Archive for category Inside Story
Bloggers from Pakistan where is the bright side
Posted by K. Shahzad in Inside Story on July 5th, 2010
I have been an active Internet surfer from long time ago, so have been monitoring the bloggers from Pakistan from long time. In fact their role was very much good in pointing out the evils of society. Bloggers even came forward and presented the stories which were avoided by media in fear of losing their financial gains or liberty to operate.
I see lots of positive criticism on the Pakistani blogs, specially the one which is related to politics, I also see posts which point out the evils of society and I also see the pictures which depict something which is happening wrong somewhere. I know this all content on Pakistani blogs is intended for good, intended to correct the things and I am perfectly good with this.
But the problem kicks in when I notice that the goods of society are no more depicted or presented on blogs. Everyone tries to change the world by pointing out the evils but not one or less of people come up with a post which is showing a good part of society.When I am saying this all I am also including myself in this. The point is that I have to grab the attention of fellow bloggers to letting the world know about the good part of Pakistani society.
By good part I mean the care we people still have for each other, by good part I mean “when an accident happens on a highway, people think nothing but rush in to help”, by good part I mean “when on some highway or a city road a vehicle gets stuck, you will see a number of people who are available to help you out” and these were two very basic examples our society have lots much good to offer. Where is that content, show me that content, show me those pictures and videos.
A person living in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad or any other city or village of this country does not need any online content, photo or video to know these good things but the people who are outside of this country do need this stuff. Even the negatives are posted to take the things on correct path, but the international web user is always getting the negative content about this content, what would be his/her thoughts and feeling about people of Pakistan.
So my point is that to have the balance, we have to redesign ourselves to offer the content which is already based on positive stuff in the society with obviously not giving up on pointing out the evils.
Feel free to share your thoughts about this post or the issue raised as comments.
PTA fails to keep people informed about banned and unbanned websites
Posted by K. Shahzad in Inside Story on May 30th, 2010
PTA Updates Page Snapshot
It is 30th may today and the last update on PTA’s website about the blocked websites was on 2oth of may. They even didn’t even mentioned any other blocked websites other than the Facebook and Youtube on their website. Hundreds of URLs were blocked and some of websites like Facebook , wikipedia, youtube and many more had faced blanket ban but PTA never mentioned about these banned websites on their website.
Youtube is already unblocked few days ago but still no update about that on their website. Whats more important is Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) never published the details of blocked websites over the internet nor they have updated people about when certain websites are being banned or unbanned. It would have been much better if things would have been much more transparent.
Proxy websites blocked in Pakistan, Whats the point?
Posted by K. Shahzad in Inside Story on May 30th, 2010
In connection with the issue of blasphemous violent content, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) blocked many websites and many people including me supported this decision of PTA. Banning the websites in Pakistan should have not mainly to prevent local people from accessing the blasphemous content but to make a statement to sites that your racism regarding the religion will not be accepted.
Considering the fact that Pakistan is an Islamic state and people at least have love for prophet Muhammad, no one would be willing to see that blasphemous content. But unfortunately PTA took things here differently, they gone few steps further and also blocked the proxy website.
Chairman PTA: We have blocked a number of sites having the blasphemous content and also blocked some proxy websites, so that the content can’t be accessed in Pakistan in anyway.
Blocking the original websites was more than enough to make a statement and blocking the proxy websites was unnecessary step. Ideally no one would try to access that blasphemous content via proxies, at least those who follow Islam and love Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and if some one would, well every one is responsible for his/her own faith.
In fact the guys blocking the proxy websites didn’t thought about the positive features and capabilities which proxies enable us with, they only kept eye on negativity and end up blocking most of proxy websites known to them.
At times proxy websites are very useful, some times certain ISP dns servers don’t have most updated IP records against domains or have problems with certain websites, in this case the proxy websites are the only handy tool to access them.
Finally I would say, it would have been better, if ban must have been symbolic for the world other than just to restrict the locals from looking at the content. Whatever else is done, I am in full favor of that but not in favor of blocking the proxy websites which still are blocked in Pakistan.
Ban on Facebook in Pakistan, right or wrong?
Posted by K. Shahzad in Inside Story on May 23rd, 2010
One would say why are we even talking about the ban being right or wrong when Facebook proved to be racist in matter of removing the draw day. Making one thing clear here, Facebook guys remove any page with more than 10,000 fans on just 700 terms of use violation requests against it, but this was not the case about the page which was setup to hold that blasphemes cartoons contest.
Coming back to the original topic, why are we even thinking on the ban being right or wrong, most would say it right because of the Facebook’s resist behavior in this matter. But there are people who are not in support of this ban, they think that the URLs where such kind of content is added must be blocked but not the whole Facebook site. Well for their information the ban is not here to prevent the people of Pakistan from seeing such kind of content - which they will not see even is not blocked – the ban is here in the first place to send a message to Facebook or any such websites that if you will come up with any resist behavior for us, we then do not need to even use your sites, can live very much without them.
There are people who were in favor of Ban on Facebook from day one, they speaked out many different ways, some recorded their protest via online posts and tweets and there were others who came in with peaceful protests on they city roads of all major cities and towns of Pakistan. This all led to the Ban order on Facebook by Lahore High Court, which is implemented countrywide for good.
What we have discussed above is the first extreme, now there are other people from Pakistan who are completely against the ban. Well they are not only against the ban, some of them have officially got recorded their protest against the ban and speaked up against it. One such example is this press conference against the ban on Facebook in Pakistan which appeared on Awab Alvi’s blog who is a well known and popular blogger from Pakistan.
Awab Alvi: While we recognize that sites on the Internet are used to spew hatred and incite violence, we steadfastly believe that governments have no right to control access to information. We believe that every citizen has an inalienable right to freely access information and by censoring Facebook, the Government of Pakistan has taken away that right
Well I will second that opinion, this time the demand for ban was initiated from the people of Pakistan, not from the government or the judiciary of Pakistan. Most of Pakistanis still stand by this decision and hope for a ban until Facebook realizes that they are doing something which is not liked by billions of people worldwide and that is the racism which came forward in matter of Draw day.
I have listened people saying where Facebook have 400 million users from world wide how stopping access of just 2 million or so users from Pakistan is going to hurt Facebook. First thing we are making it clear to the world that no such religious racism will be tolerated by Pakistanis and secondly its definitely going to hurt Facebook if they are to continue such dual behavior. Facebook is ranked two in world websites ranking and the fight for the number one slot is on, such behaviors are cost Facebook to be pushed back to number three or four instead of making it to the number one slot.
Finally we will boycott any website which shows the tolerance for the content which hurts the feelings of believers of any religion. Religion is the personal matter of any being living on planet earth and if you are heating the feelings of believers of any religion, weather its Islam or any other religion, you have no right to be called a civilized human being and nations who show tolerances for such content are not civilized nations at all.
Do write your views about the decision of banning Facebook in Pakistan below as comments and whether you are in favor of that decision or not. Feel free to express your views. Subscribe to our Twitter page and update emails from sidebar to keep yourself updated on latest information.
Electricity load shedding in Pakistan only due to defective policies
Posted by K. Shahzad in Inside Story on April 26th, 2010
The electricity load shedding in Pakistan would have not been a big problem to cope with but its made much bigger by adopting the defective policies. One of the causes of load shedding is called the circular debt, which means the private electricity generation companies keep generating the power but they do not get the money for the electricity they have provided, in that case they can generate the electricity for limited period and after that when the outstanding amount to be paid by government to these companies cross a limit, by being not able to fuel costs these companies stop the production till they have get paid back by government.
This have been happening very much lately, current approach from government is they let the circular dept build up and while companies stop production they are paid back after many months and mean while that halt brings in more shortage and more electricity load shedding subsiquently.
Now this is the place where the issue of rental power plants come in. The question is, when you are not able to finance the current infrastructure and when you are not fully utilizing the current generation capacity, why on earth you need the rental power plants? – It would have made some sense if the rental power plants would have have come with low cost electricity but unfortunately other than thinking of paying back the circular dept and taking all the current resources in action our government have chosen to bring in the rental power plants. The plants which does not still started generating the power but we already started paying the rent money.
After carefully reading whats written above one can decide that the rental power plants stunt was really not required at the moment. Moreover when you live in country which is blessed with so much of natural resources why on earth you have to go for rental power plants. Wind forms and solar energy power plants have got huge potential in this country which can bring in lots of low cast energy, also if more dams are planned, we can get much more hydro power.
After that come in the coal reserves which is blessing for this nation, we have got the coal reserves which are in few biggest coal reserves of the world. Research shows that if we use just 2% of these reserves for power generation we will be able to keep on generating the extra 25000 Mega Watts of power for next 40 years just from coal and we just have overall electricity consumption of 16000 Mega Watts country wide today. 12000 Mega Watts of power out of our 16000 mega watts is already being generated. The above facts clearly show that if the right policies are adopted we can not only generate enough power to meet our energy requirements but also generate power to sell out.
The problem of our country have never been the resources but only and only the sincere leadership which really cares for the country and all the souls living in it. For the moment we can just pray to Allah for blessing Pakistan with the leadership which is sincere and capable of making things happen. Next time when you vote in elections just think for your country and nothing else, keep the previous experiences in mind, they will help you much.
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