Facebook is unblocked as per latest verdict from Lahore High Court but I find many people not using the popular social networking website. I have even seen many foreign friends leaving facebook and publishing email addresses to stay in touch via email.
Updated at: 1027 PST, Monday, May 31, 2010
LAHORE: A Pakistani court on Monday ordered authorities to restore access to Facebook, nearly two weeks after the popular social networking website was blocked nationwide in a row over blasphemy.
Justice Ejaz Chaudhry of the Lahore High Court issued the directive, reversing a May 19 order on the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) to block Facebook over “blasphemous” drawings of Prophet Mohammed on the website.
“Restore Facebook. We don’t want to block access to information,” Chaudhry told the court.
A contest organised by a Facebook user calling on people to draw the Prophet Mohammed to promote “freedom of expression” sparked a major backlash in the conservative Muslim country of 170 million.
Islam strictly prohibits the depiction of any prophet as blasphemous and even moderate Muslims were deeply offended by the drawings that appeared on a Facebook page in an answer to the call for an “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day”.
A group of Islamic lawyers petitioned the Lahore court, which had ordered Facebook blocked until May 31 and the PTA then banned YouTube and restricted access to other websites, including Wikipedia.
Chaudhry on Monday asked the government to develop a system to block access to “blasphemous” content on the Internet, which he said was already in place in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
“It is the government’s job to take care of such things, which spark resentment among the people and bring them onto the streets. They should take steps to block any blasphemous content on the Internet,” Chaudhry said.
The court Monday adjourned until June 15 the petitions from the Islamic lawyers.
Mudassir Hussain, an official from the information technology ministry, told the court that all links to “blasphemous” content on the Internet would remain blocked in Pakistan.
Well, my initial estimates were wrong. I thought I could retweet the posts and Twitter would give me accurate results. The problem is with twitter results. They are giving me wrong and irrelevant results.
Also, when I ask Twitter to only send me “positive” tweets, it sometimes does not mark most of the positive tweets as “positive”, in fact they are not marked at all. So there are the “positive” tweets, “negative” tweets, “questions” and “unknown” (or “unrated”) tweets. A quick look at these tweets and I can see many of them as good ones that should have been retweeted but they were not.
To get over this situation, I need to have an admin panel where I can see statistics and possibly “approve” the negative / unrated tweets.
Having previous experience working in Zend Framework, CakePHP and CodeIgniter, I would prefer to build it inCode Igniter. I will keep this page updated with more info.
Yes, I know what I just said that … its true because my new project HashPakistan is using Twitter Search API to get all posts with hashtag #Pakistan and last night twitter gave it results containing #ashes (and has nothing to do with Pakistan).
My salary account is HBL (I hate this bank) and I use Dubai Islamic Bank’s services which I am very satisfied with. So last night after work, I thought to move balance from HBL to DIB, tried the inter-bank transfer (which should be great if it is working) but invain. So I went straight to DIB Main Bulevard, Guberg branch.
I took out the cash from one ATM and tried to deposit it via DIB’s CDM (Cash Deposit Machine) into my DIB account. Either the machine was acting weird or the time-waste was inevitable. The machine deposited half my cash and reject the other half. I took a look at the other half that was rejected, the bills were clean and new. I could not find anything with the naked eye so I tried again and the machine rejected all the bills again.
Hmm, what could be wrong, I was asking myself. Then I tried again but this time with different counts, some upside down, some backwards and to my surprize all of the cash was deposited. So next time, if your CDM says Can’t deposit, try straightening the bills and submitting them again using different ways, It will hopefully work. It worked for me
I moved from Warid to Ufone in April, I forgot to mention that. Thanks to MNP the move was smooth and easy.
Now let me tell you why I moved. First of all, there are billing issues in Postpaid. They have two SMS packages
Zoom Limited SMS Package offering 750 messages per month and
Zoom Unlimited SMS Package offering 7,500 messages per month
When you activate any of these packages (for the first time) the package is charged double. So e.g. you activate Zoom Unlimited and it costs approx Rs. 300 per month so it will be charged twice, once as ACTIVATION CHARGES and second as monthly charges (WTF!!)
This video surfaced before the Sharia Law was imposed in SWAT. The crimes of this girl are unknown. Forget what the comments/description says in Youtube.
Updates
Chief Justice took Suo motu notice of the flogging of a girl in SWAT and seeks report from Interior Secretary and NWFP Govt. on 6th April, 2009. Yeah!!
