>TR takes over TOC as the new high and mighty New Media – That’s right. When TOC was dumped into the dustbin by the PAPpy’s gazette, virtually tying its hands down, you thought that at least there was Temasek Review who could go around freely dispensing all sort of news (and I really mean all sorts, from politics right down to slut news gossip) to the masses.
Boyoboyoboy. Are you wrong if you thought that!
It its own high handed ways, it justifies putting up a firewall and banning IP addresses, claiming there were “wholesale downloads”.
Temasek Review is not configured to be read offline
Dear readers,
Our in-house technical has been informed of an increase in the number of client’s requesting for our entire site. This means that our readers are using some software to connect to our servers to download our entire site which can be read offline or for some other reasons.
Due to the increase in the number of readers to our site recently, our server is already running at above 60% capacity and such downloading of our entire site will cause more strain and load on our servers unnecessary.
This will seriously affect the ability of our servers to serve its content if such “complete downloads” are allowed and many instances are doing it at the same time.
To ensure that our site remains available to all readers, we have configured our firewall to ban all such “complete downloads” attempts and ban the IP addresses “guilty” of such an act. The ban on such IPs will remain effective for a period of 2 weeks afterwhich it is automatically unbanned.
If your IP is unintentionally banned by our firewall, please contact our in-house tech with the online form, stating the IP address used when it was banned.
We would like to appeal to our readers to refrain from doing so as it would adversely affect other readers’ ability to access our site’s content.
To those organisation who have been trying to “complete download” our entire site for reason best known to yourselves, please stop doing so. We will not hesitate to ban an entire /24 or /16 and even /8 of your organisation’s IP blocks if we have to.
Thank you for your understanding.
Amanda
Most of the time, the news I get from TR (and many other news sites) are through RSS feeders. In other words, I hardly visit their main site, let alone make any posts in those sites. The last time I made any post at TR was weeks ago.
Come this morning (20 Jan 2011), I tried to visit TR’s site and this is what I got.
(Click on image to enlarge)
Now how did I get banned in the first place, when I hardly even visit the main site? Unless TR bans a whole string of range of IP addresses, which I shared with someone else, and somehow I got caught in the process.
I don’t see why anybody would want to download a whole site. Why is there a need to? Unless of course TR is now finding an excuse to ban certain IP addresses – and in the process, bans others who are totally innocent of any wrong doing.
I was able to access the site with another ISP btw.
This shows that when you get too big for your shoes, you will behave the very same way as the very big boys you target. TOC targeted the PAPpy boys and grew too big for its shoes when it got the support it wanted. When TOC fell, TR took over. Now it behaves the very same way too.
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Update – 1420h (Originally posted at 1104h)
Looks like they have lifted the ban on my ISP. Now that is strange. Either
1. They unblocked the whole string of range of IP addresses, which includes my address
or
2. Lifted my address only.
Most likely it is #1 – meaning they have lifted the ban on the string addresses, which includes the IP addresses of those they wanted banned in the first place.
The moral of the story is….
TR, TOC and what not can claim that other sites censor and that is undemocratic. But TR and TOC do it too.
You can argue that TOC and TR have their reasons. But it can be argued that the other sites have their reasons too.
In the end, “free speech” is just a matter of opinion. It really means “freedom of MY speech” – and the Admin of the site decides what is allowed and what is not.
Er…isn’t that is what TOC, TR purport they are against in the first place?
