[Qatar-pm] What material does Qtel block?

[Nigel Gourlay]

Last week, Qtel gave an interview to Gulf Times, explaining the
criteria it uses for blocking websites [1]. I wanted to know whether,
in reality, Qtel blocked "pornography, political criticism of Gulf
countries and anti-Islamic sites."

Alexa.com provides rankings of the popularity of websites. I
downloaded their list of the global top 500 sites, and used a Perl
script to find out whether each site was blocked by Qtel's filter.

Out of 500 sites, 47 sites (9%) were blocked by Qtel.

I found that, out of these 47 sites, 38 (81%) were devoted to
pornography, none contained political criticism of Gulf countries, and
none were anti-Islamic. The blocked sites not devoted to pornography
were as follows:

 http://www.vkontakte.ru/ - Russian social networking site
 http://www.yourfilehost.com/ - File hosting services
 http://www.anonym.to/ - Link anonymizer
 http://www.torrentspy.com/ - Bit Torrent search engine
 http://www.flurl.com/ - Video sharing
 http://www.o2.pl/ - Polish web portal
 http://www.newgrounds.com/ - Flash gallery
 http://www.wrzuta.pl/ - Polish video/image/audio sharing
 http://www.broadcaster.com/ - Videos and webcams

These sites fall into two main categories.
 * Media-sharing and community sites that have been overblocked
(thousands of harmless pages blocked for each offensive page).
 * Tools to avoid Qtel's filter.

Links
[1] http://qatarjournal.com/article.pl?sid=07/09/18/1842215
[2] http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&lang=none
[3] http://tor.eff.org/