Friday, August 24, 2007

Is WordPress blocked?

A few months ago YouTube had been blocked by the government and it has not been back since. I can live with that because I do not have the inclination to watch video clips posted at my favorite blogs. The connection is just too slow. Sometimes I have to wait 15 minutes or more to watch a two-minute video clip. But blocking WordPress would be a different story. Today, as I was trying to visit my favorite bloggers who are using WordPress, a message in Thai characters appears in the screen. I don’t read Thai very well and I don’t understand it if I did anyway, but I know for sure that it is the same message I saw when YouTube was blocked. Can anybody tell me what is going on?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just found this through Google...sorry for the messiness...
Mike

Friday, March 23rd, 2007...12:07 am
Wordpress Blocked in Thailand?
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There have been a bunch of folks reporting that they could not access wordpress.com lately [See also Pantip.com, gooogolf, poakpong, mymoney]. Some suspected it was because of their internal networks. Some thought the poor speed from the ISPs caused the inaccessibility as it returned Error 404. Myfreezer commented that when he used proxy.org to access the site, it was forwarded to ICT’s blocking announcement page. Although it has been told that they could already access now, Thai bloggers are still panic about being blocked.

The panic of “blog brother” has been around Thai bloggers since ICT ministry apparently blocked Youtube earlier this month. There are a couple of anti-junta government blogs hosted on wordpress.com, including hicomrade, and thinking in ink. FACT, Freedom Against Censorship Thailand, is also hosted on wordpress.com.

The last attempt to block the Internet is the pro-Thaksin website, hi-thaksin.net. Manager Online, a media leader for anti-thaksin (apparently highly influence the government and political situation), has a feature on an “underground” website as its opponent’s website. The article primarily sets an accusing tone that those ousted PM supporters use viral marketing on the Internet to spread out false information as propaganda, including the recent clip of an ousted PM. (Apparently the clip has been censored by the government, even on Youtube. However, the ICT ministry still refuses the claim as usual.) The article attempts to reveal the component of the website as the ministry tries to do to block the site, including domain name, proxy, free online content hosting (in particular blog providers), and online video providers.

[Note that Hi-thaksin.net has an argumentative response to this article named “Response to Manager Onli(n)e” in Thai]

Although it seems likely that there is no highly correlation between hi-thaksin.net and other blogs, I hope none of the ISP is too sensitive about this. Anyway, I am sure that they are aware of the power of blogs.

Keep your fingers crossed that it was just an “accident”. Maybe wordpress had a downtime.

3 Comments

Filed under สื่อสารมวลชน : mass media, blogophere, นโยบาย : Policy, มั่วซั่ว : Miscellenous, Thaibrarian, JOMC490, Social Networking
3 Comments

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wät
March 23rd, 2007 at 12:33 am

i’m using true isp, and i have no problem accessing wordpress.com
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gooogolf
March 23rd, 2007 at 12:42 am

I’m doing cross my fingers that it’s just an “accident”.!
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alwayslek
March 23rd, 2007 at 1:15 am

i don’t think the gov blocked wordpress. Most likely we panicked.

We have to solve instability of Thai ISPs first.

Joey said...

Thanks Mike. It seems to be working now. Also thanks for dropping by.