Saudis say “Hell No” to MobileMe, block it because of “terrorist” concerns

The Saudis apparently think that MobileMe is either a plague on humanity, against some kind of moral edict, or a security concern, because they’ve blocked access to the popular Apple application.

MacNN seems to think that the me.com url isn’t fully blocked and that some people behind the Saudi firewall might be able to access their MobileMe pages by either visiting the site via the SSL encrypted path (https), or directly navigating to specific pages within the MobileMe hierarchy (ie. https://me.com/mail).

There’s no official word from officials within Saudi Arabia or the fine folks at Apple about what’s going on, but the fine folks over at 9to5Mac have taken to suggesting that the change was made because “Governments in the Arab world want access in order to monitor emails despatched using such services in order, they say, to guard against terrorism.” Jonny Evans seems to think that this block is a direct extension of the earlier fight between RIM and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government wanted to be able to monitor the communications, but shut off access to the service when they couldn’t. Eventually RIM and the Saudis reached a deal (read as ‘RIM caved and sold out, throwing all of their users under the bus’).

Hopefully, if the “monitoring” issue turns out to be the real reason why MobileMe is being blocked, Apple has the cojones to stand up to the Saudis, but don’t count on that happening. Apple’s already disabled FaceTime in Saudi Arabia after their government put pressure on Apple.

There’s nothing like bending your morals to make a couple of extra bucks.

ProTip: You can get MobileMe for half price on Amazon.

Article Via MacNN

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.