Anime News Network suddenly blocked in Saudi Arabia

Anime News Network (www.animenewsnetwork.com), a very popular Anime news website was suddenly blocked in Saudi Arabia sometime last week according to @Shinryoma.

Anime News Network was never blocked in the country. Anime is not porn, CITC.

Update: Thanks @Turke and @Missice81 for telling me this. Manga Fox ( www.mangafox.com ) a Manga source, as been blocked as [...]

Google isn't working for some STC subscribers

Update: More people are having problems (here and here). The problem is apparently caused by using any external DNS (Google DNS for example). This is very weird.

This is not surprising. Some STC customers (including me, Muneeb in Dhahran and Abdullah in Riyadh) are having problems accessing Google. This appears to be random because others told [...]

Blocked in Saudi: Domain Tools' WHOIS

Domain Tools (not blocked) is an online tool for webmasters. Their WHOIS service (formally known as whois.sc) is now blocked. The blocked URL is:

whois.domaintools.com

WHOIS is a harmless protocol used to look-up domain names, etc. There is no reason what so ever for having it blocked. Read more about WHOIS on Wikipedia.

To help getting it [...]

Blocked in Saudi Arabia: Google Help Group

Google’s very own “Google Groups Guide” Google group is blocked for no known reason. This is a Google Groups help and support forum. Here’s more info about it:

The Google Groups Help Forum is the primary channel for getting your Groups questions answered. You’ll find that this community is always buzzing with activity. Get ready to [...]

STC AFAQ DSL Shamil modem passwords

Here are the STC Afaq DSL Shamil modem passwords. Thanks to Aly in the comments of this post for posting these.

This will hopefully help frustrated users who can’t change the settings:

Sagem – F@st 1201 (Sagem Firmware) admin admin
Sagem – [...]

Extremely slow STC Internet speed

Update: a friend forwarded this to me “We would like to inform you that the Internet service has been restored. According to the ISP, the problem was in the IGW which caused slowness in internet browsing”. IGW is managed by STC apparently.

Everyone (at least in Riyadh) is complaining about extremely slow Internet connection (twitter links: [...]

Blocked in Saudi Arabia: Megaupload

Megaupload (www.megaupload.com) is a file hosting service similar to RapidShare. You can use it to send large files if you can’t email them. The Wikipedia article about it is inaccurate as it claims that KACST is responsible for blocking and we all know that CITC is handling it now.

I should add that RapidShare was blocked [...]

Google Wireless Transcoder blocked in Saudi Arabia

The Google Wireless Transcoder is a simple tool that rearranges websites for mobile phone web browsers. This service is enabled by default on Google searches made on Nokia phones without an easy method to disable them.

The service is completely blocked in Saudi Arabia and most mobile phone users are annoyed by this block. It is [...]

Metacafe blocked in Saudi Arabia (update: fixed by Metacafe)

Metacafe is a well known internet video website just like Youtube. While the original site www.metacafe.com is not blocked one of the static servers “s2.mcstatic.com” is blocked in Saudi Arabia. That server holds many of the JavaScript needed to run the site correctly so basically Metacafe is crippled now.

Let’s get it unlocked as soon as [...]

Vox.com blocked in Saudi Arabia (update: unblocked!)

Update: this is a record time for CITC to unblock something. They will be blocking some individual accounts who are posting questionable content of p*rnographic nature.

Vox.com is a blogging service owned by Six Apart. It is a very popular social network platform.

Unfortunately I just found out that Vox is not blocked in Saudi Arabia! The [...]