Uncle Sam Blocks Gates of Vienna (Among Others)

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This email just came in from a reader:

Howdy,

Department of the InteriorI’m a long-time reader, without ever actually commenting on anything. Yesterday the U.S. Department of the Interior installed blocking software on their entire network. Gates of Vienna is now blocked, as are all sites with a .blogspot URL. Also blocked are other conservative blogs, such as Wizbang. More than half the sites I check on a daily basis are now completely blocked. As of today, Little Green Footballs is not blocked, but that’s about the only one I’ve seen that isn’t. There’s not much that can be done, but I just thought I’d let you know. I’ll check later today when I get in to see if the liberal blogs are blocked.

As of now, Little Green Footballs is also being blocked, but DailyKos is not. I don’t have a contact for Charles. Can we try to get the word out? Blocking conservative blogs and not liberal ones is BS.

Take care, and thanks for the good stuff you folks post.

He sent a follow-up a couple of minutes later:
– – – – – – – – – –

Here’s a quick runthrough of what I’ve found so far at work. You’ll see that its pretty one-sided.

Blocked Blogs:
Captain’s Quarters
Cox and Forkum
Gates of Vienna
Little Green Footballs
Michael J. Totten
Michelle Malkin
Power Line
Protein Wisdom
Rantings of a Sandmonkey
Roger L. Simon
The Adventures of Chester
The American Thinker
The Belmont Club
The Doctor is In
Wizbang

Blogs not blocked
DailyKos
Democrat Underground
America blog
Atrios.blogspot.com
JuanCole.com
The Huffington Post
Talkingpointsmemo.com

In fact, every blog linked to off of DailyKos seems to work.

Please, please get the word out about this. It not only royally sucks that I can’t read stuff during downtimes at work, but they are being so blatantly biased as to what is being blocked. Thanks.

48 thoughts on “Uncle Sam Blocks Gates of Vienna (Among Others)”

  2. It begins….on a beautiful fall day in October.

    I’m calling every news media outlet I can think of in tthe Bay Area….

    “We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight!” We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive!”

    Da Bear

  6. Carl:

    Clinton apointment holdovers,

    Kinda like when the Marxists get ahold of the tenure approval machinery in your local University.

    It Breeds on itself.

    ————————–

    My Dear Baron Bodissey, Your Emminence:

    I bought gas last week in the Peoples Republic of Kaleefornistahn for $2.09.

    All that with rediculous single source refining… by law.

    Now what were you saying about the Saudi’s dictating fuel shortages, to swing elections ?

    I still expect more wildcat drilling and more ethanol and small car boom etc etc and the “Big Three” to transition to “hybrid compacts” and sell them at a $5,000 loss per vehicle, … just like Toyota.

    It’s just good politiking.

    $63 to $67 per barrel is where “Wildcat Drilling” becomes economic.

    ——————

    All the hub-Bub about Suitcase Nukes by Nutjobs.

    Tempest in a teapot … for now.

    “Backpack Nukes” the W54
    http://www.active-duty.com/BackPackNukes.htm

    It IS 40 year old technology.

    How long before little trouble maker’s figure out HOW to make them ?

    Not Long.

    Chaos is what they really like to do.

  7. Our own leaders are siding with the invading barbarians against those who oppose the invasion. Wonderful!

  9. It’s very sad to see that PC multiculturalist censorship is very much alive in the US the same way as it has been in Europe for some time.

    I suggest that you complain about this kind of censorship and make it public if necessary. It makes no sense to block Daily Kos as well because the Conservative and anti-Jihad websites are blocked.

    The habit of the left to silence the dissenting opinions is dangerous and threat to free speech everywhere. It seems that the islamists are not alone in their Jihad against Western values.

  10. Econ-Scott —

    Glad you changed your nickname! Now you’re easy to identify.

    Notice that OPEC is talking about raising prices, but hasn’t done it yet. I think the Saudis might just hold off until after the beginning of November, to give their ol’ buddy in Texas a li’l boost for the midterms.

    But then, I tend to paranoia…

  12. My Dear Baron Bodissey, Your Emminence:

    You said … “Notice that OPEC is talking about raising prices, but hasn’t done it yet.”

    When in the last 6,000 years of recorded human history have Sand Pirates NOT skeemed about raising prices, or restricting supply to drive up prices,

    … or demand extortion of 100 white virgins each year for their harems ?     (afterwhich they didn’t remain virgins for long)

    “Soon the Moors had assembled a massive army and within a few months had conquered most of Gothic Spain. Only isolated pockets of Gothic resistance held out. In the north an enclave only secured its existence by being forced to enter a treaty with the Moors in terms of which the Goths had to hand over 100 White Gothic virgins a year to the Moorish leaders for use in their harems – a painful tribute which continued until 791 AD, when the Goths once enough became strong enough to break the terms of the treaty.”

    http://www.israel-commentary.org/archives/2005_04.html#000451“

  13. My school istrict has blocked blogspot blogs and most others for years. That includes, interestingly enough, my own blog, which was at one point listed as being banned for “adult content” before they added the “forum/blog” category.

  14. This incident not only shows that the people in DOI is biased in what they block, but also the vulnerability it is to have your blog living on blogspot.com, as it often turns out that those that seeks to block certain types of blogs will do it lazily by blocking all of blogspot.com in one go… happened in Pakistan and elsewhere and now at DOI. IMHO bloggers need to diversify and get their own domain to make it harder to block all (or a good portion of blogs) in one fell swoop.

    This I believe is only the beginning more places will start to block bloggers and sites… and if we as bloggers and web-designers and web-developers do something about it we will be under constant attack as well as making as big a stink about such censorship particularly where it is biased as possible, and by moving away from blogspot and onto diverse domains and ISPs it will also be easier to prove bias, whereas it can be hard to prove bias if somebody blocks off blogspot.com as it hits both left, right and center blogs in one go!

  15. Your Search History
    Click a domain to see its search results:
    gatesofvienna.com
    gatesofvienna.us
    gatesofvienna.info
    gatesofvienna.org
    gatesofvienna.net

    You can get the domain name for about $10 a year through Yahoo

    I have an old angelfire blog site and it sometimes gets caught by spam blockers.

    So I got the rights to

    CommittesofCorresponce.com

    I did get it for $5 a year 😉

    I just found out recently the fee also covers using the above URL as a referal, click or paste it in and they go to my angelfire site.

  17. How can we tell if a site has been blocked in different countries?

    Also, folks, the 910 Group (see Gates’ sidebar for icon) is helping on this one; for off public radar discussions and planning on this, send me a note.
    Vsk at vicktorya . com

  18. Please. This doesn’t mean a thing except that the DOI tired of people screwing off while on the job (hey, I do it to, but I realize I’m not exactly on my own time)–paid for by taxpayers, mind you–and the filtering software they’re using isn’t exactly up-to-date.

    Give it time (this is, after all, a government bureaucracy–not exactly efficient, right? Right?). If, after three or four months, most right-of-center/libertarian blogs are blocked and few lefty sites are, then there may be a problem.

    But my money would still be on government indifference/incompetence. After all, aren’t government IT people generally not up to snuff? Elsewise they’d be working in the private sector raking in the dough…

  19. They haven’t blocked us. We get mega hits from many government offices every day, including the senate and house, USDA, IRS, DOJ and many more. We’re a blogspot blog as well.

  21. I suspect, and since I do most of my blog reading through an AF.mil domain, that the blocking is not due to a right/left bias as much as it is by blocking those addresses being frequented by folks on that system that obviously are unrelated to government official business. I’ve been expecting to see all .blogspot.com addresses blocked by our network admin for some time now. Where I come from, you can’t access any gun related sites, knife websites or shopping like Ebay or Amazon.

    Dang government expecting you to get work done during the day instead of keeping up with the blog world!

  23. After the Iraq invasion, there was a similar situation with DoD access. It turned out that they had also installed new filtering software, with default settings. The official answer (and it seemed to work) was that the office in charge would look at all requests to unblock and if the site did not fit the criteria for blocking, they would remove the block. Many conservative sites were originally blocked and quickly got unblocked.

  24. Funny how a misplaced liberal can arbitrarily pull the plug. If this post is accurate, I suppose, Interior believes that visiting conservative blogs on government computers is fraud, waste, and abuse, but, left wing whackoism is “politically correct.”

    Liberals are going to apologize and appease the United States right into a third world country.

    They will not be happy until our great country (and only world power remaining ) is gone.

    The liberalism that Interior has displayed is typical of the apologist mindset.

    Democrat hold overs from the Clinton ear suffer from three mental illness disorders: Hypocrititis, “Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS), and liberalism. Hypocrititis cause the Dem to flip flop in the wind and say one thing but do another. BDS causes the Dems to exhibit intense paranoia, blame others, and practice extreme externalization. They also suffer from Delusional Tolerance liberalism (DTL)which causes them to be tolerant if one supports their causes and ideas. The combination of the three according to Dr. Howard Dean causes the average Democrat to scream and loose all sense of morality, common sense, and human dignity.

    If they perceive that you have crossed them, you better what out.

    The good little censor happy computer geek at Interior who appears to have pulled the conservative plug should be sent to treatment. Unless, the geek pulls the rest of the access including games, porn sites, shopping, movies schedules, and all access to public sites. But I doubt that will happen.

  25. Unfortunately, some net admins are choosy about what sites to block and what to keep. One time, I blocked the NYT site and one liberal here at the office went frantic. She called her son to check the site and it came up and then she got suspicious so I had to unblock it. However, I keep nearly all the liberal sites blocked so I am certain there are a few liberal admin types out there too.

  26. My Dear Baron Bodissey, Your Emminence:

    Captain’s Quarters has in interesting article about a HUGE refinery project in INDIA which will soon process 1.24 million barrels of crude a DAY, of dirty crude (high sulfur, high parafin, gooey stuff) into gasoline for the U.S. and Euro markets.

    http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/008259.php

    They have 100,000 workers on the project day and night.

    No pesky environmental regs to worry about and those 100,000 people work Cheap Cheap Cheap. Benefits ? eh forget it. An unbeatable cost advantage when you can hire Bechtel to design and supervise.

    Bodes well for cheap fuel,

    Bodes Ill for energy security to have such Huge refining facilities , & it will only get bigger, refining facilities on 350 miles from Jihad Central, Pakistahn.

  27. Fantastic(sarcastically)! This is a violation of the First Amendment, plain and simple. Not only are you guys blocked, so am I (if the .blogspot blocking bit has veracity to it).

  28. For what it’s worth, the agency I’m at seems to have full access to everything except porn. There is no government-wide blacklist, liberal or conservative.

  29. Who cares if the government blocks blogspots?
    Damn government workers are supposed to be doing work to earn their wages, not cruising around blogspots wasting taxpayer dollars.
    They can hit the blogs on their home computers.

  35. james higham said…

    What do you mean blocked? I have no trouble getting in.
    10/12/2006 3:20 PM

    James, the block is at their end.

  36. James,

    Yes, you’d have to be in the Interior Department’s network to be affected. Not only that, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which also is in DOI, is on a separate network and is not affected.

  37. No matter who is in the White House, the government is run by liberal bureaucrats. Whether they are leaking secrets, sitting with their feet up on the desk, or goofing off on the computer, these liberals are trying to ignore, slow down, or sabotage Bush administration policies. They are conducting a low-level insurgency. I’m just astounded that the White House seems to be doing nothing to catch these people and either fire them or jail them.

    I’m not saying there is a vast, left-wing conspiracy. But I work across the street from the Capitol Building and is see the knowing looks and hear the jokes and comments. It’s a mindset.

  38. Might I suggest creating a Blog Underground?

    A network of proxies to feed the http requests through so DOI won’t block them.

    Someone here with the resources at their disposal might volunteer? I have not such things.

  40. There’s a mundane explanation for all of this, and there’s no real left-versus-right dichotomy here… it’s simple incompetence on the part of the vendor for categorizing. I’ve posted more details at Sean’s “Banned” badge post.

  44. There is no conspiracy here. I’ll bet a dollar that the netadmin simply blocked the most visited blogs accordng to the server logs. And since most moonbat leftists don’t actually have real jobs…

    There are ways around it. Try a) an anonymous proxy b) using remote desktop or vnc to log into your home computer (may require services from dyndns.org if you have a dynamic ip) or c) creating a vpn tunnel to your home network (and leaving ‘use default gateway on remote network’ checked).

  46. US Gov is blocking many sites. However, most of the computing power is now used for background functions. Security measures demand a ID card installed. If you get up from your desk, you must take the card out. However, if you forget to shut down all open MS programs like Outlook and Explorer then you must shutdown and restart your computer. Once you do this, it takes several minutes to reinitialize the system then it has to reload your personal settings, then it has “announcements” that are worse than junk mail, only approved. Blocked sites are just the tip of the iceburg.

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