Saturday, 27 September 2003

Blocking the Blogosphere

I just returned from another enjoyable trip to San Antonio. After the last trip, I blogged about having rather restricted web access at the training center, and I promised a report on what blogs were blocked. Here’s that report.

I’m not going to say what software was doing the blocking, just in case there’s some sort of absurd “Intellectual Property” claim or EULA agreement I might be violating. But do a Google search for “enterprise web filter software”, and you should be able to make an educated guess.

I obviously couldn’t check every blog out there, so I decided to use the best blogroll out there, that of OxBlog. Here are the blogs that appear on the OxBlog blogroll, along with whether they were blocked, and what category they were blocked under.

George Washington:
InstaPunditBLOCKED under “message boards and clubs”

James Wilson:
Brett Marston – not blocked
Volokh Conspiracy – not blocked

Abigail Adams:
Diotima – not blocked
NZ Pols – not blocked

Alexis de Tocqueville:
Amitai Etzioni – not blocked
Crooked Timber – not blocked
KausFilesBLOCKED under “alternative jounals”
James Lileks – not blocked
Eve Tushnet – blocked under “society & lifestyles”

Theodore Roosevelt:
Amygdala – not blocked
Asparagirl - BLOCKED under “personal web sites”
Belgravia Dispatch – not blocked
Phil Carter – not blocked
Joyful Christian – not blocked
Martin Kimel – not blocked
ToneCluster – not blocked
Adrianne Truett – not blocked
Winds of Change – not blocked
Yale Pundits – not blocked
PejmanPundit – not blocked

Calvin Coolidge:
Evil Forces – not blocked
ScrappleFace – not blocked
Up Yours – not blocked

Winston Churchill:
Sasha Castel – not blocked
England’s Sword – not blocked
Innocents Abroad – not blocked
Andrew Sullivan – not blocked

Franklin Roosevelt:
The Agonist – not blocked
Antidotal – not blocked
CalPundit - BLOCKED under “personal web sites”
Kieran Healy - BLOCKED under “personal web sites”
Josh Marshall – not blocked
The Talking Dog – not blocked
Matt Yglesias - BLOCKED under “personal web sites”

David Ben Gurion:
GedankenPundit – not blocked
IsraPundit – not blocked
Kesher Talk – not blocked

Friedrich Hayek:
Jane Galt - BLOCKED under “messageboards & clubs”
Brink Lindsey – not blocked
Virginia Postrel - BLOCKED under “society & lifestyles”
Natalie Solent - BLOCKED under “messageboards & clubs”
VodkaPundit - BLOCKED under “personal web sites”
Matt Welch – not blocked

Ronald Reagan:
DailyPundit – not blocked
Power Line – not blocked
Patrick Ruffini – not blocked

Daniel Patrick Moynihan:
Daniel Drezner – not blocked
How Appealing - BLOCKED under “message boards & clubs
Josh Cherniss – not blocked
Jeremy Reff – not blocked
Steve Sachs – not blocked

OxBlog itself is blocked under the category "message boards & clubs", and Signifying Nothing is not blocked. The data set is obviously too small and the categorization too subjective to draw any meaningful conclusion. But just for scorekeeping purposes, it looks like the Hayekians win the "most blocked" category. (Except for the single Washingtonian.)

Fun things to do on a Saturday

I’ve been spending most of my morning trying to free up enough space to install the SimCity 4 Rush Hour Expansion Pack on my Windows 98 partition ($19.66 at Walmart, before the $10 mail-in rebate offer). So far I’ve:

  • Accidentally blown away 50GB of Debian packages when I tried to use parted to resize a partition to free enough space to move my root partition.
  • Faced mysterious crashes when using reiserfs for my new root partition that went away when I reformatted to use xfs instead. (Advantage: SGI.)
  • Sat for two hours while reiserfs tried to reconstruct the tree of my old Debian package mirror disk (which currently won’t mount).
  • Accidentally set the frontside bus speed of my motherboard to 133Mhz (because I forgot what processor I have in the machine… I’ve now concluded it’s a 1.15 GHz Athlon XP, and no I don’t know what PSR it has). That’s because I flashed my BIOS thinking that would fix the mysterious system crashes.
  • Tried to pay my DirecTV bill online (I got a lovely “our systems are down” message).

Needless to say, I’m nowhere close to being able to play the game yet. Grr. And it remains to be seen whether I can actually resize the FAT32 partition my Win98 install lives on without accidentally blowing it away too. Which probably means I’m going to have to either find my original Win98 CD, or break down and install the copy of WinXP Pro I paid $50 for sometime last year I have lying around (which I was really hoping to save for… well, I don’t know what really).