i couldn t open any blogs this morning for what ever reason
The blog-blocking was valid from around last night (11/4) till this morning around 8 AM. They only block Blogspot websites though. Wordpress, Typepad, etc remained intact. Perhaps His Highness The So-Called "IT expert" was unable to differentiate between Youtube (which hosts the Fitna flicks) and Blogs (which are personal in nature)
The "outage" was due to blogspot.com performing maintenance. It was not localised either.
In an attempt to bypass what I thought was blocking I switched to a proxy server (Mexican ISP)and was rewarded with a message saying that the website being modified. Ten blogs later, all with thee same message I was relieved to find that it was not the government at work.
ENEMY ACTION
This morning, Sunday 12 April, between 11am and 11.45am, Blogspot sites are inaccessible via my ISP (Telkom). They are, however, accessible via my Anonymizer account (see http://anonymizer.com if you're interested).
Specific blogs that I tried to visit include Jakartass, Green Stump, Indonesia Now, Jenny Q and Friskodude. All were bounced by Telkom. When I switched on the Anonymizer service, they were all accessible. The only conclusion I can come to is that the whole of Blogspot is under interdiction By Telkom's ISP this morning.
This is a national disgrace, and must be doing immense harm to Indonesia's international reputation. Denying people the right to freely visit established and respected web sites puts the government here in the same rank of infamy as China.
This being Indonesia, I'm more tempted to suggest that Telkom's blocking of all Blogspot blogs is a technical hitch, á la Homer Simpson.
I can get all those blogs mentioned by the Rev when I switch to my Indosat dial-up.
The major problem I have is that both ISPs have been very erratic for the past two weeks, and I'm lucky to stay online long enough to download my emails.
Now, that is a national disgrace.
While the previous mess may well have been caused by incompetence, I'm pretty certain that Telkom did deliberately block Blogspot today. The fact that you can get through to those blogs on Indosat is further evidence of a selective shut-down by Telkom.
You're dead right about the abysmal ISP service in general. Telkom Speedy (sic) is an overpriced, underperforming, appallingly maintained utility. Telkom's monopoly is keeping Indonesia in the digital Stone Age.
i could not open blogs but i could update...just couldn t read the updates!
Aha! So I'm not a paranoid loon, there is something fishy going on. I was beginning to feel like the bloke on those cop shows who finds the body and calls the police but when they go to look for the stiff it's gone.
"But, but, it was here I tell ya, I saw it with my own eyes."
Like the Rev I was able to access one of the "blocked" sites by using BabelFish (a tip I learned from an earlier commenter here) so it definitely wasn't a technical snafu.
Someone is obviously playing silly buggers.
Commenting by HaloScan
