The Times of India is reporting that people in Pakistan of the Muslim faith are urging their fellow Muslims to use Millat Facebook. The reason being that Facebook is allegedly involved in blasphemy of the Holy Prophet (i.e. Muhammad).

Muslim leaders held a round table conference titled, “Blasphemy of Facebook and the Role of Muslim Youth on Social Media,” hosted by Millat Facebook. They slammed those in Pakistan who were advocating the abolishment or amendment to the current blasphemy laws.

The owners of Millat Facebook said that their site had seen a large amount of success since launching in May 2010. The site has suffered some setbacks, however, with U.S. and Pakistani authorities taking down its hosting. They said that U.S. officials had attacked them by threatening their hosts in the U.S. and Europe within a few months of opening.

What hurt them more, however, was that Pakistan’s national ISP refused to host the site. They also refused to explain their denial in writing.

He ended the talk by saying that Jewish and Christian groups had organized attacks on the Web site. The attackers invited people from all over the world to attack the “Muslim’s alternative to Facebook.” The team, however, stopped the attacks from ever happening.

It’s great to create social networking sites around particular religions so as not to offend people, but I don’t think the problem is with the site itself. If you look at the Web site, it’s an obvious theft of Facebook’s UI and design. They may want to change that to avoid any further legal troubles.

Since then, he has become an instant sensation, a hero for the unwitting citizen journalist if you will, as well as an example of the news value of social media like Twitter. The instant fame looks to be taxing on Athar, as instant fame is to anyone:

But he seems good natured about it all in an interview with CNET. In this interview he discusses the night of Bin Laden’s death as well as the aftermath – for him and for Pakistan. He says that he has at least 120 unread interview requests in his inbox just from one day, but he talked to CNET because of how helpful download.com has been to him in the past.

Athar weighs in on the debate that is heating up in America – whether the White House should release the Bin Laden death photos. He disagrees with President Obama:

Yes, definitely. The world deserves to see it. An “Osama II: The Return of Osama”-type scenario will always be in the back of their minds otherwise.

His commentary on U.S. – Afghani foreign policy paints a pretty bleak picture on how lack of info and transparency can lead to the engendering of radical thoughts:

Since I moved to Abbottabad, I have tried to reduce the number of things that I should be concerned about and have tried to focus on things that I can actually change. I can’t change the U.S. Afghan policy (or the AfPak policy as they are now preferring), so I spend more brain cycles thinking about how I can help my immediate environment. In Pakistan, the only information we get is X people killed by drone, out of which Y are assumed to be terrorists. That is not good enough for public approval of the U.S. policies here in Pakistan.

Us Pakistanis are kept in the dark by both Pakistan and the U.S. regarding the true picture, so most of us resort to agreeing to one conspiracy theory or another–which helps the terrorists’ causes.

He also discusses how he and the Pakistani people feel about the U.S. operation that happened on their soil:

Regarding the event itself, there is still confusion regarding whether or not the Pakistani authorities assisted in this particular operation–which is the main point that has been bothering the Pakistani people. If this was done by approval of the Pakistani Army, and if the Pakistani sovereignty was not violated, then most of the average Pakistani people would probably be more relaxed. Had it been someone else besides Osama, they’d be just as agitated to hear of an unauthorized attack by a foreign force.

Some more tidbits from the interview: He confirmed that he has gotten marriage proposals via Twitter, and says that he has room for three more wives. When asked if he was joking, he says only halfway. He can only take one more.

He also states that as far as he knows, he is the first person in Pakistan to surpass 100,000 Twitter followers. As the writing of this article, he has amassed just over 105,000.

He moved to Abbottabad from the more urban city of Lahore, partially due to the weather. Abbottabad is a popular tourist location because of its temperate climate. Other reasons he moved include less power failures (although that has changed since Sunday), cleaner air and less traffic.

Sohaib Athar’s unlikely rise to fame can be used to make a lot of morals to a lot of stories. I believe that the most important one is that everyone really is a reporter. Everything you record might be something huge, and with the permeation of social media now happening worldwide, the chances of Athar’s instant rise to fame repeating itself for some other unknowing micro-blogger are very, very good.

You can go here for a still slideshow from inside the compound.

The Pentagon has also just released photos of the compound and an illustration detailing the general specs.  From it we can see that the walls surrounding the compound range between 10 ft to 18 ft high and a 7 ft high privacy wall surrounds the balcony of the main structure.

This covert operation will only get more interesting as specifics begin to roll out – and it looks like they are doing just that, at quite a clip.  ABC news has just reported that DNA evidence has confirmed the death of Bin Laden with 99.9% accuracy.   The internet has also been busy covering the news with it’s own sometimes funny, sometimes silly spin.

YouTube was blocked for around two hours on Sunday after Pakistan denied access to the site for hosting a "blasphemous" video clip. Google has said that YouTube was offline because Pakistan "hijacked" the Web server address when it was blocking domestic access to the site.

"This was not intentional and might have happened when an international company, which is routing Internet traffic to Pakistan, tried to block the specific (web address)," a senior Pakistan Telecommunication Authrotiy (PTA) official told AFP.

Some Pakistani users are questioning the real reason why Pakistan blocked access to YouTube. They think it could be tied to election fraud in last week’s paraliamentary elections.

" Some Internet users are sceptical that the government banned YouTube because it contained clips from a private television station which showed election rigging," said Wahaj us Siraj, chief of the Pakistan Internet Service Providers Association.

Pakistan ended its restrictions on YouTube yesterday, and restored access to the site.
 

Pakistan Youth
(Photo Credit: YouTube)

The move by Pakistan led to a near worldwide outage of the site, which lasted close to two hours. YouTube said the outage was due to "erroneous Internet protocols," sourced in Pakistan.

"Traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site," Google said. We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan. We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again."

Pakistan blocked YouTube because it included Danish cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad in a negative light. "They [Pakistan's telecommunications authority] asked us to ban it immediately… and the order says the ban will continue until further notice," said Wahaj-us-Siraj, convener of the Association of Pakistan Internet Service Providers, according to the BBC.

Reporters Without Borders condemned the action taken by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA). It should not be up to the PTA to order this kind of blocking," the organization said. "Such a decision should be taken by the courts, not by a body that is under the government’s control."