Wednesday, June 20, 2007

tamilnet ban, bad show - how to bypass

tamilnet is not accessible from inside sri lanka at the moment. tamilnet is without doubt a ltte terrorist propaganda website. however banning accessibility to it is unacceptable. it is also stupid. it amounts to what i consider censorship and should be resisted.

for quick and easy methods to bypass the ban see below.

the ban is not limited to slt but affects other isps as well.

this is reminiscent of the indian government's blocking of several websites in july, 2006. as i said then, "we in sri lanka may learn a thing or two from their experience if same thing happens here in the future"

btw one has has to admit that unlike indian government which as a result initially blocked whole domains (all blogspot /blogger blogs for instance were blocked) sri lankan one was more specific.

a voice in colombo is right, we have peaceniks like sanjana hattotuwa's groundviews who unquestioningly parrot what terrorists pussies say ( and arbitrarily censors opposing views and questions. ironically some of my comments they censored concerned the free media movement's fake claims about a internet blocking in jaffna in january this year. that is yetanother example of peaceniks inability to distinguish fake from real).

however parrots are parrots however obedient, it is best that we have the original. and as a voice in colombo says "what benefit can the government expect by blocking TamilNet from here? Nothing at all."

in spite of all the claims of peaceniks this is the only example any censorship by government in sri lanka. as i always say go to the nearest newsstand to see all the political views amply reflected without censorship. that openness must continue.

bypassing the ban

one way to visit a blocked site is through another site, generally called a proxy site or proxy server. is that illegal? no. even if it is so, we should risk it.

separate comprehensive blog on how to bypass the ban will be created as soon as i have some more free time.

for present you can use these quick and easy web based proxies. (some may display ads) you type in the url "www.tamilnet.com" in the box on these pages, click the button, and blocked website will load. no need to edit proxy settings in your browser.

http://proxy.org/ (wide choice of proxies and instructions)
http://www.daveproxy.co.uk/
http://www.ninjaproxy.com/
http://anonymouse.org/anonwww.html
http://www.myinternetproxy.com/




ps at 7.10 pm 06/20/07
i forgot to write this earlier, the first site to report on the ban was the defencenet blog, showing again its relative reliability in comparison to overt terrorist propaganda sites like tamilnet itself and trashy parrots like groundviews which cannot distinguish reality from fakes (and then censors anyone who points out the fakes) as i mentioned above.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is http://www.lankanewspapers.com/ banned as well? TamilNet is one thing but if the banning is spreading, it's starting to become concerning.

sittingnut said...

no it is available. last extract there posted at 6.23pm today, is the tamilnet story about the block
before writing i checked on a variety of other sri lankan news websites and they all worked.

Chandare said...

This ranks high on stupidoscale.The Thumpane variety I should say.Probably next to stealing the well and throwing stones at the moon.

Anonymous said...

lankanewspapers.com doesn't work. I just checked...

Then I surfed the site through a proxy site. It worked fine.

So SLT has probably blocked that one too.

sittingnut said...

chandare
agree

anon at 10.02 pm
no. again checked. its available without anon proxy.
last post "Sri Lanka seeks hackers to down pro-Tiger website " posted 9.15pm today has 115 comments. most are probably from sl and no mention of such a block as far as i can see.

Anonymous said...

I'm the first anon I still can't access the http://www.lankanewspapers.com/ except by using a proxy site.

sittingnut said...

you seem to be the only one having that problem. i can access it well enough without an anon proxy. so do others it seems. there are now 320+ and 220+ comments in the posts i mentioned above and as far as i can see there isn't any mention of any blocking of lankanewspapers.com even though the subject in both threads is mainly about the blocking of tamilnet.

Chaar~Max said...

I recall ages ago, CBK made ARTv (then Dynavision) block out News Items on Sri Lanka that were aired on CNN and with BBC too.

People abroad used to know about bombings and erupting of fighting, before we did.

I see a similar thinking behind this move, throwing us deeper into the well or darkness.. emphasizing the local term.... "Frogs in the Well"


Anon : Check whether your JavaScript is enabled.

Anonymous said...

There is a FireFox plug-in called anonymouser that lets you open "blocked" links by right clicking with your mouse.

According to theanonymouser plug-in blog

"This plugin doesn't anonymize anything, it instead uses anonymouse.org (visit the site to see how it works)."

So if you are concerned about hiding your tracks you might want to check about this issue.

Otherwise its a rather handy plug-in that saves you the hassle of manually entering the URL at the anonymouse.org website.

The anonymouser has it own FireFox plug in page

Never thought much of Tamil net as a source of reliable info. Banning such a blatant propaganda site only gives it credibility. (not with me at least)

Anonymous said...

How I wish to read about Sri Lanka culture but not about Sri Lanka war...

Anonymous said...

USE
http://www.visitblocked.com/

Chandana said...

http://defence.lk/LTTE/LTTE.asp

JUST READ THIS...

Shahim Hiday said...

prabaharan's final countdown finish

one nation
one country
one srilanka