Finally, the blockage of YemenPortal.net in Yemen will come to an end for thousands who have been struggling to keep up with the most recent alternative domain.

Inspired by Hamed Saber’s “Access Flickr!”, Walid Al-Saqaf devised a similar program that will only be used to access yemenportal.net from within Yemen. A successful experiment had demonstrated its functionality and its web-based proxy allows it to become a channel to access many more blocked websites.

I am finally breathing a sigh of relief after tense days and weeks following the ban of yemenportal.net… But now with this software, it is possible to bypass the government’s filtering and allow users open access to information, which is one of their fundamental human rights.

Let’s hope that as many people get to know about this new program. It’s currently being checked by Firefox people and experts to allow it to go into the public area of the Add-ons. In the meantime, you can download and use it and send it to your friends and colleagues in Yemen and they are the ones who really need it.

The working links are:
http://mideastyouth.com/accessyp.xpi &
https://yemenportal.net/accessyp.xpi

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Walid Al-Saqaf
Admin
YemenPortal.net

In a serious twist and upsetting development, the Yemeni government blocked this blog along with the five domains of yemenportal.net including (yemenportal.net, yemen.arabiaportal.net, yemenportal.org, yemenportal.info, and yemenportal1.info).
This is another blow to Yemen’s freedom of expression. Now even protesting a ban is seen as a ‘threat to national security’, which makes our effort to combat censorship even more important.

Thanks to all of you who have signed the petition. Please go ahead and spread the word. We need all the support we could get.

Sincerely,

Walid Al-Saqaf
Admin
YemenPortal.net

As many of you may know, after the ban of yemenportal.net, the website initiated a nation-wide resistance movement online. It is an effort to neutralize the advantage of the Yemeni government in restricting access to specific websites due to news or opinion content that it may dislike.

This resistance is starting to yield results with more people becoming familiar with it.

The idea was to basically set up a robot on the website blocked.arabiaportal.net to retrieve the content of all blocked websites and list them according to their sources and category. There are articles belonging to forums, news websites, and opinion websites. All of those stories can be viewed in full at: http://blocked.arabiaportal.net/yemen/

However, this resistance movement must have offended the regime so the website (blocked.arabiaportal.net/yemen) itself was banned. Hence, we established yet another domain yemenportal.org and put the blocked content of all those websites at yemenportal.org/blocked.

This is what the resistance is all about: never give up. It will be like this, i.e., they ban a website and we establish another, until they give up on this chase and let the people in Yemen browse banned websites freely.

Thus far, we have been able to get close to a thousand emails of people who subscribed to our service at http://yemenportal.org/?signup=1 and other websites that have already been in touch with us before.

Every time the government blocks our alternative website, we will open another. The attack on the car of yemenportal.net, which took place after we set up the second alternative domain, had only proven to us that there are elements unhappy with our acts and are willing to go to extreme lengths to deter us. However, this has not achieved their objective and we decided to close down the office and have no representative in Yemen to avoid any clashes by those people.

In brief, our resistance now is fully 100% online. But this resistance cannot grow and be more effective unless you help out and participate.

Therefore, the best you could do to help this resistance grow is to put up the below graph in a convenient location on your blog or website and have it point to the following link: http://yemenportal.org/blocked.

You can also add one of the below campaign’s logo pointing to this website: http://freeyemenportal.org:

You can make a difference. Please help our movement grow and free yemenportal.net and all other Yemeni websites.

Walid Al-Saqaf
Admin, founder
YemenPortal.net