SL Banned in United Arab Emirates

I made an Arab friend a year ago and we had a great time together, he is a really nice person, suddenly, one day, I stopped seeing him. Many reasons can cross your mind (1), but a few days ago he contacted me (2) saying that SL was banned in UAE.

Have anyone else that know an Arab resident had this kind of experience?
If you are an Arab, is there a workaround that I can explain to my friend so he can come back?
Maybe masking your IP address with some program like Hotspot Shield or encrypting the SL port or use a specific proxy?

(1) I send him messages from time to time thinking that maybe he had me deactivated in his friends list.
(2) Maybe activating that personal messages be send to him to his email account.

UAE seems to filter quite broadly. Before suggesting ways he might circumvent his country's laws, it might be an idea to find out the penalty he'd pay if caught.

The UAE is a theocracy if I'm correct so I'm not surprised that they filter SL out. To them, SL goes against the preaching of Islam and their idea of morality.

The UAE doesn't hold the same rights as other countries, I'm sure the penalty can be harsh for trying to circumvent the government's doing and I'm sure he doesn't want to go to prison...

Ummmm my partner was in the UAE recently on business and had no trouble what so ever accessing SL. We actually were worried about it knkowing their filters that they have set up with accessing the interest however SL was not one of the places she had an issue accessing?

it's possible that some connections (like business lines) may not be filtered (but can be monitored)... some parts of china re like this. or your friend could have an ISP that filtered it, or just be giving excuses.

at any rate, any of the proxy/vpn redirect tricks that work for getting info into and out of china should also work anywhere else that does such blocking.

"the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" - John Gilmore

VPN tricks work. Since my laptop is set on the Domain server located ohio, I can do anywhere in the world and if that place has limited internet (filtering or such) but VPN is not blocked all I have to do is click the connect to vpn on the login screen and it will use that instead and give me an ip from the server directly which in turn bypasses there filtering.

UAE is not banned.

I had a "friend" who was just on SL from Dubai 2 days ago (he was logging in everyday from there), and now is back home in Pakistan and still logging in.

If he is banned, it is his internet provider because i know for a fact UAE loggins were happening 48hrs ago, when my "friend" logged out and left Dubai for Pakistan.

Places like the UAE and Iran often have different rules for citizens than for tourists & visitors. eg, a visiting westerner is allowed to drink alcohol, a resident is not. So it could be that places like hotel internet access has different censorship settings than residential ISPs. This would explain why Eclectic's partner and Briana's friend were still allowed access.

Wow i spent a couple weeks there and never knew that. But this was back in 2000 and we had internet on the ship via satellite.

Its been going on a lot longer than that. One of my fathers friends was a long distance truck driver who used to go out there, to UAE, Quatar, Saudi, Kuwait, during the 1970s and 80s. Obviously there was no internet back then but there were other restrictions, and laws he was exempted from because of being a Westerner. The downside was that he'd only be allowed to stay in "approved" hotels, and he couldn't just go wandering round the town. Saudi in particular was a pretty scary place to be in the 80s.

I bet they would cut off his joy stick.

Well it was still scary in 1998. We had 2 different episodes there with women. One girl was in a restaurant and when she went to the bathroom she was abducted and led out through the kitchen to a waiting taxi cab - she was eventually released when they were finished with her. The 2nd girl was in the a Hotel (i forget which one) heading up to a Navy party and she was abducted by 2 men who stepped into the elevator and took her off it.

Both of these episodes were pre-planned.

I really dislike that place.

*shudders and agrees*

UAE has nationwide internet filters and laws regarding what is allowed and not allowed. I would hazard to guess that SL is banned because it's virtually impossible to filter the information transmitted across it selectively, and the UAE offers no gaurantee of freedom of the press. Googling about this suggests that bypassing these restrictions is a great way to get thrown into a middle-eastern prison for months or years, on top of fines high enough to resembly Terry Tschaivo's uninsured medical expenses.

Sorry to hear about your friend's predicament. Unfortunately, most of the neighboring countries are similarly strict about freedom of information and speech; I hate to say it, but unless the UAE goes through dramatic reformation or he emigrates to a more open society, odds are it'll be a very long time before you see him in SL again.

There is one ISP in the UAE (Etisalat), and the government is known to hold 60% ownership in it (though Google suggests there's widespread suspicion that the government owns a substantially larger portion, if not all of it outright).



Techincally, yes. Legally? Very probably no. "Don't get caught!"

I used to do net support for customers in the middle east. At one point we had to set up a dual reverse SSH proxy (both ends had to set up separate proxy tunnels out of the country) through a server in Houston so an engineer could log on and fix a server no more than 50 miles away from where he was staying. I was told that some places they have banks of people randomly monitoring phone lines and pulling them if they hear something against policy... and that's for privileged foreigners. Scary part of the world. AND the conditions for mustelids are even worse... many species of otters are already extinct.

well yeah, but if you have to go that far (and the comparison to china should already be a warning) I'm pretty sure the person doing it knows they are seriously fucked if they get caught...

SL would not be a great reason to do it (risk vs reward) unless you were getting news filtered through it (or out through it), then you might value it enough...

I lived and worked in the UAE for many months and had no problem with internet access, SL or having a drink when i wanted. Admittedly some of the individual states were better than others, but in the main, dubai and abu dhabi were fine, although sharjah was more restricted if i recall, however i thoroughly enjoyed myself, as did all westerners there at the time.

It's probably a good thing for *us* if SL is banned in such theocracies. That way we won't have to worry about their laws being enforced on us, like the silly German laws about animations.

which ones would those be... because if it's what I'm thinking, it's actually Silly US Laws ::eyeroll::

My best advice: Don't give him any tips to circumvent this, except if he specifically asks for ity. On the other hand, don't even then. UAE is distinctively unfun to have broken morality laws in.