Travian.ae has been blocked in Saudi Arabia a few days ago. This noticeably effected the site’s “alexa ranking” as you can see here:
Here’s something weird that I discovered: there is a Travian.com.sa, a Saudi Travian domain! So why did CITC block travian.ae and not travian.com.sa? Saudi players have been playing on the UAE servers for years now.
Here are the WHOIS info for both domains. This is TRAVIAN.AE:
Domain Name travian.ae
Registrar ID 123DOMAIN
Registrar Name Klute-Thiemann Infomationstechnologie GmbH&Co.KG
Status ok
Registrant Contact ID KT-259733205
Registrant Contact Name Travian Games GmbH
Registrant Contact Email domain_master@traviangames.com
Tech Contact ID KT-037219030
Tech Contact Name Siegfried Mueller
Tech Contact Email domain_adminc@traviangames.com
Name Server ns01.travian.org
Name Server ns02.travian.com
Name Server ns03.travian.net
This is TRAVIAN.COM.SA:
domain: travian.com.sa
organization: Travian Games GmbH
address: Wilhelm-Wagenfeld-Str.22
address: P.O.Box 305150
address: 80807 Munchen
address: Germany
admin-c: SM187-SA
tech-c: TK27-SA
reg-c: TK28-SA
nserver: ns01.travian.org
nserver: ns02.travian.com
nserver: ns03.travian.net
req-date: 2009-05-27
reg-date: 2009-05-30
source: SaudiNIC
Could Travian.ae be blocked just to boost Travian.com.sa’s numbers? The more players on the Saudi server would mean more money from premium Travian players.
What do you think? What other reason is there to block the biggest Saudi server (Travian.ae)?
Online gaming website Travian has been blocked in Saudi Arabia. At the time only the Arabic interface version (www.travian.ae/) has been blocked. You can still access the original website.
If you really care about it then you know where to fill the forms to have it unblocked. This is one block I do not mind 
.
Riyad Bank’s Arabic homepage has been defaced by hackers. So much for electronic banking.
English homepage is still working, it appears that only the Arabic page has been defaced.
Qanawati (my channels) is a new service from Saudi Arabia based company Remal IT. The service allows you to check your flight reservations status via SMS.
You can check for available flight reservations on the following airlines: Saudi Airlines, Nas air and Sama. You can also check for reservations on all airlines using IATA, check the status by flight number and check the arrival/departure activity in Saudi airports.
The service is charged by each individual SMS message. Currently only works with Mobily and Zain cell networks. STC is “coming soon”.
Via Saleh at Saudi Geeks.
Covering technology event and everything of interest to the Geeks of Saudi Arabia, SaudiGeeks website was launched with that goal in mind.
Best of luck to Jalammar and everyone else at SaudiGeeks.com, make sure to follow them on Twitter as well.
Yelp is a database of locations and reviews. It started covering San Fransisco then the rest of the country. Now it’s in Canada and UK. You can use it to find and review restaurants, shopping centers, and many more. Their database is accessible from an iPhone app as well.
It’ll take them forever to expand to every country so don’t expect “Yelp Saudi Arabia” anytime soon. I am aware of one alternative, it is called Qaym (Arabic for “to rate”). Currently it’s Arabic only and limited to restaurants. I hope it expands into more categories soon.
Update: YoutubeIslam.com is now down. There was not anti-Islamic conspiracy. Youtube didn’t use the site to push inappropriate content. So these statements “والذي تحاول جوجل أن تستولي عليه لعرض مقاطعها الرديئة” and “وحسب ما ذكر بأنه سيتم تحويل الدومين إلى أحد صفحات يوتيوب التي لا ترضي المسلمي” were just wrong.
YoutubeIslam.com has been renamed to TubeIslam. I am not really sure what’s this talk about “Google trying to steal youtubeislam”. The owners claim that Google will replace the site with “Google ads & videos against Islam”.
“Youtube” a Google trademark and they have the right to protect their trademarks. Microsoft didn’t allow a developer to name his program “Windows Commander” for example. I am sure Google just don’t want them to use the name.
From the ICANN blog:
Google has a trademark in “YouTube”, the very well-known video site, and it argued that the current registrant did not have rights in the name and that it was using the site in “bad faith” – which is a legal term interpreted by the arbiter, but in this case might mean using the site to attract visitors by appearing to associate yourself with someone else.
Found the news about the rename from tech-wd. Read mroe about ICANN.
STC have opened a mirror server for hosting open source files. The server currently have mirrors for CentOS, OpenSuse, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, CPAN, MySQL and OpenOffice. This is not the first mirror of it’s kind in Saudi Arabia, The Internet Service Unit have one as well (mirrors.isu.net.sa).
Mirrors are regular file servers (HTTP or FTP) that provide a copy of a file that is closer to the person. Basically increasing the download speed and reducing the load on the main servers.
Via Yousef Raffah.
Update: There is another mirror, thanks to Abdulhadi for showing me this mirror download.net.sa provided by Bayanat, a Mobily company.
Twtbase, a website dedicated for listing and rating Twitter applications was acquired by Saleh Alzaid, a Saudi web developer. Saleh is the creator of untiny (short url parser, initially created to bypass Saudi Arabia’s ongoing block of tinyurl).
Thanks ArabCrunch for the heads up.
Ryan Block and Peter Rojas (formally from Engadget and Gizmodo) has opened their new site, gdgt, today.
It is a social website aimed for owners of gadgets. Just register and add the gadgets in 3 lists: Gadgets you are currently using, gadgets you used to have and gadgets that you want to have. The content is user generated and more gadgets are added by the users. Gdgt also includes reviews and discussions for each gadget as well.
I am interested to see if gdgt will add multi-language support otherwise I expect a similar Arabic site to emerge. Gdgt’s website was facing difficulties when they first opened but a few hours later I have finally registered on gdgt.
Update: Peter Rojas has commented on this post and said that multilanguage is built into the system and non-English language versions will be available in the future.