In an effort to make the CTers happy, RR has blocked their subscribers from a bunch of web sites, The best news is Alex Jones 2 sites have been blocked, so now he can wax ecstatic about the plots.....no doubt we will hear about soon, on C2C or something similar.....Now I have noted that certain other sites are also blocked, including firearms related historical sites, ie: not selling any guns, just pictures and histories. Since I am in the antique gun biz, this is somewhat strange....I have to state, that even though Alex is controversial, the bed wetters and politically correct idiots at Time-Warner need to stop trying to censor the net....This is really unacceptable, I do not need some whiner at an ISP telling me what I cannot see....If Bush did this, the media would go berserk, so I wonder why no one else has mentioned this in the supposed "real media"....

This was discovered by this writer on 10-04-05, and noted on C2C on 10-05-05.......Has anyone else noticed this??? (RR has confirmed for me their blockage of "Controversial" web sites...via a 3rd party..)

Dale in Ala

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"Ad astra per aspera"

Bluecoat currently claims that my own website (and everyone else who uses the local Mac user's group as their ISP) is pornography.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

What are CTers? What is Roadrunner and Bluecoat?

Pete

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PJE

There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy.

RoadRunner is a DSL ISP running on Cable TV lines here in Birmingham...(Alabama)

Dale in Ala

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"Ad astra per aspera"

Bluecoat is a service that categorizes websites. You can get software that will read their categorizations and block browsers on your computer (or network) from accessing inappropriate sites. For example, from this office I can't get to pornographic, hacker-related, or political websites because they're blocked (or, more precisely, sites that have been categorized as such, correctly or not).

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

"CTers" is the local shorthand for "Conspiracy Theorists".....BTW They are foaming at the mouth over this......

Dale in Ala

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"Ad astra per aspera"

Okay, I use Roadrunner, and this is slightly peeving me off. I use it here in Corpus Christi, TX, and so far I've loved how fast and effective it is, and how low my problems have been.

To hear that they would censor anything irks me. An entire ISP deciding what to censor and what not to censor makes me irritated, especially when I'm 20, nearing the age of 21, and I should be able to view practically anything I wish to (limited at Rights to Privacy, of course).

If I want to look at anything pornographic, I should be able to. If I want to look at guns, whether to buy (legally), sell (legally), or look over histories of (I doubt I could do this illegally), I should be able to. This is incredibly disheartening news, and seems slightly fascist (though instead of the government telling you what you can and can't look at or do, it's a corporation).

Bah, sorry for the minor rant here, I'm not really adding anything besides an editorial, but I had to pipe up.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles...nercensors.htm

This is his claim on this issue....

Dale

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"Ad astra per aspera"

It is about time someone started policing the web

Pornography degrades all who touch it, funds terrorism and may bring the final apocolypse

What we need now is some decent software that will block those obscene news items that criticise the government. Criticising the government is running the country down and a blow to morale.

We have seen what these so called free thinkers do, drugs, rock and roll, free love. It is time to put an end to this pernicious cancer once and for all. Censorship is your friend, you will love and adore it

It was good to here that Yahoo has been helping catch serious offenders in China (see here)


Wow I just managed to keep a straight face there spouting that lot off

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Moderations in purple

Fame, glory, adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

To report a post (even this one) to the moderation team, click the reporting icon in the upper-right corner of the post:
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Are you sure that this isn't fall-out from the Level3-Cogent dispute? I've see Roadrunner customers complaining about large pieces of the Net being unreachable.

Cogent Network Status

Date: 10/06/2005

On a Roadrunner status page I see:

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

I personally think it is the cogent/level 3 thing, but since Alex loves to rant und rave, I could not resist putting this up....

Alex has a so called camp listed in Arab Alabama, I live near that town, so I did some checking.....Wal Mart Area Distribution Center...passed off as a camp in a Sat.Pix... So I have no faith in his rants anymore, btw: Later he claimed that Wal Mart is in on it, and part of the grand plot....

Dale

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"Ad astra per aspera"

http://www.prisonplanet.com




Woo-woos, sir! Thousands of them!

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All the woo-woos come out on the internet. Someday a real mod's gonna come down and wash all the scum off of this message board.

For what it's worth...

I implemented the web filtering solution at the rather large corporation where I work, so I've got quite a bit of experience with them. You can generally get around any category-based web filter by using a web proxy. Since web proxies include translation sites (like babelfish) it is unlikely that RoadRunner has blocked these. On the other hand, if they're using some sort of active content-based filter that wouldn't work--but since it's rather difficult to imagine what sort of keywords would indicate "controversy", I doubt they're doing that.

This seems very odd to me. What would make an ISP decide to block its users from wide swaths of the web? It seems like that would serve only to give advantage to their competitors.

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That's not an astronaut, it's a TV comedian! And he was just using space travel as a metaphor for beating his wife.

I noticed some on GLP talking about this. Some people replied that they were on Roadrunner and weren't having problems. It seems like it might just be a regional thing. This could have been one person's decision to block these sites. Most likely it will be reversed soon as people complain about it.

Frankly, I don't see it as a big loss.

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"Eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy"
------------Mark Twain

"Women are like Voltron. The more you can hook up, the better it gets."

Great, now every time I watch Zulu I'll be snickering at the the tensest parts, imagining hoards of crystal-wielding new-agers. Thanks for that, Kemal.

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"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery

Roadrunner is my ISP, and I cannot access the site(s) in question. Hopefully this is simply a result of the aforementioned dispute. I loathe Jones and his tiresome, nonsensical PCT claims, and generally have no desire to visit his website (unless I'm interested in viewing something specific for debunking purposes). If RR attempted to arbitrarily decide what I can or cannot view, I'd drop them in a heartbeat even if it meant going back to dial-up.

i would tend to agree that it is more likely the level 3/cogent issue. the ISP is not liable for content you choose to view at home, so they have no reason to limit your access. i had roadrunner when in florida (via cable modem) and never had any issues.

taks

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goodbye richard pryor :(...

I thought AOL was the worst offender by far in this respect...can someone tell me about what AOL does? I heard it's not actually the web, but their own little world, with only approved sites and so on...Is that true? Personally , I don't care for AOL's advertising methods and would never use them as an ISP

Pete

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PJE

There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy.

What AOL does is charge people more for service that is of a lower quality than real ISPs.

It started back in the 1980s, when home-accessible networks were being developed outside of ARPANet. Others of this ilk were Prodigy and CompuServe.

When the net was opened up in 1995, these providers managed to hang on by claiming special content and services. An aggressive and often deceptive advertising campaign by AOL, banking on the general ignorance of the American public about the WWW in particular and computers in general, paid off.

What was really hilarious about these three was during 1995, before they became de facto ISPs, they claimed to provide a user with "net access", but only to their own proprietary domains, which were inaccessible to non-AOL, etc., net surfers.

Why AOL is still is business was best described by H.L. Mencken many years ago,

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A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

I'm on RR and don't seem to have a problem getting to those sites. I guess it's over with, whatever it was.

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You're a coward and a liar and a thOOF - Bart Sibrel

I think the whole thing stinks, but I don't like calling it censorship. I reserve the term for the government prohibiting something. I think you should be able to look at porn, guns, or donkeys mating if you want to, but I also think that an ISP doesn't have to help you do it. The powers that be didn't say no one can look at subject matter X, you can still use a diffferent ISP, buy magazines, visit in person, etc. to view such material. If I present a web site, I won't be having any advertisements for KKK meetings or porn, but I wouldn't act to deny others the right to partake of it elsewhere.

Yeah, I can now access them as well.

Also, last I heard AOL still used proxy servers, which means that instead of being directly connected to the internet via your ISP you are connected to AOL's servers which then filter the internet to you, if they wanted to they could change how the content of a webpage looked to people using AOL. Many people are uncomfortable with this, it doesn't help that AOL charges more then most ISPs for inferior service, their 'high speed' is slower then the company I buy from (as in, drastically slower) and costs about twice as much, further more, their tech support leaves much to be desired.

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I agree with you completely. I also say it is time to start removing double plus ungood content from the dictionary.

Aporetic

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Aporetic

Interesting thread, eveyone, but isn't this forum restricted to conspiracy theories related to astronomy and space travel?

CJSF

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Two years ago moved from my town
I was looking up past the city lights
But the city lights got in my way

See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
Just a guy made of dots and lines

-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants

As far as I can tell, Alex is fair game because of the UFO Alien connection, and on the BABB he was lumped in with the rest of the Conspiracy Nuts.....I think that we are intersted in the epistemological methods of these types, as they all seem to use the same style of reasoning....I cannot recall a whacko theory in the past that did not use the same arguments that appear somewhere on the sites of this ilk....ie: accepting as fact some assertion made by someone else, and then using this to promote their arguments....So far I have not seen or heard anything from the CTers that resemble any logical assertions.....

Dale in Ala

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"Ad astra per aspera"

Here is what happened to Road Runner.

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"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery

Christopher, this is a discussion group that has agreed to a set of rules. This is not a policy affecting people who had no involvement. Nothing prevents you from posting whatever you want here other than that we would exclude you if you broke the rules - our rules.

Soooo..... the answer would be "no" it's not restricted to astronomy/space??? A policy affecting people with no involvement? In what? Why would I be prevented from posting?

CJSF

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Two years ago moved from my town
I was looking up past the city lights
But the city lights got in my way

See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
Just a guy made of dots and lines

-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants

Prior to the merge, discussions of general conspiratorial claims (e.g. HAARP, "chemtrails", etc.) were allowed in Against the Mainstream even though they had no direct bearing upon space and astronomy. Some latitude was also given back in the days of the Planet X forum to other EOTWAWKI topics such as the Mayan calendar and so forth. The Conspiracy Theories section here on the new and improved BAUT can still accommodate those sorts of things.