A recruiter from Google has written to send the following job ad– they’re hiring software engineers and more who have fluent Arabic. The whole job listing is after the jump for those interested — good luck to those who’d apply, and if you get in please tell Google to allow filtering of Israeli ads in [...]

The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker has highlighted YouTube’s decision to block the Egypt torture videos page, which we recently covered. In his post Brian says points how this removes a crucial tool at the hands of bloggers to distribute and publicize cases of human rights abuses and build a campaign against Egypt’s systematic use of torture.
Reading [...]

Yamli Search is very intriguing new search engine that transliterates Arabic written in the Latin alphabet into Arabic proper, and then runs that query through Google. It’s really quite neat — for instance if you type “ikhwan al muslimeen” it will search for “اخوان المسلمين“. You have to try it out to see what I [...]

FBI Mined Grocery Store Records to Find Iranian Terrorists:
Bay Area FBI agents wanting to find Iranian secret agents data-mined grocery store records in 2005 and 2006, hoping that tahini purchases would lead them to domestic terrorists, according to Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein. The head of the FBI’s criminal investigations unit - Michael Mason - shut [...]

Science and the Islamic world, an essay by a Pakistani scientist on the decline of science in the Islamic world in my favorite magazine (not really), Physics Today:
In the Islamic world, opposition to science in the public arena takes additional forms. Antiscience materials have an immense presence on the internet, with thousands of elaborately designed [...]

‘The IED problem is getting out of control. We’ve got to stop the bleeding.’ - A fascinating WaPo piece on the history of the IED in Afghanistan and Iraq and the countermeasures developed against it.
Update: Part two of this series on IEDs is here: ‘The single most effective weapon against our deployed forces’.

Iran: mostly nasty, but sometimes they may be on to something. (No, not really.) Meanwhile, the Lebanese are the last people to discover Facebook, apparently.

Why is YouTube blocked in Morocco? I remember seeing some nice historical archive of Hassan II on there, but nothing too compromising on King Muhammad VI. That’s the only political reason I could think of, as well the many critical videos on the Western Sahara. If YouTube is indeed being blocking by Morocco’s main ISP, [...]

I had this opinion piece on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site about Arab and Egyptian bloggers and how they might face the ongoing security clampdown. Got so busy yesterday with work forgot to post it here! (Sorry for the slow posting these days…)
I just wanted to note, if any Egyptian bloggers feel slighted by [...]

Via Reporters sans frontières:
(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has called for the immediate release of arrested human rights activist Ibrahim Zoro, who regularly posts material on foreign-based opposition websites. It noted that two other people were in prison in Syria for posting similar material.
It said the state security service, whose agents arrested Zoro on 5 [...]

Hossam has linked to Judge Abd al-Fattah’s lawsuit here. It’s riddled with factual errors. More on that later. It’s still not clear if this is going anywhere, but as commenters on Issandr’s original post on the topic noted, we have early warning in this case, and we should take advantage of it. A list of [...]

Did a little digging into Judge Abd al-Fattah Murad’s lawsuit to get the government to censor 21 Web sites and blogs:

Abd al-Fattah Murad will likely not be the judge in Abd al-Karim Sulaiman’s appeal. This would too nice a present to the defense team, who are engaged in a separate legal dispute with the judge [...]

The head of the very same Court imprisoned blogger Kareem Soliman will be appealing to next week is launching a lawsuit to get 21 blogs and websites blocked in Egypt. Un-f#$%g-believable:
Rumors have been reaching me for days now, and I received confirmation only today from lawyer Gamal Eid, executive manager of Arabic Network for Human [...]

Abdel Monem Mahmoud, the webmaster of the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language website, has a post on his English blog with a list of Ikhwan youth blogs.
Until not too long ago there were very few Islamist bloggers in Egypt; it seems this is changing fast.

Mahmoud is the “grandfather” of Bahraini bloggers and is now being sued by a minister for a critical comment he wrote on Mahmoud’s Den. Read all about it here:
I was a guest of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in Adliya this morning. I was called yesterday and asked - very politely - to present myself [...]

Our friend Negar Azimi has a a very nice, long piece in The Nation about Egyptian bloggers and the recent video torture scandals. It’s all good stuff, but I’ll highlight the part about our own Hossam:
But how threatening, we may wonder, can a handful of bloggers be–and how much of a threat could they be [...]

As a favor to a friend of a friend, I have been asked to let interested readers know about a a questionnaire on file-sharing put together by someone carrying out research into the ways people use the internet. It takes about 15 minutes to get through, so if you are so inclined go here.

Egypt is about to launch a spy satellite:
Egypt will be able to spy on Israel from outer space if it successfully launches a new spy satellite Tuesday from Kazakhstan. The cameras on the EgyptSat 1 vehicle will be able to transmit photographs of objects four meters (13 feet) wide.
I guess they’re trying to keep track [...]

A Canadian web designer gets rather racist when asking for a job:
From: Amir Saffar
To: Mike Platts
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 9:11 PM
Subject: RE: hi again
it’s very simple Mike. You are interested in my profile and i wanted to know how much you were able to pay. no response means: you either can’t pay that much, [...]