Come meet Ashraf Khalil, author of  Liberation Square and contributor to the Arabist Podcast at these AUC events:

► On Thursday, May 3, 2012, at 1:00 pm in Mary Cross Lecture Hall, AUC New Cairo Campus. 

► On Monday, May 7, 2012, at 6:00 pm at the AUC Press Tahrir Bookstore, AUC Tahrir Campus (entrance from Mohammed Mahmoud gate).

► Both events will include a book signing and a question-and-answer session.

► For more about Ashraf Khalil's Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation (AUC Press, 2012), click here. For a recent interview with the author, click here.

► "Tear gas still lingered acridly in the air, and blood spattered the asphalt, which had been gouged and broken up to create fresh projectiles." To read the complete prologue of Khalil's book, click here.

(If you're not in Egypt, you should pick up a copy of Liberation Square on Amazon or your local bookshop.)

First, I see an ad for Islamist candidate Muhammad Selim al-Awa (a blowhard with some rather nasty remarks about Christians in his past, even if he says he was misunderstood now) appear on the site:

And then, a reader in the US sends me a screenshot showing yet another ad for Israel:

Nohing I can do about it — I asked Google several times... I'd love to get off Google Ads and onto a private ad network, but unfortunately there isn't much out there for the Middle East.

Am in the UAE this week, and while I would have loved to give impressions, I have been ordered to lay off the computer by my doctor after a rather painful inflammation of shoulder muscles that has left my right arm very painful and in a sling most of the time. Back in a few days, when it all gets better.

I did not even know about this, but I am in good company here with Phil Weiss, Razan Ghazzawi, Lisa Goldman, Elias Muhanna and more... Thanks for the nomination!

The Arabist will be going dark on January 18 (Egypt time) to protest the SOPA and PIPA, two bills promoted by the American entertainment and publishing industries currently making their way through Congress. The bills are so bad that even the White House opposes them. Some major sites, including Wikipedia, Reddit, Boingboing and others will be goinb black on this day, but there’s a special reason for us to join in: in a SOPA world, the Arab Spring’s inventive use of the internet would have been much more difficult, if not impossible.

The problem with SOPA and PIPA is that they break the internet. They add all sorts of liability problems when a site links to another: we have to be sure that this site has the right to display the media it contains. They would give power to companies to decide to block sites they feel infringe of copyright laws. They would stop the wonderful culture of remixing cultural production to give it a new message, a subsersive act widely used throughout the Arab Spring and before. Check out the video below that explains much more.

In addition to this, I think this industry cannot be trusted to censor the internet (no one can be trusted to do that) but also that it does not deserve to be. This is the same industry that lets you buy digital books on one device but won’t let you read them on another. Or that would not let you play a US DVD on a European DVD player. It’s out to maximize profits by setting up new legal liabilities (an already mounting problem in all walks of life in the US) to use and abuse in the future. All of this will make it considerably more difficult for labors of love like this website to continue.

If you want to do something about it, check out americancensorship.org and sopastrike.com.

Update: For example, this is the kind of thing people might not be able to make — or that could get Vimeo censored — if the bills get through:

Hello from ant1mat3rie on Vimeo.