Saudi Arabia and the UAE are a pair of conflicted countries.  They love all the positive aspects of being oil-producing countries in the modern world, but they hate pretty much everything else about the modern world.  They started off by banning kissing in public and various other moral and value-based guides, and now they’re cranking up their censorship efforts by banning some BlackBerry services, specifically BlackBerry Messenger.

Long story short, everything in Saudi Arabia and the UAE is monitored, controlled, or censored by the government.  Email, Internet, phones, messenger services, everything.  In 2007, UAE tried to inject spyware into the nation’s BlackBerries in an attempt to monitor just what the users are saying to one another.  Since RIM refuses to cooperate, we’ve got another China/Google situation on our hands (and in our pockets).  There are nearly a million users of BlackBerries in the two countries, and RIM is faced with either selling gimped handsets and potentially losing customers or keeping up their fight against censorship and potentially losing a million customers after they’re banned from the marketplace.

Tags: BlackBerry banned, blackberry, RIM, Saudi Arabia, UAE, unusual laws, blackberry messaging banned by saudi arabia, blackberry messaging banned by UAE, technology, censorship

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