Saeed Malekpour is an Iranian web-programmer who had been working in Canada as a freelance web designer since 2004. On October 4, 2008, while visiting his terminally ill father in Iran, plain-clothed agents threw him in the back of a sedan and placed him under arrest. No warrant or proper identification was presented when he was taken into custody. Malekpour wrote a program that enabled his...

The following article was taken from the Daily Beast, to view the original, click here. “Dear Arabs, if you had dared to protest against Bashar in the same way of your protest against the American embassies, Bashar would not have been able to kill 200 Syrians a day.” So read a banner in Syria satirizing the absurd and exaggerated outrage against the Web trailer for Innocence of...

In his interview with Solmaz Sharif, Iranian journalist and online activist Ehsan Noruzi identified three main problems facing internet users in Iran today. First, cyber infrastructure is poor, many Iranians lack internet access, and those who do have it often rely on outdated “dial-up” connections or have difficulty accessing certain web services because of poor bandwidth. “The main...

Canada has closed its embassy in Iran and expelled the remaining Iranian diplomats in Canada, according to a statement released by Foreign Minister John Baird. The announcement was met with shock among both Iranian and Canadian citizens. Barbara Slavin, the Washington Correspondent for Al-Monitor, a Middle East-focused reporting service, tweeted: “explain how making it more difficult for...

On Friday, September 7, 2012, Jordanian activists held demonstrations in cities across the nation calling for the monarchy to step down and protesting the rising cost of living.   A video of the demonstration in Tafilah shows protesters holding banners ridiculing the monarchy. One banner stated: “It was Rania’s [Queen of Jordan] birthday, her gift was a private jet, now they raised...