Censorship

It’s no secret that the Internet is a censorship nightmare, the great firewall of china and AT&T take great pleasure in telling users what they can an cant search on their smart phones across America. but I always considered the UK to be a relatively unaffected area.

For example I’ve never been blocked outside of college but just now I was wanting to download I file my friend hosted on ZShare.

A perfectly legal, non copyrighted essay he had written and wanted me to proof read but I got sent to a banned page. this annoyed me but he emailed me it instead.

Later that day I went to check out 4Chan (I know) I was bored and had little else to do than spend 5 minutes on /b/ but alas I got banned page again as seen here now I’ve only been on 4chan a few times and I’ve sure as hell never posted anything.

But this isn’t a 4chan hate post oh hell no.

so I read up on why this is going down, I check a few other chans and sure enough ALL of them are banned.
I check rapidshare, Depositfile and ZShare and sure enough more bans and failed downloads.

so I check why and also try accessing these site on opera-tor(if you don’t know what this is Google it and see, it’s like a proxy browser all in one)
and I can access them again which deduces down IP bans and just crappy uploads and means it must be a ISP thing.

I’m yet to email plusnet (my ISP) and enquire about this but my best bet is that it has something to do with the IWF.

The IWF by Google define is (IWF - Internet Watch Foundation. BT internet is a founding member of the IWF, a charitable organization which seeks to rid the Internet of illegal material such as child pornography. The IWF encourages the Internet community to report the finding of any such material.)

but they have moved up from just getting reports of Child porn to blocking pages that discuss racism and arresting authors of erotica.

The internet is a beautiful place for freedom and debate on any and every subject and should remain like that.

I’m against racism and child porn as much as the next guy but stopping people accessing multifunction sites such as depositfile will do nothing but drive the whole operation further underground.

and as for arresting authors of erotica goes word can’t describe how wrong that is you can click this paragraph to read into the case more courtesy of wiki but they are authors of an art that can be truly beautiful. I have read erotica online many times and have been truly blown away by the quality of the authorship and writing that rivals some published famous books. What the man did in the above case did nothing worse than mills and boon have done many times over but was picked up, strung out and dropped back down by a censorship agency that the UK never asked for nor appointed.

The declaration of independence of cyberspace is a long and beautiful script which you can read by clicking this paragraph but I have extracted the relevant paragraph below

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

We are now being ruled by a governing body that used pedophilia as a weapon to scare ISP's, Governments and Organizations not to mention individuals, they know it will make them comply and they can obtain absolute power over our internet.

And as we all know the quote about "Absolute power" and its corruption it is a natural pattern that one minute they are protecting the children, the next they are "trading" our details for safety .. and funds of course.

We must become aware of this threat which is far greater than copyright fraud and the constant circulation of scams and chain emails. because let’s face it the organisation who rules the whole country is much more powerful and scary than one author of erotic stories or one nut job racist

Don’t you agree ?

P.S no thats not my real ip address