arabic

Government crackdowns on Internet dissidents and bloggers in the United Arab Emirates have finally come to a head. The government made sweeping changes yesterday to the laws that govern what the country's citizens can and can't do on the Web, according to the UAE state news agency WAM.

The most drastic of the changes is jail time for anyone who imitates or pokes fun at the country's leaders. According to WAM, the new laws "stipulate penalties of imprisonment on any person who creates or runs an electronic website or uses any information technology medium to deride … Read more

Spoiler alert: The Cuban Missile Crisis ended without the United States and the Soviet Union launching even a single nuclear weapon, and the Allies won World War II.

You're no doubt well aware of those ultimate outcomes, but what if you don't remember, or never knew, the myriad individual moments, big and small, that led to those famous conclusions? There are plenty of thick history books you could pick up, but maybe you're someone who wants a more dramatic sense of what happened -- even, perhaps, to feel like you're right in the thick of the drama.

To be sure, there's no time machine that can take you back to London during The Blitz, or to the White House Situation Room as JFK stood firm against belligerent military leaders wanting to engage the Soviets over surreptitiously putting nukes in Cuba. But these days, in little 140-character snippets, many of those moments are being played out for the whole world to see. And if you close your eyes, you can almost imagine you're there. … Read more

What did it take to revamp Twitter for mobile Web? Lots and lots of man-hours.

Twitter completed the overhaul of its mobile site today, which aims to make Twitter available to anyone who owns a cell phone -- smartphone or feature. Now people in far away or rural places, and even those on low-bandwidth networks, can use the newest version of Twitter for mobile Web on their cell phone.

This is significant because it means that news on events like the Arab Spring, where Twitter played a major role in spreading information, will now be even easier to get.

Here'… Read more

Facebook plans to open its first Middle East office in Dubai next week, according to the Associated Press. This United Arab Emirates city is considered the Silicon Valley of the region and so it makes sense that the social network would put its Persian Gulf hub here.

With 80 percent of users outside the U.S. and Canada and more than 70 languages being used on the social network, Facebook has a massive global presence. Besides several offices throughout the U.S., the company also has 18 international offices, from Auckland to Hyderabad to Tokyo. Its international headquarters are in … Read more

With slumping sales in the West, Research In Motion has plans to go to the East. The BlackBerry maker is in the process of opening retail stores throughout the Middle East starting in Dubai, according to Bloomberg.

"We're getting the first one up and running and then we'll be looking at other cities across the Middle East -- Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar," Sandeep Saihgal, the managing director of RIM's Middle East business, told Bloomberg in an interview earlier this week.

The Dubai store in the United Arab Emirates will be the flagship shop and Bloomberg … Read more

Some Twitter users are trying to wield the organizing power of the social-networking site against the site itself: they're using the hashtags #TwitterBlackout, #TwitterCensored, and #J28 to spread news of a Twitter boycott planned for tomorrow.

Yesterday, Twitter said it was willing to remove tweets on a country-by-country basis when there are local restrictions against content in the tweets, and when a country requires the tweets to be taken down. That's why these Twitter users are up in arms.

The company said the new plan promotes freedom of expression, transparency, and accountability because even though these tweets may … Read more

Internet access came back online in Syria on Saturday after two-thirds of networks in the country became unreachable from the rest of the world in the midst of street protests on Friday. As the strife-ridden country once again became visible to the online world, videos of snipers apparently firing on peaceful demonstrators began to surface, like the unsettling clip below, which turns violent about 20 seconds in.

According to Renesys, which monitors Internet connectivity, the country's 3G data network and other ISPs disappeared from the global network grid Friday morning, but domains linked to the Syrian government remained online. … Read more

RIM yesterday reiterated that it's unable to provide the Indian government with the means to access secure e-mails on its enterprise network, despite a looming deadline.

Robert Crow, Research In Motion's vice president for Industry, Government and University, repeated the company's familiar position. Speaking to reporters yesterday in New Delhi, Crow said that RIM does not have the ability to turn over the keys to the encrypted data flowing over its BlackBerry Enterprise Server because those keys are held by its corporate customers.

Despite promises to India that it would offer a permanent solution by January 31, … Read more

Research In Motion has been butting heads with foreign governments over its tight security, but its latest BlackBerry 6 OS has won approval from the U.S. government for those same standards.

RIM announced today that its BlackBerry 6 operating system is now FIPS 140-2 certified. FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) is a series of standards set up by the U.S. government to ensure that computer products meet certain high-level security requirements. The standard is used by government agencies, regulated industries, and other organizations that store and send data dealing with sensitive information.

The FIPS 140-2 standard (PDF) specifically … Read more