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Friday, 03 Sep 2010
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Pakistan may ban Yahoo, Google, MSN
A petition has been filed calling for the ban of nine websites in Pakistan.
LAHORE: Deputy Attorney General, Bahawalpur, Muhammad Azad has said that the Lahore High Court has ordered Ministry of Information officials to appear in court regarding the blockage of nine websites including Google, Yahoo, YouTube and MSN.
Rabia Mehmood, reporter Express 24/7 confirmed that a writ petition had been filed by a citizen in the Bahawalpur bench of the LHC seeking a ban on websites publishing blasphemous material and misquoting the Holy Quran.
The Lahore High Court (LHC) has ordered Ministry of Information officials to appear before the court on June 28, after which a decision will be taken regarding blockage of the sites.
Websites included on the ban list are:
According to Azad the ban will not be implemented today (Wednesday) as indicated by early reports in the media. The fate of the nine websites will be decided following the June 28 hearing, he said.
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O my !
What the hell do they want..any Tom Dick & Harry will stand up and file a petition and they are gonna block that website !!!
What the Fudge :o !!
WOW… Stone Age coming !!!
Might as well start banning electricity, cars, cement and everything that wasn’t here 1400 years ago.
What’s wrong with these people.. who are they to decide for the entire population…
Is it possible to sue the LHC for wastage of taxpayer resources in this utterly pointless and pathetic course of action?
I don’t understand, really. Instead of negotiating with the profane authors or website-owners or simply ignoring the very existence of such domains, LHC decided to ban nine websites? And those nine websites contribute a lot to daily searching, assignments, projects, entertainment and the sort. I thought viewer-ship was left to the viewer’s discretion, not an entire court of rash lawyers and judges. I guess Pakistan will have to say a big hell to the stone age now. So much for enlightenment.
Why is LHC provoking unrest !! A lot of people use these sites for work, studies, research and networking. As if facebook’s ban was not enough, it basically opened the Pandora box.
hello* even
Fate of the 9 websites? NO, fate of poor Pakistanis who use these services will be decided on June 28.
The real question is how long would these sites be blocked? Google, for instance, is a search engine and not a website, per se. So, people are most likely going to find anything they search for. Similar is the case with Bing/MSN and Yahoo.
If found ‘guilty’ and penalized with a ban by the esteemed court, how long would be duration of the penalty?
Forever?
you know the air that we breathe might also be coming from these countries…how about banning that as well?
Excellent!! If we can’t see blasphemous material, obviously it doesn’t exist!
The definition of ‘blasphemous material’ and methods of controlling it is getting to be a highly ridiculous joke now. These people need to go out and actually do something constructive in the world.
We need Internet savvy judiciary who should be well aware of basic terms like “Search engine”, “online buying” and “electronic mail”.
Why don’t we just ban the internet all together and be done with all the bans? We definitely don’t want to be part of the 21st century so let’s just stop dilly-dallying and ban the internet all together.
masha-Allah !
simply ridiculous!!
I seriously doubt eligibility of honourable Judge sitting in LHC. He should learn to use internet and also that banning is not the solution. BTW why not ban internet altogether?
@ above all
this is the situation of so called muslims of so called islamic repuplic pakistan… shame to all of you…..
Send some drones on to the LHC – This is where the menace takes courage.
A person from Bahawalpur .. who probably would be using the internet for chatting and downloads only.. stands up and files a petition .. and then the LHC takes it seriously and the internet is about to get blocked!
I mean .. for God’s sake at least try and understand how the search engines and these publishers work!
Speechless really! Welcome to the world of millatYOUTUBE, millatMSN, millatHOTMAIL, millatGOOGLE and millatYAHOO! That seems like the fate of internet for Pakistan… lolz
Simply ridiculous. Even the earlier ban on facebook was ridiculous. The lawyers and judges first need to understand how “internet” works before going all out against it.
They are simply making a joke out of our nation.
Let’s sue the LHC for wasting public money and time. On the other hand we will miss the good jokes they make. ;-)
Ufff what should i write… i have no words to pay tribute to all of them as i cant use slang words here:(
It would make a LOT more sense to Officially BAN the Products from such countries, for example, Israel, Denmark, etc. That would really hurt them. Blocking websites is practically useless and hurts us more than it hurts them.
Welcome to bronze age.
Seriously. These Judges are shame for Pakistan
On a laconic note: this is sheer absurdity
Welcome to the stone age of Pakistan..
An other stupidity at its best from judiciary.
Pakistan’s judiciary system has totally failed to give justice to this nation and they do not have anything to do fruitful for this nation, but doing childish actions like banning sites. why do not they join something like International Banning Organization rather than sitting in a court room.
wow, ab maza aye ga, hum bhi pagal tum bhi pagal……
Only websites containing blasphemous material should be banned, but not all those like yahoo, Google, Hotmail, YouTube and Bing.
I bet these judges can’t even spell Google, let alone know what these websites are and their importance for finding the relevant info..
Welcome to the 12th century. Now where is that pigeon, i wanna send a message coz gmail, hotmail and yahoo mail are extinct here.
what a bunch of idiots we have in the judiciary. No wonder our country is in a bad situation and close to being declared a banana republic.
Lets ask those judges and lawyers what is google, yahoo, bing, hotmail, etc.? or how about simply ask them what the frak is the Internet?
Im sure they have no clue about it and they wouldnt even know how to start a PC.
Stupid people should not be allowed to breed…one day we are gonna be over populated with idiots its already happening look around and be afraid!
I think we have no right to interfere in the affairs of Punjab. If its institution chose to implement religious fanaticism (in Punjab), we can say nothing about that. However, the verdicts of Punjabi courts should not affect the lives of the peoples of Pakhtunkhwa, Sind and Baluchistan.
Well lets not over-react on this… Its just a petition not a decision yet… LHC will probably dismiss it… Just another piece of stupidity given coverage by sensationalist media…
wahhhhhhhh
I would have hoped that after the Facebook debacle, our courts would have had the sense to throw petitions like this out of court instead of taking them seriously and fast tracking us to the Stone Age. I do not pay taxes to have judges who clearly don’t understand how the Internet works upholding ridiculous petitions like this. This obsession we have with blasphemy colours everything else we do, usually at the expense of common sense and basic freedoms.
I think its more of a political strategy by the government to ban mass media like internet, rather than just a petition by a citizen.
champions of so called “AZAD ADLIA” should be very happy. on to the era of intellectualism. BTW WHAT ELSE DID YOU PEOPLE EXPECTED FROM SHRIEF COURT
Knowledge is Power. The courts seem to think that denying the People of Pakistan Knowledge is a wise thing to do.
Completely pathetic on their part and I can’t help but be ashamed by the mockery of our courts.
Why didn’t they mind telling the good reason behind this blocking?
Ignorance has no end in our country!
This is a sad day for Pakistan and i do not think it is the last time such a preposterous order will come from the judges. I am actually at a loss of words as the judge passing this order is clearly unaware of the uses of the internet and search engines. Businesses, institutions, students and individuals from all walks of life need and use the world wide web, not to mention communicate using email. It is beyond me as to how these websites ‘promote’ blasphemous content. The judgment is supposedly to protect us, however it seems to be a direct infringement of the fundamental rights guaranteed to the people of Pakistan in the Constitution. It is not surprising that individuals will speculate on the motives of such a move, which are clearly anything but the protection of the sanctity of the religion, which the Petitioner knows nothing about. Pakistan’s image is already frail in the international community, its economy is on the edge of destruction and the country as a whole is on the verge of a socio-political revolution (considering Pakistan is amongst the list of ten failed states on this planet). The judge passing the order has not only ignored the law and the principles embedded in our constitution, but completely ignored and set aside the effects on the people and the nation, not to mention the fact that any logical and pragmatic individual would have dismissed such a case as a waste of the court’s time and the taxpayers money. There has always been lack of faith in the legislative faction, evidential from the beginning of Pakistan’s creation, however, the little hope in the judicial division has now seized to exist. I shudder to imagine the future of this country as we are thrown back into the dark ages, and this is not because of the constant load shedding.
Banning Search Engines will push Pakistan back to stone age.
Websites containing blasphemous material should be banned, not the Search Engines through which people in the entire world do research work including Pakistan and learn a lot through the Search Engines.
***It will be the darkest day in the digital history of Pakistan.***
That’s shocking. I mean there is no reason why we should ban such websites. What a Crap!!! this petitioner is mad to be very honest.
i must say its a courageous step by LHC but i want to ask judiciary that is it a wise step to stop such things to happen?? a month ago when facebook was banned in Pakistan people didn’t stop using it..there are many proxy servers available over internet through which you can access banned sites. anyways i think this issue should be solved by religious scholars.
Is this the same court which has let dangerous terrorists off the hook lately? Now they are diverting their attention towards further radicalizing the society by banning internet and access to information. One can clearly see their inclination. I would go as far as saying the courts (like the media, the parliament, the army/ISI, the civil administration, provincial governments) have been infiltrated by Taliban/Alqaeda directly or through their sympathizers. Verdicts like this one and those absolving dangerous terrorists all point in that direction. Sad, sad, sad !!!!!
Wrong islamic information over the internet is a serious concern, because it can mislead people. Now a days people don’t search things in books they go to internet. Having said that, the amount of good, true and useful information on internet is in a much much bigger number compared to the wrong info.
What we need is a organization or a team, which searches for these materials and corrects them or ban the materials, not the full websites.
Search Engine is just like a library, you go there find books related to what you need, if there exists such books that is wrong, then hold access to the book, no need to close the library.
wake-up guys, banning websites for mocking Islam and our Prophet is a good thing. This tells you make such great websites yourself which are earning billions of dollars on our self respect.
But stop a minute…. who put dump guys on the Pakistan Internet Exchange. Please just filter out bad-contents and some time not-so-important websites; like IslamExposed and InTheNameofAllah, can be totally banned. Yah Google should not be banned entirely. Access list is not a solution but content filtering such as done in Iran and China.
I think we should not give any value to such news. the purpose of such news was to create further bad images about pakistan. Pakistan has not banned these website and no such thing is going to happen. That is just a petition. Anyone can file such petition even in UK or USA. what matters is a dicision and government orders. Pakistan has already unblocked the facebook – I am sure that was a mistake. Filing a petition is different from a Govt order. And we should be abstaining from defaming our country by not propagating such stupid material.
Can you ban what someone else is thinking? That thinking may manifest as content on a website or literature or TV program or whatever — those can be banned. But does that remove mindsets?
just speech less !!!