Syria: censorship leaves more than 100 sites blocked
Posted by Evan Fell on December 10, 2007 at 12:38 PM
Reporters Without Borders has expressed their concern that the number of websites to which access is blocked in Syria has been growing steadily for the past month.
Around 110 websites are known to be blocked, including the video-sharing site YouTube, the blog platform Blogspot, the email service Hotmail, and Facebook. Most recently, Amazon.com was blocked.
The Syrian human rights commission’s site is also blocked, along with another independent human rights monitoring site. Elaph.com, a news website that is very popular in the Arab world, with around 1.5 million visits a day, is also inaccessible.
When contacted by Reporters Without Borders, the Syria Computer Society, one of the country’s main ISPs, said the Internet was not censored and that these problems originated in the computers of the individual Internet users.
Source: European Journalism Centre
The Syrian human rights commission’s site is also blocked, along with another independent human rights monitoring site. Elaph.com, a news website that is very popular in the Arab world, with around 1.5 million visits a day, is also inaccessible.
When contacted by Reporters Without Borders, the Syria Computer Society, one of the country’s main ISPs, said the Internet was not censored and that these problems originated in the computers of the individual Internet users.
Source: European Journalism Centre
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Actually, this service has been available for almost one year.
This Newsworthy press release
http://tinyurl.com/2m6key
introduced the service on October 4, 2006.
Another page on the Newsworthy site offers links to several other newspapers using the service:
http://www.newsworthyaudio.com/news-podcasts/
+ Austin American Statesman
+ The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
+ The Daily Advance
+ The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction
+ The Marshall News Messenger
+ The Reflector
+ The Rocky Mount Telegram
+ Waco Tribune-Herald
+ Washington Technology
Here are two services that use synthesized voice.
XFruits Voice (Vocal Fruits).
Enter an RSS URL and have the feed read to you. One of the many services XFruits offers to make RSS even more useful. Overview here:
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2007/03/29/more-mashup-fun-with-xfruits/
The post also has links to Speegle (several news sources, synthesized voice)
and the ability to have any page read using one several synthesized voices at this URL.
http://www.speegle.co.uk/summary.php
Speegle (you probably remember these guys from years ago) will also read your google results to you. http://www.speegle.co.uk/