No CNN, but Fox News?

I'm writing this from home because blogspot is blocked in TAGKS - the Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Knowledge Society - the place with the free internet, nice facilities, copying and printing, and air conditioning only a short walk from campus. Also known as the Americans' hangout. In fact, a lot of things are blocked there. I found that out on my first day using their internet, when a friend sent me a link to something on cracked.com. Nope. Can't do that. I explored a bit today to find out what was blocked and what wasn't, and there are some surprising results.

News sources, unblocked:

MSNBC

CNBC

Fox News

Washington Post

Huffington Post

New York Times

Drudge Report

ABC

News sources, blocked:

CNN

BBC

NBC

CBS

I wonder what those four major networks did to bother the folks at TAGKS. You'd think that the stuff on some of the aforementioned unblocked sites would be a little more controversial than NBC. Note that all the newspapers are unblocked - I also checked Raleigh's N&O and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Webcomics and general internet timewasters, unblocked:

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Digg (although a good number of its links don't work)

Texts From Last Night

Fark

Webcomics and general internet timewasters, blocked:

xkcd

Cracked

FML

Postsecret

Qwantz

Youtube

Sporcle

I can't figure out what makes xkcd more problematic than, say, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, but so it goes. And what's wrong with some friendly dinosaurs? For those who follow the FML spinoffs, lmylife and mylifeisaverage are in the clear.

Internet video, unblocked:

southparkx.net

surfthechannel

Internet video, blocked:

Youtube

Hulu

South Park Studios

Note the relative legitimacy of those websites. I was, in fact, surprised when southparkx was still available - I guess there are always a few holes. One of my friends reads a column that is apparently quite controversial in nature. She can't go directly to its website, but she can look up a newspaper that runs the column and access it that way. Crafty.

As for Youtube, I've heard that it's blocked because of bandwidth issues because, let's face it, if it weren't blocked I'd have seen way more Carl Sagan remixes and one-minute videos of cats doing silly things.

Now, take note that this list is only from today. I've definitely read a BBC story that my friend posted a link to on Facebook. Another friend and I sporcled on her laptop. And I could swear that I saw a Jordanian pre-med watching some educational Youtube video a few months ago. Once - just once - Facebook was blocked. It was the week of my program's spring break, and I was only in TAGKS to register for fall classes. (If you want to know, I have the best schedule ever.) Wanting to post something to the effect of, "Sarah Bruce is all registered for classes, yay!" I tried to log on to Facebook, only to be... denied.

Larger significance of all this? I don't know if there is any. There's no way for me to find out exactly why any one website is blocked, or why any other one isn't. I can only imagine what makes Texts From Last Night safe while FML isn't. I don't know what CBS did to get itself blocked, or what ABC did to remain in TAGKS' good graces. It's just that this trip has been my first foray into the world of internet censorship, and I find it very very interesting.

Okay, "censorship" may be too broad a word. It has dirty implications. This is more like how Enloe blocked Facebook (so many proxy sites that it didn't matter) than how China wants to censor Google search results (foiled, China, foiled indeed). But it's fascinating, nonetheless. I'd say that the inconvenience of having to wait until I get home to check xkcd is outweighed by the fun I had today thinking up websites to check.

Other fun? The Westboro Baptist Church's website is blocked. The websites for New World and Buffalo's were both unblocked today, although I could swear one of them was blocked just last week. And all the fast-food chains I checked were unblocked, including Starbucks, which we all know is part of the Zionist conspiracy. Yay.