Access Denied

November 19, 2007 12:17 PM

In the same spirit as the Open Net Initiative and Committee to Protect Bloggers that both track global internet filtering, Sami ben Gharbia's Access Denied Map tries to track the blocking of sites like Blogger, Flickr, YouTube and others by governments, as well as efforts by activists to keep them accessible or to challenge their blockage.
posted by Blazecock Pileon (5 comments total)

A great idea. Unfortunately, it takes forever to load for me (Firefox/WindowsXP); for a few minutes I thought it was living up to its name.
posted by languagehat at 1:11 PM on November 19, 2007

I've always been fond of saying that, historically speaking, the Internet was originally designed to withstand a nuclear holocaust. If one city is taken out, as cold and heartless as this may sound, the network of computer systems throughout the planet, would simply divert around whatever geographic boundaries occurred, and continue forward in short order as if the previous obstacle had never existed. This occurs through redundancies and multiple routing access points for information and blah blah blah blah blah.

If there ever is a nuclear holocaust, or some other kind of armageddon, chances are it will be governments who cause them. So I always find it amusing when governments try to block the Internet. It's like watching Lex Luthor try to tango with Superman. Again.

You'd think it'd get old after awhile...
posted by ZachsMind at 1:25 PM on November 19, 2007

A friend of mine living in China recently started tagging sites blocked by China in del.icio.us, suggesting: "A listing of all the links that I come across on the intertubes that I can't access because of Chinese internet censorship. If you are a nerd and use del.icio.us as well, feel free to start using the same tag ('BlockedByChina') for the same purpose."
posted by pithy comment at 1:35 PM on November 19, 2007

A new internet tool lets you see countries cracking down on user-generated content like YouTube and MySpace. But it could also be a tool to help us see our country's own suppression.
posted by homunculus at 12:58 PM on November 22, 2007

Sort of makes you wonder if George Orwell's memory hole is really just a web filter...
posted by jenniferwalker at 1:01 PM on November 28, 2007