I just couldn't log on to my blogger.com account.
Naturally, the first thing that ran through my mind was that Etisalat had found me. And not just Etisalat, but whatever secret organisation (Ministry of Truth, perhaps?) controls the ether. Just think -- that was before I posted the lollipop story.
Yes, I'll confess, after a week or so of hanging browsers, I was getting a little worried. But instead of packing my bags, I re-downloaded the latest version of Tor, configured Mozilla to use the proxy, and shazam! I was back online.
While I was offline, I drafted a little letter to the nice folks at Etisalat:
Dear Etisalat geniuses,
While I commend you on your efforts to limit internet access for the purposes of protecting the innocent citizens of the UAE (not to mention your own bank balance), I think you could try just a little harder. You see, even though you have succeeded in blocking Skype, anything including the Story of O, pictures of Socrates with young Meno, and a number of educational geographic sites (such as the ones that might inform my students that in the southern hemisphere January and December are summer months), you have more work to do. None of these blocks really amounts to anything until and unless you block access to all anonymising proxy servers. So why haven't you done that?
One possibility is that you aren't quite sure what an anonymising proxy server is. Easily understood, when one considers the probability of your average employee knowing what the words 'anonymising' and 'proxy' mean. Let's say it's something like 1/100 for each word, making the probability of knowing BOTH words far less (no, NOT 2/100). My recommendation is that you furnish each of your employees with a dictionary. While they're climbing that steep learning curve, rest happy knowing that every expat in Abu Dhabi is successfully Skyping their loved ones back home.
Except me. You still haven't hooked up my internet.
Kind regards,
Another Expat
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