*.wordpress.com censored by order of the PTA

The heavy hand of the govt. strikes again. First they came for blogspot, but the teeming masses said nothing, and moved on to wordpress.com. Now they’ve come for wordpress – where will they go now? Tee Emm writes to to the Society Against Internet Censorship in Pakistan:

Just for the information of people on this list, TW (Transworld), a new carrier in Pakistan (operating its own submarine cable) is blocking *.wordpress.com. As one of their bulk bandwidth customers, we have been told that they have done so at the request of PTA.

Interestingly, the same is not blocked on the PIE/ITI/FLAG network that is operated by PTCL, the incumbent.

I’ve almost given up blogging on my telecom related blog not because I don’t know about the workarounds but in protest. I know this is self-defeating and not going to help anyone but until I find time to set up an independent site for the blog, I am not going to post.

Once all the major blogging services are safety locked up than individual sites will be targeted too. Ironically, this website about Internet Censorship in Pakistan is also hosted on wordpress, and is now no longer accessible in most of Pakistan.

Weblog censorship aside, recently my ISP censored the Dawn newspaper’s site. This is the website of Pakistan’s most popular English newspaper. Ironically, the physical newspaper was still being published, just the website was blocked. What the web censorship of the newspaper really brought to mind was what exactly is being censored in print.