Well, that was a funny 48 hours. For some reason, I've been unable to access any Blogger blogs, including my own. I could get into Blogger itself, and add a post to Cultural Snow; could also read comments, because they're copied to e-mail, although I couldn't comment myself. I could even spot when some of my faves had been updated, because they showed up in my Technorati feed. But I couldn't read them.
It was an odd experience: hovering over my digital back yard, seeing bits and pieces of what was going on, but unable to take part; mouthing silently, hoping that some kind of e-telepathy could alert people to my plight; an eternal spectator, albeit one with the worst seat in the house, stuck behind a family of five fat people with Afros; Scrooge seeing his past, present and future; George Bailey watching Bedford Falls mutate into Potterville; and the modern reinterpretation, Donna Noble experiencing what might have happened if she'd listened to her mother.
5 comments:
Hey Tim,
Looks like you have those tech wizards over at the ICT Ministry to thank for this one. I'm only able to access your site via a proxy server, apparently all websites with a blogspot domain have been banned.
This from Bangkok Pundit:
"The Thai government have blocked Google's most popular blogging site blogspot.com since the eveninh of Friday, 27th June, 2008. None of the Thai bloggers are able to access their blogs from Thailand. According to reports, the government were aiming at blocking only saturdayvoice.blogspot.com and a few other political related websites. I doing so, their technicians have blocked all of the sub-domains of blogspot.com which is accessed by millions of internet users around the world."
wow, i hope you are unblocked soon. or un-unblogged. or re-blogged?
how do they do that anyway? how can a government block select computer access? technically, i mean, i won't go into political reasons. i just don't understand technically how that works.
All back on now, which is a relief.
This makes sense, Noel. Anywhere else in the world, you have to decide whether something is a cock-up or a conspiracy. Here, it's both.
It's not the computer, Amy - it's specific URLs that they block, usually for porn and anti-monarchist sentiment. Although last year's YouTube fiasco proved that they prefer to use a wrecking-ball to crack a peppercorn, and kill entire sites and sub-domains. Of course, at that time, there was an ICT Minister in place who declared that he didn't see the point of e-mail; why couldn't people just pick up the phone? But the general philosophy seems to have lingered.
"It's not the computer, Amy - it's specific URLs that they block"
oh. well. duh.
i imagined something like a virus or perhaps a gnome accessing everyone's computers and stopping access to blogspot.
Thai government or not, something odd has happened on blogger. I think there must have been a maintenance glitch. According to bloglines some blogs have 200 or so new posts (the newest post being March 2008). A few people have had their templates messed up. Having several thousand "new posts" was a bit worrying!
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