Appelbaum explained how Tor works with a presentation which clearly illustrated a Tor bridge (to find out more info on Tor, see here), as well as what kind of information Tor tracks, and the history of the Tor project. During the workshop, participants live-tweeted information from the presentation.

weddady noted the lack of safety in some proxies:

weddady quotes Jacob Appelbaum

Appelbaum explained further that with proxies, one never actually knows who is running the proxy, thus creating a potential risk of surveillance.

Amira Al Hussaini noted on Twitter that Tor is not widely used in the Middle East, and relays Appelbaum’s call for users:

Amira Al Hussaini attended Jacob Appelbaum's presentation on Tor

Tor can be downloaded here, and more information can be found here.

The second day of the Arab Bloggers Workshop kicked off with a presentation about Herdict Web, a site which uses crowdsourcing to gather reports of Internet filtering from users around the world. Qatari workshop participant Muhammad Basheer tweeted a photo from the presentation:

Following the first presentation, Egyptian blogger Manal discussed the world of Arab techies, particularly touching about female techies in Egypt. Lebanese NightS noted the need for more women at #ab09:

After Manal’s informative presentation, the bloggers broke into group workshops, touching on a variety of subjects. One workshop, conducted by hamzoz, focused on blogging from Iraq. Muhammad Basheer attended the presentation and tweeted:

Creative Commons rep Donatella Della Ratta also attended, tweeting:

Bahraini participant Amira Al Hussaini attended a presentation by the lead of the new Rising Voices project in Yemen. She was clearly impressed by the workshop:

The last major presentation of the day was once again perhaps the most captivating. Anas Tawileh, founder of Meedan, presented on the Arabic-English crowd translation project. Iraqi blogger Salam Pax best captured the sentiment in this tweet:

Tawileh opened his presentation with a number of interesting facts about the Internet including one that the number of hours spent on Facebook in a year, translated into volunteer hours, could be spent to build the Giza pyramids in only 9 days. Amira Al Hussaini shared another of Tawileh’s tidbits:

Tweeting about the concept, Moroccan GV author Hisham G. summed up Meedan in a few words:

Lastly, Meedan itself (which has covered the workshop here) noted on Twitter that they’ll be translating tweets from the conference (which can otherwise be found on hashtag #ab09):

Throughout the day, there were several specialized workshops, on everything from circumvention and anonymity (presented by Jacob Applebaum) to citizen journalism (presented by Amira Al Hussaini and Salam Pax) to video-hosting alternatives to YouTube (presented by Slim Amamou and Marcin Gajewski). Of the latter, Lina Ben Mhenni commented:

The presentation that got participants most riled up, however, was one given by Syrian attendee Razan Ghazzawi on the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s study mapping the Arabic blogosphere. Though there were too many reactions to share (which can be found by searching the hashtag #ab09 on Twitter), here are some highlights: Egyptian participant lastoadri wondered on Twitter if participants were fully informed about the study:

Nasser Weddady noted an important point made by Razan:

Finally, Iraqi Salam Pax agreed with Razan on the issue, stating: