Comment by Riaz Haq on July 25, 2013 at 11:17pm

Here's a Time magazine story of how 12-year-old Khadija Niazi coped with Youtube shutdown in Pakistan:

On Sept. 17, the Pakistani government shut down access to YouTube. The purported reason was to block the anti-Muslim film trailer that was inciting protests around the world.

One little-noticed consequence of this decision was that 215 people in Pakistan suddenly lost their seats in a massive, open online physics course. The free college-level class, created by a Silicon Valley start-up called Udacity, included hundreds of short YouTube videos embedded on its website. Some 23,000 students worldwide had enrolled, including Khadijah Niazi, a pigtailed 11-year-old in Lahore. She was on question six of the final exam when she encountered a curt message saying “this site is unavailable.”

Niazi was devastated. She’d worked hard to master this physics class before her 12th birthday, just one week away. Now what? Niazi posted a lament on the class discussion board: “I am very angry, but I will not quit.”

In every country, education changes so slowly that it can be hard to detect progress. But what happened next was truly different. Within an hour, Maziar Kosarifar, a young man taking the class in Malaysia, began posting detailed descriptions for Niazi of the test questions in each video. Rosa Brigída, a novice physics professor taking the class from Portugal, tried to create a workaround so Niazi could bypass YouTube; it didn’t work. From England, William, 12, promised to help and warned Niazi not to write anything too negative about her government online.

None of these students had met one another in person. The class directory included people from 125 countries. But after weeks in the class, helping one another with Newton’s laws, friction and simple harmonic motion, they’d started to feel as if they shared the same carrel in the library. Together, they’d found a passageway into a rigorous, free, college-level class, and they weren’t about to let anyone lock it up.

By late that night, the Portuguese professor had successfully downloaded all the videos and then uploaded them to an uncensored photo-sharing site. It took her four hours, but it worked. The next day, Niazi passed the final exam with the highest distinction. “Yayyyyyyy,” she wrote in a new post. (Actually, she used 43 y’s, but you get the idea.) She was the youngest girl ever to complete Udacity’s Physics 100 class, a challenging course for the average college freshman.

That same day, Niazi signed up for Computer Science 101 along with her twin brother Muhammad. In England, William began downloading the videos for them.

Read more: http://nation.time.com/2012/10/18/college-is-dead-long-live-college/

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 19, 2013 at 4:51pm

Here's a Christian Science Monitor report on Youtube ban's first anniversary in Pakistan:

YouTube has been banned in Pakistan for a year now, underscoring the rising influence of Islamist hardliners and intolerance for free speech in the country.

The ban came after YouTube refused Pakistan's demand that it remove “the Innocence of Muslims” clips, outtakes from an attempt at making an anti-Islamic film that enraged many Muslims, from its website.

Islamists, backed by different religious parties came out to protest in the thousands, and started riots across Pakistan, leaving at least 20 people dead. Protestors also attempted to attack the US Embassy in Islamabad. The government eventually blocked access to YouTube last September, appeasing the protestors. A year later, despite calls to end the ban from free speech activists and business interests, the ban remains.

“The Pakistani government has been blocking Internet content under the pretext of national interest, religion, and morality,” says Hassan Belal Zaidi at the independent Internet rights advocacy group Bytes For All, based in Islamabad. “But it is actually trying to block any parallel discourse on the Internet and curtail freedom of expression of minorities... both political and religious, which speak against their persecution that happens quite often in Pakistan, and are not covered by mainstream media."
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Youtube hasn’t been the only case of social media censorship in Pakistan. Facebook and Twitter have been banned for hosting what the government deemed blasphemous material. And websites promoting separatism in the restive province of Balochistan and those criticizing the powerful Pakistani Army are also regularly blocked.

It’s not a complete crackdown: Internet rights activists say many Pakistanis are getting around the ban in new and creative ways.The digital block can easily be circumvented, they say, by using proxies and virtual private networks.

“Software such as Hotspot Shield, Spotflux, or TOR Browser as well as a host of online proxy servers are being used to access YouTube in the country. Many Pakistan-specific mirror sites have also been set up to allow people here to access content on Youtube, directly and indirectly,” says Mr. Zaidi.

Though university students who cannot access proxies while on university servers are losing out, everyone from Internet experts to the former president’s son provide advice online on how to circumvent the ban.

“Anyone using iOS and looking to get around the YouTube ban I suggest downloading VPN One Click,” tweeted the former president's son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of the Pakistan People's Party, the party that was in power when the YouTube ban was enforced last year.

One possible silver lining, say some observers, is that the ban and problems associated with using proxies has prompted a rise in alternative local websites. One example is www.tune.pk, which now has more than 25,000 registered users. “We cannot beg someone to erase the videos we do not like, instead we made our own space,” reads a statement on the website run as a private enterprise out of Lahore, the cultural capital of Pakistan. The website says the site regularly monitors content and removes any material that it feels is not suitable for a Pakistani audience.

That self-censorship is not satisfying to activists. Bytes For All, the advocacy group, has filed a lawsuit against the government's YouTube ban in the Pakistani courts, saying it curtails the fundamental rights of Pakistanis. The group's lawyer says the case is slow going because the government is terrified of inflaming religious sentiments and the possibility of more violence.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2013/0919/Pakistan-s-YouTube-ban-1-y...

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 29, 2016 at 8:28am

14-year-old computer security researcher from #Pakistan listed in #Google Hall of Fame http://bit.ly/28VnIqc via @techjuicepk

Muhammad Shahzad, a 14-year-old security researcher from Pakistan, has been enlisted in the Google Hall of Fame for reporting several vulnerabilities in their web applications and also getting them fixed.

Don’t let his age fool you though. Muhammad Shahzad may look like an average teenager but he is actually quite an accomplished ethical hacker. Shahzad was exposed to the enticing field of hacking after his father’s email account was compromised. Since then there has been no looking back. He started to spend most of his time looking for vulnerabilities in softwares and over the course of time taught himself to be a security researcher.

Shahzad also reported the notorious Android 4.4 Lock Bypass bug two years ago, just a few days after it was detected by someone else. Nonetheless, he was acknowledged appreciated by Google for doing so. Since then, he has been finding and reporting security vulnerabilities including different vulnerabilities in their acquisition’s websites. To honor his work, Google has inducted him into the Google Hall of Fame.

Shahzad’s portfolio is more decorated than most people in the tech industry. Before being listed by Google, he was also featured in the Hall of Fame’s of Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Twitter. He has also worked as an intern at Plan9 and a Web Designer and Penetration Tester at DezignBurg. He has also submitted an application for Plan9’s Launchpad Incubator for his own startup idea. Owing to his expertise in the field of Security Research and Ethical Hacking, he has been invited by NUST and UET, Pakistan’s leading universities, to appear as a guest speaker. He was also included in our annual feature “TechJuice’s 25 High Achievers Under the Age of 25”. For the future, he has targeted an MS in Information Security at MIT.

Google has always promoted people to report bugs and vulnerabilities in their products and help better them. Their Hall of Fame features over 1000 people who have contributed in making Google products safer. Very recently, Google revealed that they have given out $550,000 to Android security researchers.

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