Dear Jordanian Bloggers and Tweeps. March 12th is the World Day Against Cyber Censorship, which has been organized by the French-based organization, Reporters Without Borders (RWB) for a few years now. RWB will also be releasing their annual “Internet Enemies” list, which compiles the names of governments that have unfriendly cyber policies – and most [...]

I missed my five year blogoversary by one day, which is perhaps a testament to the difficulty of finding time to blog these days. Yes, I haven’t been blogging as much as I would like to these days. 7iber has me occupied most of the time lately. But nevertheless, it has been five years since [...]

This is just a quick note to readers of The Black Iris or anyone else who may stumble on this blog, to take some time (about 5 minutes) to give to Haiti if they haven’t done so already. If you’ve noticed, I’ve put up a link to the International Medical Corps, which is a great [...]

A few days ago we were all surprised to learn that a ruling from Jordan’s Supreme Court decided to include “websites” as subject to the country’s notorious Press & Publications Law. The reason bloggers, technologists, activists, journalists, free thinkers and anyone with a half a brain and a beating heart has been up in arms [...]

This is just a quickie post, as a lot of people have been asking my opinion about the recent court decision to include websites under the Jordanian Press & Publication Law. There’s plenty to say about the topic and I want to write an extensive post about the issue (in the making) but I would [...]

I thought this piece about Queen Rania to be fairly interesting for several reasons that I’d rather not share out loud for fear of “poisoning the well”, so to speak. I’d rather leave it up to the reader to watch it and express their own views on it, especially Jordanian views, which isn’t something we’ve [...]

For the second year in a row The Black Iris was nominated and managed to win the Brass Crescent award in the Middle East category. I actually had to look up last year’s post to make sure that I don’t repeat myself, but then I discovered that last year’s post really said everything I wanted [...]

Thought this Abu Mahjoob caricature was pretty uplifting for the (political) season! So Eid Mubarak to you all and I hope you have a great holiday. Stay safe, do something fun, enjoy your family time, and go some place warm!