In China, NPR = Pornography
Lately the internet at my university has been total crap. It's felt like I've time traveled back to 1997 and hooked my computer up to a 14.4 kb/s modem and some free hours of AOL (i.e. it's incredibly slow and I get disconnected every 20 minutes). At first, the school chalked it up to all the students being online, but when I brought up the fact that at least 80% of the students have gone home for the summer the story changed to maintenance on the server. Well, now after two+ weeks of bullshit, the internet seems a bit more reliable, albeit with some new quirks. NPR (National Public Radio) is now blocked as if it's a porn site.
I first noticed this ridiculous case of censorship in iTunes when my favorite podcast, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, failed to download for two days in a row. Then I realized that all of my NPR podcasts were coming up with errors when I tried to update them [Photo #1]. I just now tried the NPR website and it's blocked as well. The weirdest thing is that it's not blocked in the same way as Twitter or Youtube (those just come up with connection errors) [Photo #2]. No, NPR.org comes up with a page that tells me I'm accessing prohibited content, that my behavior is being recorded and that my network administrator will be alerted [Photo #3]. This is the exact same message that one would receive if he or she would to attempt to access a pornography site like Big Boobs Alert [Photo #4].
Now, I haven't checked it through a proxy, so I suppose the block could be justified and the NPR home page could have a huge picture of the Tappet Brothers from Car Talk running a train on Ira Flatow, but I highly doubt that.
Hey Green Dam, you suck.
