According to that ever-reliable font of human knowledge Recess Monkey the Home Office has installed a firewall which bans Home Office civil servants from viewing my blog. Can this be true? I wonder if they have banned the Mail on Sunday too.
UPDATE: I'm told that the Home Office has assured the Times Diary that they have not banned my site. Another scoop for Recess Monkey which turned out not to be...
39 comments:
Sorry to mention this, but this blog is a bit heavy with "extras". Some firewalls and other security software exclude ads, information gathering and swf files, all of which you have in entirely benign forms.
Government and quasi-government orgs have notoriously zealous IT departments. Combine these two facts and you get trouble.
That could be it.
I don't think it is correct that Home Office civil servants are banned from accessing your blog. At their homes on on their own computers I suspect they can pretty much look at what they want...
It must be the unfavourable comparisons here of John Prescott and John Reid. Next-up there will be a comparitive chipolata commentary and Mr Wreck-it will have a fit and provide the SNP with a neat little by-election.
New Labour's brave new world eh?
What's next in their sights I wonder?
If recess monkey had more then a monkeys brain. And you Iain were not so happily making a name for yourself apeasing the BBC and climbing up the slippery poll of Conservative politics you might gain some real insite into what is going on in this once great free half libertarian country of ours.
You are fortunate for now at least that it is only your blog that has been banned. When Gordon Brown becomes THE LEADER of THE PARTY all betts are off.
We are being watched and watched very well by the Home Office and it is not because hardly anyone there is interested in Conservative party politics or the West Ham v Man U result.
You have been warned. Take it seriously.
I have a friend *coughs* who accesses this blog from a Home Office computer quite regularly and has found that it can sometimes be incredibly slow to download... so slow sometimes as to give the impression it might be blocked. Same with Guido's blog.
I shall ask this friend to try to access it tomorrow and see what happens.
Well I for one am reassured to hear that, at long last, the Home Office is taking decisive action to deter subversion of the state.
I suggest a freedom of information request to the home office for a list of all the sites they have banned. Who knows what you might trawl up - and since they're banned from this site they won't know what your up to !
Get even ! (or get Guido to do it.)
Consider yourself honoured, Iain
Auntie Flo'
Did you see the Home Office stunt this evening, curtesy of the BBC?
Coppers arrive outside a wharehouse; they rush in and drag out illegal immigrants.
Voice over tells us it's part of a home Office CRACKDOWN on employers exploiting illegals. We can all sleep easily in our beds.
(Cameramen go home, and so do the illegals when they're released without charge.)
The employers? I bet they got a good talking to.
Meanwhile the Gordon Brown Roadshow goes on and on. We are going to get a Labour Party Political Broadcast on the BBC every night for six weeks. No questioning, no adverse comment. Just a slick package of Brown's day on his triumphant "campaign".
How do the fuckers get away with it?
Iain - I can't believe the good doctor would do that to you. He's not the sort to bear grudges.
Why aren't all those cushy bastards working? They shouldn't be reading any blogs in the office!
You'll be telling me they all get inflation-proofed pensions when they retire!
If this is true it is patthetic. as soon as they get home they will check your blog to see why they have been baned so more of them will read it.
Big brother labour government
I read it at work no problems. Although sometimes the ActiveX controls hidden here sometimes cause it to be blocked, just keep refreshing until it loads
I tend to agree with wrinkled weasel that it's more likely to be some of the active content appearing on your blog page rather than the blog itself.
If this is true, then you have just received the best possible publicity for free.
judith said...
Why aren't all those cushy bastards working? They shouldn't be reading any blogs in the office!
LOL...fair point!
But we do get a meal break when we are encouraged to access current affairs type sites (no, seriously, we are)
I expect that the sort who would malinger on the internet during working hours would probably not be hanging round here.
*shakes head earnestly*
It is just that their computers are a bit primitive and even their email system sensitive to attachments. We have not yet been annexed to China...
I do nothing else but look at Iain's blog to watch for signs that I have still got a job. He seems to have access to better information than me.
But Dawn is right - the other Scotch god-like creature would not do anything as petty as ban the blog of a 5th rate Tory party blogger. If he had a grudge he'd send the boys round!
There is also the issue of exactly how a firewall level corporate or government system blocks or censors a particular blog or website.
Spy Blog, for example, gets
censored by WebSense , in a particularly nasty and inept way, in that a message is displayed to a user of the system, which implies that Spy Blog somehow contains "Illegal or Questionable" content.
This is tantamount to libel.
It will be interesting to see if
something similar has really happened to this Ian Dale's Diary blog as well.
Apologies for mistyping "Iain"
I think we need to stop this nonsense about John Reid. He's gone, finished, he is dead, he is deceased as a politician. He is no more. And the same goes for Tony - barring a few whimpers over the next few weeks.
Gordon is on his way to the top of the heap. History is being re-written as we speak and all the mistakes of the past ten years will be seen to be the fault of David Cameron when he was an adviser to Norman Lamont.
I, as a person of the female persuasion, will make an ideal deputy leader because I am a woman and I say "womany" things like - er, well - let's have a Minister for the Family. And, er, well that's it really.
So elect me as deputy to Gordon and I will try my hardest to get Patsy a job 'cos she supported me. (She's not at all bossy really - well no more than me!)
Bebopper said: "How do the fuckers get away with it?"
In part because Iain Dale recommends in the DT that Cameron lies low for the next eight weeks and leaves the field to Gordon Brown.
Why give him a daily free shy at the coconuts? The Conservatives ought to be out there spoiling the show.
Bloody hell, anonymous! You still up?
As tonight's duty researcher I can assure you Iain is (as we speak) dreaming of ways to persuade David Cameron to announce some policies.
they should be working not swanning around various blogs
I tried to access your blog from the pay-as-you-go net access at Stansted airport and it was blocked for having a 'porn' rating.
Absurd but true. Perhaps that is the same reason for other places like the HO, as really, there's nothing on here that is beyond likely to scare the horses is there?
I agree with the non paranoid HO civil servant at 10.48pm. Your blog is one of the slowest to download. There is far too much excess garbage on the front page that could easily be removed to elsewhere via a simple one-stop link. Think about it and stop wasting our phone money and adding to the great global warming debate as we sit idly waiting for your pearls of wisdom to appear. These same points were made in these pages a few weeks ago by a number of your contributors, but you seem not to be listening.
Perhaps they have banned you on the basis that they you are too amenable to the establishment and they fear the steady rythm of amiable chit chat will lull their worker bees into a deep slumber ? .
Which would be nice .
(...well its hard to see what anyone could take any serious exception to anyway........)
John Reid Fears Iain Dale!
How about this statement that might wake someone up.
Gordon Brown is a Stalinist who will change this country to an extent that will shock and amase even members of THE PARTY.
Some of them are wise enough to know it or feel the same, but are too intimidated to even think about saying so. Like Lenin, sorry Tony Blair.
Iain,
You're still accessible from HM Revenue & Customs (what you can see, you can tax...). As others have said though, your blog is a bit slow to download.
Iain,
My computer sometimes does not like your site and stops it loading. Can you have your site checked?
My employer blocks all blogging domains regardless of content.
They do this even in the public internet cafe now. The BBC ones used to be readable but now they are blocked too, which is pretty mean because they are largely harmless and Evan Davis and Robert Peston are actually vocationally useful.
I could start whingeing now about political censorship like a left liberal but I prefer the right wing view that the computers are my employer's property and they can do this with them if they want to, I am always free to view blogs on my own computer at home.
Anonymous at 2:49 said:
"My computer sometimes does not like your site and stops it loading."
My computer does likewise. What good taste my computer has - better than mine
From within the deep dark recesses of the police state, we also like to pop over to your blog occasionally, if only to laugh at verity's rantings. Of late, however, your page has taken longer and longer to load up. Way too many added extras, I fear.
Must dash - spymaster general approaches...
Untwist those knickers!
Most public sector organisations are supplied with so-called 'blacklists' by third-party suppliers...usually the same ones that provides the firewall/proxy hardware and provides the ongoing support.
I deal with several requests a month to unblock websites that, until a few days previously, had been openly available. The updates are automatic. If there's a business case (possibly doubtful in the case of the blogosphere to be honest) then we override the auto setting and allow it.
I agree with some posters who say it's you content. You have so many feeds, any one of which could be on the blacklist through no fault of your own. The site could be being 'throttled' to save bandwidth...for example we don't block streaming video or audio sites, but the protocol is restricted to a measly amount of kps, thus rendering it too slow to use.
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Just noticed your update. So were you banned at all?
SDM
So, Iain, why did you believe that utter c%*t Recess Monkey, you know, the one who posted that Thatcher was dead?
Frankly I have come to expect more intellectual rigour from you than this, plus a journalist's sense of what's going on.
How many more times are you going to be fucked over?
what do you write that would merit a ban I mean who the fuck are you, are you dangerous or zummit, one o thay arrrrr terorrist buggers
get real& keep it real mate
Don't worry about "Retard Monkey".
Are you "China Ban Free"?
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