Saudi Arabia doesn't tolerate any Yahoos.

The conservative Gulf Arab kingdom, in the news most recently for publicly beheading a convicted murderer, announced Sunday it is cutting its Internet users off from access to clubs hosted by Santa Clara-based online media giant Yahoo!

One of the largest free forums for online discussion, "Yahoo! clubs" served more than 60,000 subscribers in Saudi Arabia before the shutdown, hosting everything from theology discussions to local sports talk.

And, say Saudi officials, pornography.

"The pornographic content of many of these clubs cannot be tolerated," says Eyad al-Hajery, head of the information security center at KACST, the supervising body in Saudi Arabia responsible for monitoring the Internet there. "(KACST) determined that blocking the whole club service would be the easiest and most successful thing we could do."

This is not the first time the Saudi government has blocked large sectors of Internet content from its population. Last year the kingdom also prevented several services from America Online, citing similar justification.

"Users of America Online were able to acquire programs that bypassed (KACST's) proxies, setup to prevent pornographic content from reaching the kingdom,'' says Hajery, referring to the earlier block.

Hajery did not say specifically what the future of Yahoo! would be in Saudi Arabia, but stressed KACST was working to reinstate access to clubs meetings "the kingdom's standards."

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The announcement in the Gulf means Yahoo! is now facing censorship from two ends. Last Friday, a judge in France ordered Internet service providers (ISPs) there to block racist content on Yahoo!'s auction cites. Yahoo! was originally sued by two Parisian advocacy groups citing over 1000 pro-Nazi items on the portal's auctions last April.

Officials at Yahoo! had no comment on the Saudi order, but have repeatedly released statements claiming it would be technically impossible to block French Internet users from sites governed by America's "less restrictive" laws.