bt public phone net terminals are censoring a croatian political satire mag called 'feral tribune', a more rabelaisian version of 'private eye'. try to log on and you get a 'banned- tasteless' message .

Anyone know what kind of software filter system they use?

As these filter / blocking things are often too shotgun style they must be blocking access to loads of sites with 'legitimate' content - would be great to get a list of sites that BT are blocking for these public terminals.


(btw a friend used a few of these on mayday to access this site :-)

it is vital we get as many ideas across as possible, esp on the years 1642-59, even from groups we may not like /swp etc/.

read the works of perry anderson to see how our interpretations of this era still affect the current attitudes of radicalism. check too 'the rise and fall of revolutionary england' by maclachlan

Is it possible that it is just a mistake or technical fault which prevented your article being posted? Given that a lot of puerile or pointless stuff is posted here and left on the newswire, it seems unlikely that you were censored as such (i'm not saying that your posts are puerile or pointless). Also, why would they leave your subsequent postings on if they wanted to cenosr you? Perhaps the article was too long, or perhaps it just got lost in cyberspace? I'm not that technical, but this seems more likely.

dear readers, below i forward what i send to my fellow imcuk collectivists, emails suddenly seem to end up in the newswire. i've hidden the rest of matt's postings but leave this one - reactions welcome. andi

> i think that profr@fuckmicrosoft guy has posted
> a lot of crap and now has cc'ed all the mails to
> us into the newswire which i find a bit
> provocative. well, that's the way he seems to
> work. waco nutter bobby deaf israel has started
> again, too. i think we're getting in the midst
> of an australian and an american nutter who
> clearly have the resources to use the web
> extensively and try to make any imc newswire
> their own. i think we should categorically ban
> both whatever they post. i've hidden all but one
> of profr@fuckmicrosoft's postings (i left the
> one where a debate kinda started, and i'll post
> this email as a comment into that story, too).
> still, i have hidden all of booby deaf waco.
>
> profr@fuckmicrosoft or  mattdw@iprimus.com.au is
> matt o'dwyer on 0417 531 548 (australia). he is
> the guy who is claimed to have mailed death
> threats to a certain Ernesto Cienguegos from 'La
> Voz de Aztlan' who IN OUR NEWSWIRE offered a
> reward of 25000$ to reveal who is behind the
> profr@fuckmicrosoft postings (id=5249). we
> haven't hidden THAT one. 'La Voz de Aztlan'
> sounds good but they publish articles which
> provoke accusations of antisemitism, see
>  http://aztlan.net/razajews.htm, and have a
> campaign against the imc going, see
>  http://aztlan.net/threats.htm check as well the
> action they took with australian police:
> http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-tech/2001-May/011872.html
>
> waco nutter bobby deaf israel is a very clear
> case, and matt o'dwyer even complains in story
> 5610 that we don't hide THAT guy's crap. funny,
> as i've hidden at least ten weirdies of that
> bobby guy and even in the oh-so-nice global indy
> site they've cut the guy out. still funny to see
> that both seemingly are on a wavelength here...
>
> in the end i think we either shouldn't hide
> anything, stick with our editorial guidelines,
> or we better start a new round of discussion on
> the EG's in the collective. personally i think
> we should stick with the news item criteria, and
> get a ban on those two guys.
> andi
>
> >as for the prof...@fuckmicrosoft one, true,
> >he's been a pain in the ass for a while and his
> >latest one threatening us is one step further
> >in his personal campaign against indy-uk. it's
> >a tricky one
> >jordi
>
> >>I personally think we should relax a bit but
> >>must remove the obvious non-stories and
> >>explain why - this does leave a gap between
> >>why we don't remove everything that is not
> >>news and why we pick on the nutters.
> >>cheers tony

Um, first of all I'm not too sure how you'd stop them from posting unless you contact every ISP they could use and try to ban them, and then hope they're not intelligent enough to get on the 'Net without an ISP, and they won't use mates to post by proxy for them.

Secondly, if you start censoring people there's got to be public announcements of this with full explanations of why you're doing it. We can't have people whose opinions we disagree with banned, otherwise we're all just hypocrites. If they're spamming the boards with uninformative posts to the tune of "This is a silly post, your mum sucks!" then I can see why you'd want to stop them. But even if they post pro-Nazi statements, to censor them would be extremely hypocritical as Indymedia is meant to be an independent portal of FREE SPEECH!

...showing all the hidden articles.This way it won't be censoring, since everyone may still read the articles if they wish to do so.

Daniel

If you go to the admin page there is a link to all the mails sent to the site - the IMC crew can not delete a posting - only hide it off the front page.

As for free speech - this is an endless discussion and one that i have read good responses to from this site.

For me there is a line where 'free speech' becomes silly and counter productive - if this site was really filled with rascist rantings - then it would no longer be what it set out to be and peopel like me would stop coming here to read alternative news.

They seem to have got a good balance and don't hide the debate when it happens against them. The newsire was starting to fill up with these meaningless rants so it was time to clear it up - but i would like to see reasons posted.

jen