The whole domain blogspot.com was banned by the Pakistani authorities earlier this year. That hurt, but we lived on through pkblogs.com and similar proxying services. This time its WordPress. So much for free speech and freedom of the press. Mr. President, where are you now?
A couple of days ago, I was told to restrict access to a certain WordPress blog for the ISP’s users after being deemed offensive by the authorities, but it seems that now all blogs on the wordpress.com domain are inaccessible. The main WordPress site opens fine, but the blogs I checked don’t. They probably blocked everything going to all wordpress.com addresses.
I’m against censorship in general, but this is just going too far. It’s like stopping all traffic because someone was seen speeding on the highway. Or burning a library because some of the books it stores contain offensive material. Besides, the Internet is such that you simply can’t block something completely without cutting yourself off from everyone else. You’ll just irritate the hell out of everyone and force them to use other means to get to that content.
The worst part is that a number of sites being blocked share their IP or subnet with other sites. This causes many other useful sites to be lost just because of that particular one.
It looks like eventually, people will start banning us. I remember Slashdot doing it once due to unauthorized activity from our proxy’s IP and it wasn’t pretty. What if it was Google or Yahoo that blocked us? That should be pretty effective at killing off a lot of our business and all the progress we’ve recently made.
10 thoughts on “First the blogspot ban now wordpress”
why everyone is complaining about wordpress ban? I can acess *.wordpress.com on cybernet network. Seems some technical glitch nothing else.
The reason everyone is claiming (read shouting) because i cant access it on WorldCall broadband. Cybernet must have checked early and bypassing through some other means which can be easily done.
The only place i could access both the blog and dashboard was at SZABIST (using zab.net)
I’m not sure what the exact problem is. I thought it was with PIE, the upstream provider that most ISPs in Pakistan use. It’s also the one actively blocking sites, but one of my emails to PIE finally got a response.
They claim that it’s opening fine through their network, but I don’t know how accurate their findings are.
I think CyberNet uses FLAG or France Telecom which usually don’t suffer from the same issues.
It’s opening on Cybernet DSL… but not suprising that it’s also blocked.
All those sites opening on Cyber is due to their uplink from FLAG. They route all the banned URLs and IPs on their FLAG link.
Apparently, I can access it from WorldCall, but not from Maxcom. Hate the authorities, I cant afford to move to other service!
Strange! I can access *.wordpress.com from max.com, multinet. I don’t know about other ISPs. May be wordpress.com is not officially blocked yet. But thats not good. They shouldn’t be blocking those sites.
Starting with the new year, I cannot access *.wordpress.com on Cyber.net DSL. Initially, with a lot of friends behind desi cable networks reporting their inability to access wordpress blogs directly, I had thought the problem rested with the desi cable networks. But, of late, more and more users of different ISPs have been venting out their frustrations. And as of today, I cannot seem to be able to access blogs on wordpress anymore.
i guess if someone publishes something offensive on youtube or google or metacafe..then they’ll be banned as well. next thing you know, the .com domain will be banned if someone posts offensive stuff on their websites. talk about stupid people and stupid policies.
This is the gift for all the Pakistani Bloggers by our Enlightened govt…everyother day we hear Mush claiming that he supports freedom of expression yet we poor Pakistanis aren’t even allowed to access our blogs.
Hats off to our govt!!
Neway..our govt probably underestimates all the techies around. First we had pkblogs.com and now i have found this other proxying service through which u’ll be able to access ur WP blogs.
http://www.hidemyass.com/
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