This blog is restricted, apparently. Blocked. Censored. By the Department of Defense and also by the German MoD. That’s what we heard from a few people who tried reading KoW at work. Why would anybody do that?
There could be several explanations. Our first thought was that hundreds of thousands of DoD employees are spending hours every day reading our content and commenting on posts, thus blocking bandwidth, wasting taxpayer money, and impairing the nation’s ability to win wars. Maybe. What else could it be? Some of us spent enough time in the United States working on defense issues to believe that DoD doesn’t just censor a blog run by academics (I’m a little less sure in Germany, though). Arlington and Bonn are not Teheran or Pyongyang, after all.
So my guess is we’re having a technical issue here. A software that blocks all blogs based on, say, WordPress code? Probably not. Or some mashup issue? Perhaps deep down in our archive is one of those four-letter words that would be beeped out in an American radio program?
Now, if you’re the guy who blocked us, or if you know the answer to this question, let us know in the comments or drop us a note. We’d like to fix this.
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Maybe it’s because you haven’t found out yet that it is Berlin, not Bonn? ;-)
Just kidding.
On a recent trip to the German PRT in Kunduz, had to find out that my blog was blocked – but so was every blog hosted on WordPress.com, typepad.com and some other blog hosting services, plus Twitter. J6 are are special kind of people everywhere (met some PAO’s who had a hard time to convince the J6 guys that they’d need internet access especially during blackout in an emergency).
Seems they’d like to ban the bad, bad Internet in general. But still, looking forward to an explanation why you’re not accessible…
First it was MPRI not including us in their review of social media, now this latest outrage. Don’t they know who we are? We’re in the Green Paper and everything…
Personally, I’ll be boycotting the DoD webpage until this is resolved :)
Tomorrow I’ll check on this while at the Pentagon.
Works fine at NATO… (SHAPE anyways)
The painful and simple truth is, that most of the PC´s in the DoD have no access to the Internet at all ;-) But don´t worry, if there is a relevant article on KoW, it will be printed out and distributed via the “Postmappe”.
Banned in the 10th Mountain Division. By the way, we allow Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and have a very popular blog run by our commanding general–but no Kings of War.
IMHO is is due to the very un-PC nom de guerre of the blog itself–masculine-only royalty and, dare I say it, war? Haven’t you heard that our current administration prefers a more conciliatory lexicon (” ‘terrorists’ and ‘islamist extremists’ attacking innocents etc.” is now referred to benignly as “disgruntled, misunderstood, oppressed (by the evil US or more specifically by the Bush/Cheney cabal), yada yada yada being somehow involved in a ‘man caused disaster’ “.
Perhaps if you change your name to something along the lines of “persons of royal and noble blood having more than a passing interest in incidents where evil powerful “Western” countries do the bidding of even more evil profiteering corporations to oppress the Itaqu”?
I checked with my contacts in the Pentagon.
Apparently it is blocked. Weird, but as the guys explained to me, because the site is a “.org” and a “foreign” website, those two flags probably kicked off the logarithm and it was auto-blocked. No particular bias against KoW, just a mindless computer at work.
I checked with several people, they have the same answer and opinion.
Now, sadly, I have to disagree with Sascha. In the DoD, almost everyone has a computer hooked up to the internet, even in classified spaces (don’t worry, classified computers are not hooked up to the internet and are “air-gapped” from unclassified networks/systems).
Now, if you want to talk about internet access and availability within the MoD, well, that is another story. When I was an exchange officer in an MoD think tank, the philosophy was; “If you can get out, THEY can get in.” True, but this reflected a risk avoidance approach rather that a risk management approach that is embraced by the DoD.
NO kidding-when visiting JSCSC Shrivenham, don’t count on internet.
Depends which bit, C Jr…
True-from a conference attendee perspective I meant to add.
Still have access here at USNA.edu. Not DOD wide I guess, or just a snafu?
I would guess your “.edu” extension might be a player here.
You will be gratified to know that the Canadian Forces internet firewall permits me to goof off at work (sorry, make that “engage in professional development activities”) by reading KoW.
Some advantages to being a civilian at least.
It’s a technical issue and not content. The phrase I heard was something like DSN poisoning.
Thanks Steve – sounds painful…
IT guy weighing in here:
It’s entirely likely that the DoD and the German MoD use a proxy to grab web pages for their internal computers. This proxy will have a list of sites that it is set to deny access to. For one reason or another, kingsofwar.org is in their deny list. Sites can be reclassified, either locally by an IT department, or by request of the company that provides the proxy service.
It’s a technical issue, but it’s content related; the word ‘war’, an automated classification service, and suddenly no access to kingsofwar.org
Hope that clarifies things!
DNS poisoning. Someone will have managed to get an ISP’s caching DNS nameserver to accept an answer from something posing as an authoritative nameserver for kingsofwar.org.uk, so it then serves that answer to people looking for you. As the answer could be any arbitrary Web site, there are plenty of possibilities for what might have triggered somebody’s security policy.
And you scoffers thought my surmise about the un-PC nature of the (inherently evil and unacceptably bellicose vestige of the Cheney-led neocons) term “war” was just silly….. ;-)
What I was hearing was that is was not content related, but someone about the ISP that hosts the site.
Thanks everybody, both for comments and emails. Your help is much appreciated. We run the latest WordPress.org CMS on a GoDaddy.com server. So I’d be surprised if it’s an ISP issue. If you can easily request reclassification from within the MoD in question, go for it — needless to say that we think debate and increased visibility is a good thing.