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Thursday, April 15, 2010

Censorship by disruption

Ohio's top court has forbidden enforcement of a judge's order barring the press from covering a trial until he was ready, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Judge Keith P. Muchlfeld wanted the blackout until a jury has been seated in a related criminal trial.

Muchlfeld evidently is an admirer of European law.

Microsoft's denial that it participated in Kyrgystan censorship conflicts with the facts, insists Forbes' blogger Jeffrey Carr/. [I checked that URL carefully and the link should work, but it doesn't. I searched Forbes.com and could pull up nothing about Carr or his blog. Guess you'll have to try Google or another search engine.]

Censorship via disruption. I wanted to enable ads on this site in order to gauge the degree of censorship of this blog. Plus, it should be noted, my expenses are non-zero. I got a confirmation today but the instructions seem hopelessly complicated, including closed loops. No ads have appeared as of this writing.

I also decided to enable ads at another blog in another Blogger account but when I got to my dashboard page found that AdSense had already been enabled, without my consent. Still, I went through the routine of enablement. Ads appeared immediately on that blog, without my having ever received a confirmation email. I tried to alter the settings in order to move the ads to a different position but ran into the closed-loop problem again, and was unable to do so.

These kinds of hassles are typical for me, and are, I suggest, a method of censorship by disruption. There may always be some pat explanation. But there are simply too many instances in need of pat explanations to be credible.

Why don't I take better security precautions, you may wonder. Experience tells me that I'd be wasting my time. Adversaries simply use up my time on security drek, which they are well able to bypass.

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