Overcoming censorship - new mirror of socialiststeve.me.uk in India
Steve Wallis
an error message or given up waiting for the page to load, and
probably assumed that this was due to a technical glitch or slow
connection between computers on the internet. Even if you live in a
Western country, a supposed democracy, this could be due to internet
censorship.
I view statistics about my websites quite regularly (as anyone can by
clicking on links at the end of my home page), and the detailed
country information strongly indicates censorship, with users in some
countries only able to access certain kinds of files (typically music)
and those in others unable to access the websites at all. The main
pages on my main website (socialiststeve.me.uk) have a lot of buttons
at the top and accessing one of them should result in a lot of hits
from graphic files for each page. Most countries have the same number
of pages as hits, suggesting that only music has been downloaded (but
perhaps the graphics files haven't been instead, as happened once on
my mobile).
I was quite relaxed about this censorship until earlier this month I
discovered that uncensored access to my main website was now only
possible from Europe, the USA and Canada. It occurred to me that
censors were trying to use my websites against me, as a subtle
strategy to engender racism trying to aid those who claim that non-
Westerners are less intelligent than white people. More to the point,
censorship could hinder struggles for democratic socialism. Perhaps it
is easier to do censorship at the servers connecting continents
together than in each individual country. Islands are probably easier
to censor than countries linked to by land (there have been no
accesses at all from the Irish Republic this month or last, unless
they are included in the European Union counts) and accesses from New
Zealand are negligeable compared to Australia. The pattern of accesses
is slightly different later in the month with Australia and China
having slightly more hits than pages suggesting that censors in those
countries are reading my stuff to decide what to let through!
The increase in censorship lately is probably due to me posting my New
Good Intentions Manifesto (you can find a link to it from the top of
my main website home page or go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PRsocialism/message/161).
This provides a coherent analysis of my philosophy, with a scientific
basis, as an alternative to Marxism.
This censorship may not be all bad - some socialists got elected in
Ireland in the recent elections, including the Socialist Party's Joe
Higgins to the European Parliament (as one of three from Dublin); the
SP also won some council seats as did the People Before Profit
Alliance which included the Socialist Workers Party. [As an aside, the
form of proportional representation used there is single transferable
vote, which I advocate with my Foundation for PR-based Socialism; this
gives the left a chance but would hinder fascists as they are unlikely
to get many transfers from other candidates.] My ideas can be a threat
to such Marxists but not those who want to think themselves rather
than toe a party line. In the long run, they need to incorporate ideas
such as mine to stand any chance of coming to power, but it was
certainly good news they did well, as a partial counterweight to
successes of some right-wing parties across Europe.
Anyway, to undermine censorship, I have set up an Indian "mirror" (at
www.socialiststeve.in) containing the same files as those on my main
website (www.socialiststeve.me.uk). Try one if the other fails. [One
of my other websites has recently been hacked into; if anybody spots
any discrepancies between the two sites, please let me know.]
Other ways to deal with censorship are suggested on the page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship (and links on the
left hand side provide translations to other languages), with proxy
servers a suggestion. I get quite a lot of accesses to my websites
from "unknown" countries, and suspect that they are accesses using
proxies.
On the topic of internet censorship, emails may be censored as well as
web accesses. The US Department of Homeland Security ensured that
internet service providers use programs designed to filter out spam to
check for political keywords too (and I think they use artificial
intelligence software to read the emails rather than just scanning for
keywords). When I created a hotmail account (located in the USA even
if you put it at hotmail.co.uk) I found that messages sometimes
appeared normally, went in the spam folder, bounced back with an error
or disappeared into hyperspace! Probably due to consumer pressure, the
latter two possibilities may not happen any more (but if anybody has
more information on this I'd be pleased to hear it).
--
Steve Wallis (Manchester, England)
Preferred email address: revolutionary...@yahoo.co.uk
Super-blog: http://www.twitter.com/socialiststeve
Other blogs: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/steve-wallis-socialist-blog,
http://blog.myspace.com/galaxiasteve
My socialist website: http://www.socialiststeve.me.uk (Indian mirror:
www.socialiststeve.in)
My pages at Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1038291480,
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/galaxiasteve and Bebo:
http://www.bebo.com/SteveW519
Founder, Ethical Capitalism Network: http://www.ethicalcapitalism.net
Founder, Foundation for Proportional Representation-based Socialism:
http://www.PRsocialism.org
Founder, Revolutionary Platform Network: http://www.revolutionaryplatform.net
My revolutionary socialist band, Galaxia:
http://www.galaxiamusic.net,http://www.myspace.com/galaxiamusic,
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Galaxia-a-revolutionary-socialist-band/84310120180,
http://www.bebo.com/galaxiamusic.
My socialist band, Red Day: http://www.red-day.net,
http://www.myspace.com/reddayband,http://www.facebook.com/pages/Red-Day/27468311341
Author, "Revolution Destroyed? Have I ensured that a world socialist
revolution will never happen?": http://www.revolutiondestroyed.net
For discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories, go to
http://www.revolutionaryplatform.net/forum/index.php?board=89