Internet blocking

[peterbj7]

Contrary to what they have been saying, BTL are increasing their blocking.  I have indisputable evidence of several sites related to VPNs which are now totally blocked, though a few weeks ago all were working.

[peterbj7]

It's actually far worse than I thought.  I have spent the past couple of hours working with a VPN company, who say that BTL seem to have pulled out all the stops to suppress all VPNs.  They have succeeded in suppressing most current VPN services, and it seems that they won't stop until they have killed them all.  In the past couple of weeks a great deal has changed.

[deadserious]

With any luck, Irish Digicell will fix the problem when they take over the company.

[peterbj7]

The more I look into this the more insidious it appears.  To quote from Wikipedia "In some cases, Internet censorship may involve deceit. In such cases the censoring authority may block content while leading the public to believe that censorship has not been applied. This may be done by having the ISP provide a fake "Not Found" error message upon the request of an Internet page that is actually found but blocked (see 404 error for details)".

This exactly describes BTL's current activities.  Despite the PM's statement that under national ownership internet blocking would be stopped, there is ample evidence that BTL are actively devoting considerable resources (man-hours and probably money) to increasing its scope.  I'm not going to state specifics here, but in the past week several actions have been initiated that potentially have a huge effect on users.

I wonder whether the PM is aware of and supports BTL's activities, or whether there is a "fifth column" at work reporting to another master.  It may well be that the PM (who I am sure does not have the technical knowledge to understand what is going on, and that is not a criticism) isn't checking it out as a user for himself, and is simply being lied to.

Whatever the details, there is no doubt that our internet service is being fundamentally degraded and interfered with, despite the hype of "higher transmission speeds for the same money".

[klcman]

so all that rhetoric aside, have the transsmission speeds doubled since last week, as promised?

[deadserious]

I don't know about double, but I found the internet access where I was to be completely adequate speed-wise and the owner of the connection was purchasing the 1MB/512k connection.  I was getting at least that down and less up.

The blocking on the other hand was again irritating and forced me to find several work-arounds to be able to keep in contact with the office while there.  I got creative but it worked well.