The mystery of country-specific URL re-directs explained

I have noticed very recently that visitors to various blogs (including my own) are being re-directed to country-specific URLs when visited by readers from specific countries. So far I have seen variants of my blog (whose true URL is http://billcameron.blogspot.com/) ending in:
.IN (for India)
.com.au (for Australia)
.co.nz (for New Zealand).

A quick search on Google (where else!) reveals that this is no mere fluke. It is a practice being rolled out by Google/Blogger across various countries (starting with India, apparently) as a way of putting in place country-specific 'filtering' of content to 'comply with local laws' - or CENSORSHIP to you or me! You can read Google's rationale for this here.

I am surmising this is all the fall-out from the recent difficulties that Google had experienced in China, where it agreed initially to comply with censorship reqirements there by filtering out content viewable there that the government there did not like, until later it decided to pull out of China entirely, after an international outcry. This new mechanism presumably gives Google the ability more easily to censor content viewable from specific jurisdictions and thus 'comply with local laws' more readily (CENSORSHIP in other words!) whilst in theory not affecting content viewable elsewhere.

Whilst one cannot imagine plausibly that countries such as Australia or New Zealand, perhaps India too, are going to attempt to censor content viewable in their territories, what this change means is that the building blocks are being put in place, for commercial reasons, by Google to allow them to protect their own business interests with possibly immense negative consequences for freedom of information and speech.

Google may choose to call this 'complying with local laws', I call it what it is:
CENSORSHIP

Solidarity with Susie

I've just come across a story about an American expat (lady) blogger, married to a Saudi Arabian national and living in Jeddah, whose blog susie's big adventure has been blocked from being accessible within Saudi Arabia, although it remains viewable elsewhere. There is no clear reason why the Saudi Arabian Communications and Internet Technology Commission have taken this action, although it may be that the fact susie's big adventure was recently mentioned in a high-traffic website, which resulted in a dramatic rise in visits to her site in April, in particular, may have brought the blog to the Saudi Arabian authorities' attention.

As you can see from reading her blog, it is pretty anodyne and level-headed, although she does allude to the restrictions placed on women there, for example in a recent article about the fact that women are not permitted to drive in Saudi Arabia she links to a video showing Saudi Arabian cleric Dr. Abd Al-'Aziz Al-Fawzan explaining why women should not be allowed to drive. It's laugh-out-loud funny in some parts, of course, but it perhaps goes some way to explaining the action taken against her blog within the Kingdom by a very sensitive, some would say paranoid, regime. Embedding has unfortunately been 'disabled by request', so you'll have to visit YouTube to see it here.

I don't know what, if anything, fellow-bloggers can do to help Susie, but at least I can do my little bit to publicise the domestic censorship that she must contend with in Saudi Arabia. As she writes, though, her own family and friends back in the States can continue to read her blog (one of the principal reasons she started it) so even though she has been obliged to switch commenting to pre-publication 'moderation' (so she can retain some control over what is said in her comments area) she remains able to post new blog entries and modify the template. However, she cannot any longer respond to comments through her own comments area as she cannot visit her own blog. I lived in Saudi Arabia before the internet was even thought of and quite enjoyed being there; we had our own problems there in those days, just as those who live there today have their own. A deeply weird and disfunctional society it remains.

(PS/ Funnily enough I wrote fairly recently about possible changes which might one day in the not too distant future permit women to drive in Saudi Arabia. However the power of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices can never safely be overlooked there, even by those who in theory govern the country.)

Internet censorship - alive and well in Britain

(Please see UPDATE at end)

You'll search in vain this evening for the following blogs:
Bloggerheads;
Craig Murray;
Bob Piper;
Boris Johnson.

Why?

Well it seems that Alisher Usmanov doesn't like what they [or some of them, at least] have been saying and has got his legal firm to threaten them and their common internet host and as a result the latter has 'pulled' them; some have disappeared merely because they share the same host as those who have 'offended' a rich and powerful individual.

Read more here, here, here and here. Forbes magazine has a laconic write-up; the little that is written there is quite telling.

I have zero interest in football so if this gentleman wishes to take control of a football club I am largely indifferent, if this was all that was at issue; it seems, though, that the football club in question is somewhat exercised by the prospect, according to the BBC. The Guardian focusses on the way some use legal suasion to try and head off discussion of matters they would prefer remain undiscussed.

UPDATE: (Friday 21SEP07 10.25 BST) The original 'offending' article written by Craig Murray can be found by placing the Uzbekhi/Russian gentleman's full name in front of ".blogspot.com" for anyone who may be interested; please note that the comments to that reposted entry list several other places on the web where the article can be found. I had not read Craig's article before, now I have - and the alleged information is now in my brain, and anyone else's who reads it, whatever a London law firm may care to try and do about it. We know! Let freedom prevail!

Well, make your mind up! Am I blocked in China or not?

I first came across this site through a post at Tim Worstall's blog some days ago and when I tried it out then I found my blog's URL was blocked, whereas Tim's apparently was not.

Well, I have just come across mention of the Chinese verification site in a new post in Mr Eugenides's blog with the splenetic little one (I refer to his header banner, I have no knowledge of what he looks like [now]) somewhat miffed that he is not blocked. Now I have re-checked my own site again and find I appear not to be blocked. So which is it?

Did my comment to the post where I first noticed it on Tim's blog make the Chinese authorities spring into action and unblock my site? Not very likely I think. Or was it because I host my blog at 'Blogger'? But of course Mr Eugenides does too. Was my speculation in that comment that my being blocked then might either be related to me being 'gay' or because I quite often have blogged about China and socialism in a less than flattering way? Or is the checking site either simply inconsistent in the results it returns or indeed is it a complete waste of time?

I have noticed over the past several weeks that the number of 'hits' to my site seeming to emanate from China has lessened considerably, although these have not disappeared completely. On the other hand I have started to track visitors back quite often to the 'pkblogs' site, which I understand is a way internet surfers in China have found to circumvent the Chinese government's firewall. Perhaps the real answer is that the Chinese firewall is not the secure barrier they had hoped and that 'leakage' occurs (just as it always has with the real Great Wall of China).