Another day, another example of a country making it harder for its people to use the web and some of its most effective channels of communication? There are reports coming in from Pakistan that it has become the latest country to ban the use of Twitter. Update: it’s now back up — new post explaining development here. Read below for full story.

According to the blog Dawn, the chairman of Pakistan’s telecommunications authority has today imposed the restriction because of blasphemous content: it reports that Chairman Mohammad Yaseen blocked the site today “because Twitter refused to remove material related to a competition on Facebook to post images of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.” Facebook, apparently, has complied with the request, says the blog. Others are now starting to report the same, and below the break we have a screenshot of how accessing the site looks from one of our readers in Lahore who says he “cannot access the site at all.”

Getting blocked in Pakistan, if true, is particularly ironic because the two, paired up, played a major role in one of the most important news events to be broken in recent history: the raid and demise of Osama bin Laden, which was tweeted by at least two people watching the raids as they happened in the mountains of the country.

This is a developing (and slightly confusing) story: just yesterday, about 12 hours ago, Senator Rehman Malik, of Pakistan’s People Party, tweeted that nothing was getting blocked: “Dear all, I assure u that Twitter and FB will continue in our country and it will not be blocked. Pl do not believe in rumors,” he wrote. We have contacted Twitter and Facebook for their responses to this story.

Update: More details coming in from Pakistan’s Express Tribune: The request to block the site was made by the Ministry of Information and Technology, it says, citing a drawing competition (more on that here). The ministry, apparently, made several requests to Twitter, which responded that it “cannot stop any individual doing anything of this nature on the website.”

Directives to block the site were sent to ISPs in several parts of the country, including PTCL Broadband and Wi-Tribe. It also reports that Twitter is still accessible by mobile using secure browsers like Opera, as well as proxies and VPNs like Vtunnel. [original report continues]

This is not the first time that Twitter has been blocked in the country: a similar ban took place in 2010, Dawn reports. That lasted for two weeks.

The move underscores how susceptible social networks remain to higher powers in government. And Pakistan is not the only country to pull something like this.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter  are still officially forbidden in China (although millions use it anyway using VPNs — virtual private networks), with the bans often having strong political overtones around people expressing contrary opinions. Developing countries with big populations represent some of the biggest potential growth opportunities for scale-oriented social networks — when they can get used.

Even developed countries like the UK have floated ideas about how to restrict the flow of information on social networks — this was something that came up last summer during the London riots and the role that some believed services like BlackBerry Messenger played in gangs getting organized to loot.

Update 2: One of our awesome readers in Lahore, Waqas Ali, sent us this screenshot:

Ali has also played a role in a past campaign in the country to keep Facebook from getting banned. He says that he cannot access Twitter at all right now but that a friend is able to use the Opera Mini browser to access the site.

Update 3: Here is a follow up post some back story on Prophet drawings, along with another theory: the blockage could be to do with Pakistan testing an image filtering service, which sounds even wider-ranging in its possibilities.

[Image: Farooq on Flickr]

• TWITTER
• FACEBOOK

Twitter allows users to post text updates via SMS, instant messaging, email, Twitter’s website and third party applications. Users have their own profile page that displays their latest updates. In addition, users can become “friends” with one another, or simply be a “follower.” Other than reading another person’s profile page, a user can also receive others’ updates through text messages, RSS or third party applications.

Twitter itself is a free service, though users may have to pay text messaging charges…

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Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

The original idea for the term…

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Pictures of the Prophet Mohammad have always been a highly contentious issue — they’re not explicitly prohibited in the Qu’ran but many Sunni Muslims forbid the idea, while others do not seem to mind as much. Among the latter group are those who feel that banning such images is a restriction on freedom of expression. The issue at the center of the Pakistan-blocks-Twitter story today has been reported to be around a viral activist campaign that’s been running for the past few years to point attention to this.

But as with the actual blocking of Twitter itself in Pakistan — there has been no official Pakistani government statement about what is actually behind the current Twitter block at the moment (here is a screenshot of an alleged email ordering the block to ISPs with no specific reason behind it) – it’s hard to pin down exactly what content was actually sent around that caused the block in the first place.

And at least one group is raising the question of whether this blockage could be related to the government testing an image filtering service — something with wider-ranging implications.

Update: Twitter is back up, and we have a full, separate post on that here.

A Prophet-drawing campaign started on Facebook in 2010 with a specific page, Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, created in response to the TV show South Park getting some heat for depicting the Prophet. The EDMD page was eventually taken down; but not before resulting in a temporary Facebook block in Pakistan. This year, according to Wikipedia, EDMD was specifically geared at sending pictures around via Twitter, to protest the arrest of Saudi poet/journalist Hamza Kashgari for writing “insulting” tweets about the Prophet. However, there are a number of Facebook pages that come up when one searches for “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” — not clear whether any of these are “official.”

And at least one Pakistani blogger/activist (and, yes, dentist) Awab Alvi has raised the point that there may be no direct blasphemy accusation involved today at all. In a blog post Alvi explains:

Ever since the reports emerged we have asked affected users to help test the site from their ISP connections and within minutes we had hundreds of reports The traceroute shows a very interesting fact, the block is at the DNS level, the url is not resolving right from the get go… My gutt [sic] feeling is that PTA is just testing their URL Filtering system, we had reports of them testing some image servers on facebook last week, and it disappeared by the evening. PTA choose Sunday to avoid any legal backlash exploiting the courts day off….

…The civil society has to its credit a stay order on the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority preventing them from blocking websites obtained on 19th April 2012 which can be used against them.

Once they get through these testing days I am sure it can be later used as and when needed. Though the argument presented by PTA is that it needs this technology to crack down on Terrorism related issue, but one may never know when it can be used for political censorship

Regardless of what is really behind today’s Twitter block, the issue of not being able to easily access the social network clearly touches on a sensitive point in Pakistan around freedom of expression: watch #twitterban to see how people in Pakistan and elsewhere are responding to the story.

We have contacted the Ministry, Facebook and Twitter to try to get more information on this.

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With Disrupt NYC 2012 literally a day away (tickets here), it’s hard not to think about the past success of our former Battlefield startups. I’ve taken a close look at quite a few over the past couple weeks, and to be honest none have come as far as Mint.com. The company has rocketed to success since launching at TC40 in September, 2007, and subsequently winning the top prize at the Battlefield.

The personal finance service has raised a total of $38.1 million over the course of the past five years, and has gone on to be acquired by Intuit for a whopping $170 million in September of 2009.

When I spoke to VP and general manager of Mint, Aaron Forth, he said that two very specific things, the financial crisis of 2008/09 and a launch on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage, were the main factors of the company’s success, both in acquiring users and being acquired themselves.

Here’s what else he had to say:

TechCrunch: So tell me the story of Mint, from launch until now.

Mint.com: It’s been such a great run. We won TC40 in 2007, and that was the first time our product saw the light of day. It was an intense moment, debuting something we had put so much work into.

Winning gave us a great start. We hit 20,000 users within the first couple hours of the announcement. We’ve been on a crazy growth trajectory ever since, and we saw TechCrunch as a catalyst for getting out of the gate.

It’s a special place to launch, particularly for a service like ours. We were trying to disrupt the personal finance world. We were asking for sensitive information, and credentials to financial accounts. What TechCrunch gave us was access to a young, tech-savvy, comfortable-on-the-web readership that was excited about exploring the service. They didn’t get aggravated by security concerns.

It became a very viral growth process for us. We continue to spend very little money in marketing. Our growth is from word of mouth, and the TechCrunch crowd are great amplifiers.

TechCrunch: I seem to get really emotional during the Battlefield. People are launching products they’ve been working on for years sometimes, and it’s a huge moment in their lives. How was the experience of launching on stage?

Mint.com: We came out with a fairly immature product at TC40. So we realized that we had a ways to go. We were very focused on trying to demonstrate the value of the product and into pulling everything into one place. We wanted Mint to do all the work for you, which was our focus at TechCrunch.

But at the time we could only aggregate checking, savings and credit. Over the next two years we worked on rounding out the financial picture, pulling in investments, loan functionality, and adding budgeting features. This type of full view built up quite a lot of data.

We knew where consumers were shopping, and during the financial collapse in 2009, we became a huge resource to the media. Our data was anonymized and aggregated, and we could help the media tell a story with real data. It got our name out, and we continued to see really healthy growth during the economic downturn.

Then we brought out mobile apps. It’s started to really drive us a lot of new users at a very affective acquisition cost. In fact, 60 percent of our new users come from app stores. By then, interest from Intuit and others started to come our way.

As you already know, Intuit acquired us in September 2009 for $170 million, and we’ve continued to grow post-acquisition.

TechCrunch: Do you think your TC40 win may have strengthened the argument for you guys, whether it be with investments of with the acquisition?

Mint.com: Our win absolutely lent credibility. But then there’s the after effect. The amplifier that TechCrunch provides means that a lot of influential people end up following your service and getting buzz going. That, paired with attention from the media gave nothing but legitimacy to what we’re doing.

The idea of aggregated finances has been done before, but it didn’t get traction. We did it substantially differently. Having that kind of platform to be born into the world got our name out there, gave us a lot of users fairly quickly, and made it easy to demonstrate growth.

TechCrunch: So if you had to name a few things that led to your success, what would they be?

Mint.com: I think TC40 made us.

It was the launch at TechCrunch and the work we did to parlay that into making us a reputable service. Another thing that helped was the economic crisis. Being financially conscious was actually cool all of the sudden, and we could help people be cool and not be trapped in the desktop or a legacy personal finance tool. We modernized it and made it mobile.

TechCrunch: There are hundreds of entrepreneurs headed to New York right now, if they aren’t already here. As a winner, and a super successful member of the Disrupt alumni clan, what advice would you give to them as they launch their products on stage?

Mint.com: I think the demo has to impress, which rests on the strength of the product. the demo just makes it believable.

But the thing that really resonates — and you have to realize that the panels are made up of guys who are used to investing and seeing lots of ideas come by — is the value proposition of how your product is going to change lives.

If you have that hook, something that makes people believe in your company, then you have a chance.

The next thing that you’re sure to be challenged with is how you’ll do it better than other people. Be prepared to speak about it in those terms. “Here’s how we’re different and that’s why we’re going to win.”

If you can show the product and communicate a clear value proposition and how you’re going to win relative to competitors you’ll have a successful onstage launch.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

• MINT.COM
• AARON FORTH

Mint.com is a free online personal finance service that is aimed at being “easy and secure way to manage and save money online.” The service is accessible anywhere, anytime over the web.

Launched in September, 2007, the company states that Mint.com has over 1 million users, making it the largest and fastest growing service of its kind. Mint.com has received top awards from Kiplingers, Money and PC World magazines and is PC Magazine’s Editors’ Choice. Mint.com was acquired by…

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“Aaron brings over ten years’ of product development and product management experience to Mint. Prior to joining Mint, Aaron held several leadership positions at eBay and Half.com (acquired by eBay Inc.). Most recently, as Director of Advertising, Aaron was responsible for product strategy, design and product development. Aaron has a background in multivariate testing used to drive analytically-based decisions around product design, improved user experience and strategic partnerships. Prior to working in advertising, Aaron managed internet marketing and product…

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It’s been a long, caffeine-fueled ride for the hundreds of hackers who have set up at our big Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon, but the furious process of taking a wild idea and turning it into something real is finally winding down.

Projects were being finalized, UIs were being tweaked, last minute Red Bulls were being downed — it was a quite a sight to see everyone buckling down for those final few minutes before submissions were due.

It’s almost like a weight has been lifted off everyone’s shoulders though, and more than a few people have chosen to let off some of their stress-fueled steam by running around with the arsenal of Nerf guns we’ve left strewn about.

Oh, but it’s not over yet.

Now that everyone’s hacks have been collected, they’ll all start to take the stage here at Pier 94 and present the fruits of their hard work to our panel of judges. The chosen winners will then have the chance to present their projects at the Disrupt main stage in front of all of our wonderful attendees (but only after they get a few days to catch up on their sleep). On top of that, our API sponsors will be handing our prizes of their own, ranging from cold hard cash to a free Windows Phone.

The Hackathon finals are set to begin in just a few moments, so stay tuned for all the action!

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A life-size fire-breathing dragon. A fully robotic calliope band. A full-scale flight simulator built by teenagers. An entire herd of homemade R2-D2s. Electric cars, steampunk fashion, a robot petting zoo, a piano made of bananas, and a cardboard Trojan Horse. Plus a zillion different interactive attractions, classes, and events for kids of all ages. Yes, the Maker Faire is back in town, and only just in time.

It was exactly the tonic I needed after my inability to get excited about the Facebook IPO and my ongoing sense that most of the Valley is focused on building meaningless mobile/social/local/scrapbooking sugar water. This was a place full of people building real, tangible things for the sake of sheer awesomeness. Oh–and while they’re at it, almost as a side effect, hidden behind their Burning Man-esque decor is a community and technology ready to turn the whole planet on its ear.

The maker movement has hit an interesting flux point; its amateurs and enthusiasts, much like the computer geeks of the 1970s and 1980s, now stand on the verge of watching their hobby erupt into big business that will reshape the way people everywhere live. Do I sound hyperbolic? Don’t just take my word for it; listen to the mighty Economist, which in its British understated fashion recently called digital manufacturing no less than “The third industrial revolution.”

“What happens when you give the tools of the industrial revolution to the creative class, for the cost of a bad coffee addiction?” asked Mark Hatch, CEO of TechShop, a company that offers its members access to workspaces armed with industrial-strength toolsets. Then he reeled off some impressive examples: James McKelvey built the first three prototypes of the Square card reader — in two weeks — at TechShop in Menlo Park. That’s also where Phil Hughes and Bob Lipp built their initial fanless liquid-cooling system for server farms, which went on to soundly defeat IBM in a “chill-off.”

TechShop’s Mark Hatch.

But I’m most interested in the economic effects once the maker movement hits the developing world, where the demand for custom parts, recycled materials, and mechanical repairs is immense and inexhaustible. Or consider another of Hatch’s examples: the Embrace low-cost infant warmer which is reportedly on track to save the lives of 100,000 premature babies over the next five years.

And we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. When maker technology and spaces like TechShop begin to metastasize all over the planet, so that anyone and everyone can plausibly build their own solutions to their problems rather than waiting for some industrial-scale corporation to do so, that’s when a lot of lives will really begin to change. And TechShop is indeed expanding, although, alas, only in the USA for now: there’ll be “more than one open on the East Coast by the end of the year,” according to Hatch.

In the interim, drop by a Maker Faire if you can, to catch a glimpse of this nascent future in its larval stage, while it’s still messy and exuberant and fueled by amateurish enthusiasm. (Bay Areans: it’s open until 6PM today.) And the next times your eyes glaze over at the sight of yet another SoLoMo app, consider looking into what’s happening in the world of hand-made hardware instead. If nothing else, it’s awfully colorful:

The Ragtime Castaway Band, a fully robotic giant calliope band.

Laying down a beat with a piano made of bananas and a drum kit built from limes.

That dragon again.

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SpaceX and Elon Musk will not be held from the history books. Last night the company announced that engineers were currently replacing a faulty valve on engine #5, and if successful pending a data review today, the company would attempt a second launch on Tuesday, May 22nd. This comes as SpaceX’s maiden voyage to the International Space Station was cut a half second short by an automated safety function built into the rocket.

SpaceX is attempting to become the first privately owned entity to reach and dock a capsule with the ISS, therefore increasing its chance to win what will likely be a lucrative contract to ferry cargo and humans between Earth and Space. So far these duties have been carried out by the U.S., Russia and Japan. However, as governments are cutting space budget programs they are looking to hand over these relatively nominal duties to the private sector and redirect funds to long-range space exploration and science programs.

Come next Tuesday, SpaceX will attempt to make history again

.

• ELON MUSK

Elon Musk (born June 28,1971) is an entrepreneur and a co-founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and Space Exploration Technologies. He is chairman/CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and chairman of SolarCity.

Musk was born and grew up in South Africa, the son of a South African engineer and a Canadian-born mother who has worked as a New York City dietitian and modeled for fun. His father inspired his love of technology and Musk bought his first computer at age 10…

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