Pakistan Today has reported that Lahore High Court Justice Sh Azmat Saeed yesterday ordered ministry of information and technology to block Facebook in Pakistan for spreading religious hatred on internet world.

This news is not being covered by any other media outlet so far (which is strange and hence isn’t that convincing) plus we don’t have any official confirmation from ministry of information technology or from PTA as of now.

According to Pakistan Today, during hearing a petition requesting a permanent ban on Facebook for hosting competition featuring blasphemous caricatures, Lahore High Court ordered the government to make sure that Facebook is blocked in Pakistan and to submit a compliance report by October 6, 2011.

The judge, however, made it clear that no search engine including Google would be blocked, reported the paper.

It maybe recalled that Facebook got banned in Pakistan last year for hosting Draw Mohammad Day and for not removing blasphemous pages from it’s server.

This fresh petition in Lahore High Court is filed by Muhammad & Ahmad, a public interest litigation firm, through chairman Muhammad Azhar Siddique advocate praying for a permanent ban on access to Facebook for hosting a fresh blasphemous caricature drawing contest world over under a title “2nd Annual Draw Muhammad Day on May 20, 2011″.

Facebook is a social network and users from around the world are free to post anything, however, it content is moderated based on Facebook terms which state:

You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.

Facebook became controversial and was condemned for not removing Draw Mohammad Day page from it’s server despite it was reported (as abuse) by hundreds of thousands of Muslim users. While on other hands Facebook tends to remove any anti-Jews or Anti-Israel page in only few minutes.

Update:

We just got confirmation from PTA officials that they have not received any such order, at least as of now, for Facebook blockade.

This is a developing story and may get updated when and if we get any further information on this

Dhaka, Hackers have broken into the Bangladesh site of leading search engine Google, internet service experts said Saturday evening.

The site is inaccessible from some ISPs, as their DNS settings have been hacked.

Visitors to the site are seeing a defaced landing page rather than the usual search site.

Users can at times view the google.com.bd homepage due to the cache on their browser, but the page entertains no search.

Attempts to access the site by users are rebounded with message reading, “Google Bangladesh OwN3D by TiGER-M@TE.”

“The site has definitely been hacked,” said Pradip Dey, chief technical officer of ADN, a leading ISP.

“A couple of other ISPs have also got similar complaints from their clients,” he said.

Earlier, privately managed International Internet Gateway operator, Mango Teleservices, said they can enter google.com.bd.

“I can access it from here. But, many are calling us about this problem.”

KARACHI: President Asif Ali Zardari Friday said that the government has initiated a drive against the encroachers and ordered a survey of all those areas which had been encroached upon, adding, all the encroached areas would be cleared of the encroachers.

He suggested the authorities to use the Google Earth to check whether the Goths of Karachi were old and not encroached upon.

“We welcome all those who are coming to Karachi, as it is their constitutional right, but not in the form of ‘Qabza groups,” he said.

Speaking at the ceremony of 11th draw of Waseela-e-Haq and Smart Cards programmes of Benazir Income Support Programme here, he said, the government would fulfil the vision of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto of women empowerment.

The president congratulated the gathering that the Parliament has unanimously passed the Benazir Income Support Programme bill as all the political parties, under the reconciliation policy and showing maturity has acknowledged that it should be continued in future as well as it is in the best national interest and benefits the downtrodden section of the society.

“Government is committed to steer the country out of the present crisis and we all will together give a better Pakistan to our coming generations,” the President said.

He said that Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has done his B.A Hons and got the same marks which Shaheed Benazir Bhutto had obtained. He said, “now we will start his training-the politics is in his genes”.

“We will give the youth of Pakistan in his hand and he (Bilawal) will make progammes for the coming generations,” he said.

President Zardari said that presently the users of internet in the country are 20 million and in coming years they would reach to 200 million, adding, the present government wanted to provide internet service and a laptop to every home.

He said that now the time has come that the son of a ‘Hari’ in Sindh should know the outflow of River Indus.

The president said that he had raised the issue of water with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the UN summit two years back and he (Singh) had said that Pakistan can take the issue to the World Bank.

He said that the government had hired an international arbitrator who would talk with India on the issue.

Google translation, a tool to translate from one language to 57 another languages, has added Urdu in the list.

Meaning that, now you can translate 57 languages into Urdu and from Urdu to 57 well known languages of the world.

This remarkable achievement will greatly help in localizing the content by presenting foreign language websites in Urdu language through Google’s web page translation tools.

At this moment, we must not forget PakTranslations.com that served for long, as only Urdu language translation tool available on web. But this move from Google is going to hamper PakTranslations, by large, particularly, when it comes to results.

Just to add, Google Translation allows users to upload documents and get them translated with a single click.

Also you can use Google Translate for Urdu to any other Language dictionary.

About the quality of translation, given that in ALPHA version, results are amazing good, but not the perfect. Let’s expect further enhancements with time.

Try Google Translation yourself by clicking this link

via=’ProPakistani.PK’

From:  pakspeaks.com

‘For Hire’ is an urdu book from a taxi driver Asif Hussain Shah. He has tried the new way of attracting people by advertising his Taxi Business with the Google on his Taxi body. See image below to get a better understanding.

You can call and contact Asif Hussain for the book ‘For Hire’ or even for a taxi cab.

Google is for every one, so as for the Taxi Drivers. Even in a not so tech-savvy country, Pakistan where people advertise their business only with the local or national newspapers. This is the quite unique idea from the driver of taxi cab, Asif Hussain Shah. By doing so he has already gathered the attraction of many online blogs for his taxi business.