Burmese authorities block the bloggers, pics and videos of attrocities go online
If there was ever a story to prove that blogging is not always about the mundane, fickle things, it’s that of those in Burma who have been trying to get words and pictures out about the atrocities in their country.
Where the international media isn’t (officially) allowed to tread, a handful of bloggers, who began writing much the same everyday life stories as millions of other bloggers around the world, found themselves running from the authorities, while sending accounts, images, and video footage to the wider world.
From a technical point of view, they have been using services such as CBox, a form of Twitter, which allows short snippets of news and reaction to be broadcast. They’ve also used SEND6, free online software which able to compress huge video and picture files to management packets, and Your Freedom, which helps to circumvent various blocks.
However, last Wednesday, the Burmese authorities blocked these internal blogs, and then, on Friday, the whole Internet, effectively sealing off Burma from the outside world much as has happened in the physical world.
A blogger going by the name of Superman says that “Burma is like the Stone Age”, with the only way to get information out onto the Web now to make expensive international calls to foreign ISPs.
As The Times reports:
The bloggers held out as long as they could, and if there is ever a monument to the heroes of the Saffron Revolution it should certainly feature a statue of a skinny boy in a T-shirt and thick glasses hunched over a computer and a digital camera.
(Via The Times and Read/Write Web)
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