenty of individuals and organizations that probably deserve the award, along with two curious candidates that will almost certainly hog all of the media's attention: WikiLeaks and the Internet. This year's field features a whopping 241 nominees, breaking the record of 237 set just last year. Notable candidates include former ...

As chaos continues to roll across Libya, most observers and media outlets have been busy trying to make sense of the country's horrific violence and escalating death tolls. Web developer Jerry Brito, on the other hand, seems more concerned about another potential casualty of Libya's civil discord: bit.ly, and its link-shortening brethren. As it turns out, the ".ly" suffix is a top-level ...

Just about everyone not named Malcolm Gladwell can agree that Facebook played a pretty integral role in recent protests across the Middle East. The company, however, doesn't seem very interested in talking about it. According to the New York Times, Facebook's silence has more to do with business than sheer modesty. Although many have praised the social network as a critical mechanism of ...

The already Twitter-savvy U.S. State Department is now tweeting in Arabic. A few days ago, the Department launched a new feed, @USAbilAraby, devoted exclusively to Arabic-speaking audiences. The account describes itself as the "US Department of State Arabic Media Hub," and, as of this morning, has already accumulated over 500 followers. According to the Washington Post, the State Department ...

The Web may be up and running in Egypt, but Anonymous clearly hasn't forgotten the Egyptian government's unprecedented shutdown of the Internet. The group of free speech 'hacktivists' is now claiming credit for taking down the websites of the Egyptian Ministry of Information and the National Democratic Party, which is currently in power. Anonymous confirmed the attacks in a message posted to its ...

The Egyptian government restored the country's Internet services today, as the army urged protesters to end demonstrations and "bring stability back to the country." Hassan Kabbani, chief executive of mobile service provider MobiNil, confirmed that sites previously blocked were rendered accessible around noon, including the Central Bank of Egypt's website and social networks like Facebook. The ...

As civil unrest continues to spread and intensify across Egypt, authorities within the country have taken a drastic and apparently unprecedented step: they've shut down the entire Internet. The blackout began at about 12:30 a.m. local time, when four of the Egypt's major service providers abruptly shut down. Calling the nationwide outage "an action unprecedented in Internet history," the ...