Friday, October 29, 2010

Blogspot Blocked in Nepal

The Nepal Telecom Company (NTC), which is the primary ISP in Nepal seems to have blocked access to blogspot.com domains today. Apparently, they filter the internet for porn and managed to (accidentally?) block blogspot and the huffington post after blocking 60 porn sites yesterday.

Given that thousands of new porn sites are created every day (and the sheer number that already exist), you have to wonder why they even bother trying to block all of it in the first place. It's a pretty hopeless endeavor, especially for a government run company that has very limited resources.

Since most people in Nepal won't be able to access blogspot (and thus, this blog) it's hardly worth going into detail about it, but one way to easily bypass the kind of filtering is to use TOR. I tried that this morning and was able to get through to blogspot domains with no problem...

2 comments:

  1. Perhaps you should anonymously post TOR instructions somewhere in which people of Nepal (and other countries in a similar situation) can easily find them. I'm sure that this has been done, but there is no real reason not to... as long as you remain anonymous

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  2. The law of unintended consequences takes over. Or was it?

    ReplyDelete