But it’s actually up and running, something in the network prevents access to it

HILE Mr. Trump fights for his “safe space” by blocking me (and many other critics of his), I myself never block anyone. I never preached for anything other than free speech, including speech or messages that I strongly disagree with. I never deleted any comments that offended me, either. I approved everything. Even insults against me; even libel!

Not everyone views the world like I do. A lot of people believe in outright gagging of particular views. In fact, many think that it’s acceptable to block my entire site, as the EPO has done for nearly 3 years. The EPO went even further than blocking my site and on numerous occasions threatened to sue me (SLAPP). Others did so too.

Over the past 4 months my Web sites have not been accessible from particular locations. My webhost and I are not sure why. Recently, things got a lot worse. More and more locations in the world find themselves unable to access my writings. There seems to be something in the network (not the server or the user’s end but the routing) standing in the way. We are still investigating this as ‘censorship’ of this kind continues to exacerbate (I track the severity of it using an uptime notifications service called Montastic — a service I have been using for over a decade).

At the moment, my most important work revolves around articles about the EPO. In the past, the EPO attempted article takedowns using threats of litigation. It tried several times. These articles contained leaks, which we published almost daily. Would any other sites out there be willing to create a mirror for it all? It’s almost 2,000 articles (the site as a whole has about 22,500 articles, aside from the Wiki and front page which was implemented in Drupal), which include PDF attachments etc. The CMS is WordPress for the most part (for all the articles). Articles indexes have already been set up; someone scraped these and put some copies on Github, but a complete mirror would help discourage future muzzling attempts.

The state of censorship on the Internet is now verging the creepy. We’re told it’s necessary “because Nazis” (the perfect pretext/excuse other then pure criminality like drug-dealing, copyright infringement, terrorism or pedophilia) and it’s only expected that over time things will get worse. How long before even evidence of crime gets censored and those who document war crimes have their videos pulled down? Oh, wait, that happened only weeks ago.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 27th, 2017 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.