Monday 28 February 2011

Flattery Will Get You Nowhere

From time to time, people say nice things about this blog. Sometimes not so nice.
I've been informed today of a really fine form of flattery: the Iranian government has blocked access to the blog!
They must be getting nervous about news from Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli and elsewhere. Everybody knows that it is impossible to effectively prevent the spread of information by internet. I'm told that in China during the Olympics the universities asked their students to sign an undertaking that during the Games they would not consult proxy (that is, illegal) websites that provided access to material that was otherwise blocked. When I tell people in China that I am concerned about access to the blog, they just smile knowingly and indicate that the information is accessible, but with difficulty. This must also be the case in Iran.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

When I was in Iran in the very heated summer of 2009 (http://andreasmoser.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/reports-about-my-trip-to-iran-in-junejuly-2009/), I stepped into an internet cafe in Tehran on my first day and saw everyone on Facebook or YouTube or BBC, all blocked sites. When I couldn't access them, a lady sitting next to me gave me a memory stick with a programme called "Free Gate", a proxy programme, which I copied onto my own memory stick. I am sure the owner of the internet cafe realised what was going on.

K said...

maybe you could feed the blog posts through other portals like facebook to make it more accesible to people in iran etc...

Unknown said...

by the way, you are also banned in Myanmar as well. Though most of the internet is baned there.