Ministry bad. Proxies good.

Alrighty. So you are pissed off with Batelco and the Ministry of Disinformation, Truth, Culture and Censorship, or whatever they are calling themselves these days. 

First of all, don't just accept it. Complain. Write letters. Scream. Sign petitions. Scream louder. Complain more. 

And then, when your vocal cords are suitably painful, bypass the stupid pointless censorship. 

How? It's simple. 

Download something called Hotspot. The Ministryites know about it but you can get it from a number of mirrored sites. Be slightly patient, and it shall appear. There is a downside... it is slow. Yes, slow. Slower than the pathetic stone age speeds that BaZainCom call Internet. Still, there is no 'site blocked' nonsense, no blood pressure spikes and no broken computer monitors to contend with. 

Another alternative is Ultrasurf. Again, you will have to do a little looking, but not much. Install, follow instructions and PRESTO... no 'site blocked' headaches. Unfortunately, Untrasurf, while not as slow as Hotspot, doesn't allow access to a bunch of sites, for reasons I cant be bothered to explore. 

But not to worry. You see, while these applications help get around the annoyingness, their single best use is to access the lists and lists and lists of brand spanking new Proxies that nice people from all over the globe upload on a daily basis. Find a new proxy from a list of many, shove it into your browser and be on your way. It may take a few attempts, and the proxy that works for you may only last a day or two at the outside, but it works. 

Better still, visit a proxy group on Yahoo or Google or somewhere. Many of them have email lists... which means you can get a list of brand new proxies in your inbox every single day. I could give you all step by step instructions, but I am far too lazy. 

Be free. Be anonymous. But never, EVER stop complaining. 

Ahh.. the hypocrisy.

On one hand they censor our media, attempt to ban our alcohol, discuss arresting people for eating or possessing pork and spew ignorance at a bored national media who have no choice but to report it.  On the other hand we have the Spring of Culture, Formula One, Exhibition bloody road and god knows what else. 

Welcome to Bahrain. 

These two worlds will collide. When they do, what will happen is anyone's guess. Imagine promoting the F1 to the world, trying to convince those who care that Bahrain's race is better than the newer, shinier Abu Dhabi race. People can fly here on our possibly alcohol-free excuse for a national carrier, and they can get a visa online so they don't have to queue. But while here they may or may not be able to drink. And they may or may not be able to eat pork. They may or may not be able to access their online media of choice. And who knows what else they may or may not be able to do. But, y'know, don't worry... Exhibition road will be just as pervy and disease ridden as ever. 

And then we have the Spring of Culture. Personally, I have an issue or twelve with the festival, but it is hard to condemn. Yet perhaps we should condemn it. We should consider boycotting it. Why? Because the powers that be, those responsible for the Spring of Culture, are the same powers that have decided to take it upon themselves to police the Kingdom's morality. They are the same people who censor our internet and tell us what we are allowed to think. (Did you know that now, when trying to access links from your Facebook inbox, you get the new, shorter SITE BLOCKED nonsense. Even if the Facebook link is to google.com, or even Bahrain's very own E-Government.)

Culture and censorship do not mix- sort of like oil and water, but, y'know, more ideological. Yet here we have a situation where the big boss of culture and the censorship czar are one and the same. The persons who attempt to broaden horizons, educate and enrich are the very same villains that seek to deprive us of free speech, opinion, personal choice and whatever else they deem 'illicit' or 'immoral'. If that isn't hypocrisy, what is? 

Bahrain cannot be cosmopolitan AND conservative, progressive AND primitive, cultural AND censored. It doesn't work that way. Pick a side and stick to it. Bahrain, like many of it's people is about image. Without image we are just a dusty island in the middle of Arabia. We try to market ourselves to the world -- encouraging professionals to seek careers and invest in property, begging tourists to give us their hard-earned cash, hoping big multinational corporations pick us to be their regional base -- yet the smallest bit of press about banning alcohol, pork or free media will be remembered long after the Business Friendly Bahrain ads and talk of Golden Smiles have come and gone. Business Friendly Bahrain it might be, logic friendly it certainly isn't. 

 

So they've censored your internet...

Hahahaha... 

Just when you thought Bahrain's Interweb couldn't get any worse, the all-new Ministry of Information and Culture go and censor the great wide web. But, as far as I know, only if you have Batelco. 

I don't. I suffer with Zain. But at least my internet isnt censored. Yet. 

Draconian stuff this censorship. First you get people up in arms that two or three sites that no-one visits cant be accessed unless you have a smidgen of resourcefulness, and then...

They get stupid. For not only have the mighty ministry taken it upon themselves to act as society's moral compass, again. No, that wouldn't be enough. Now they've decided that in order to protect ourselves from ourselves we are no longer allowed to use Google Translate. 

Because as everyone knows, having to use an online translator is, like, totally unislamic. Or perhaps it's just too unintellectual. So what if the dedicated few have realised that Google Translate can be used to make the blocked stuff unblocked, albeit in a different language? I never realised that until they went and blocked it.

Yeah, they went and blocked some porn and some politics and some other nonsense... It's unjustifiable but understandable, at least when you try to think like a ministry muppet. 

Muppet 1: "So... Internet haram."

Muppet 2: "Yes, but what to do?"

Muppet1: "Close it?""

Muppet2: "Yimkin, but people will comblain"

Muppet1: "Okay.. then we only close it shwayaa."

Muppet2: "Ajeeeb. Yalla!"

And then they likely reeled off the lists and lists of porn sites that instantly came to mind. And by the time they asked another two of their co-workers, they had a 20something megabyte text file (it actually exists, allegedly) full of domains that are suddenly inappropriate. And just to make it suck more, they block all the proxy sites that they could think of. All the proxy sites that they likely used to bypass Batelco's pathetic oldschool firewalls. All the proxy sites that probably helped them access the porn 'n stuff they knew well enough to block. And then they block Google Translate. 

The stench of stupidity is eye watering. 

Next up is probably facebook. Why not? People can see people they know. HARAM. Hell, what about Google? Google makes it easy for people to find things, things which might be HARAM! And Dictionary.com, because we all know that you can use a dictionary to look up rude words, which obviously is HARAM. Soon Bahrain's Internet will be nothing more than a collection of e-government nonsense, Batelco.com.bh and FeedMe. What more do the dimwitted masses require?