Your page is blocked due to a security policy that prohibits access to category Gambling.

Another option to work around the nannies would be to make use of TOR, the onion router. As all of your TOR traffic is encrypted in transit, and neither leaves nor enters on ports 80/443, the nannies won’t even know that you’re using the web. Some might figure out that you’re using TOR, but in that case the best option is to just leave the establishment after barking at the management.

It’s highly unusual for me, but I, too, will leave the rant unranted. For now.

I hope this post only shows up once — my internet connection is falling part under the snow today…

OMG!
Ed, in this article you have quite a few quotable quotes… but generally, what the f*ck is going on there in the States? I can guess why the searching under the Statue Skirt, but this thing with poker is really making me wonder: haven’t they learnt the prohibition lesson from fifties yet???

Oh no… I just realised that maybe you got blocked in cafes due to my post about the CoffeeKid cupping device in one of threads on the forum?

Category: Statue of Liberty my Ass

priceless

http://www.youhide.com/

For all your “illegal” surfing needs.

Unless this is blocked too. Then you guys are pretty much fcuked.

Yeah, it’s great living here in the land of the free (who need a strong central government to protect us so that we don’t get into trouble and become less “free”). Pretty much a reminder why I’m a Libertarian. Speaking out on these issues is far more important to me than supporting the winning horse in the race.

I used to spend a lot of time in my local Panera, and played quite a bit of poker from there. But then when I visited another Panera 40 miles away, the filter blocked me from some of the poker sites and from 2+2. I made a point not to go to the latter Panera when I could avoid it.

Umm Pawel. If you are going to go off on an anti-american screed at least get your history correct. Prohibition in the United States occurred in the 1920s and ended in the early part of the great depression, 1933.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition

Now the 50s were a lot of things but prohibition was not one of them. Inhibition maybe, jim crow, and a lot of other things yes.

He meant fifties of people that got rich during prohibition

(I’ll get me coat)

Sad to see from outside (Europe, Hungary) how the things going in the States. The land of freedom suddenly started to became the land of soft dictatory. People obligated to do the “right” things and others decide what is “right”. Doing anythin what could harm you is prohibited.

I used to read this kind of “my site is blocked” articles from Chinese and Saudi Arabian people, not from Americans. But thinking methodicaly: the speach remained free, you can write the blog. The constitution has not mentioned anybody should be allowed to listen your words when you speak freely.

I’d suggest all of you to read 1984 from G. Orwell until you are allowed to.

anti-american? never! I’m pro-american to the very bottom of my soul.

KetszeriCs,

1984 is a great book. Everyone should read it

But in this case, Ed’s coffee shop blocked certain sites not his government.

The land of freedom remains quite different from the repressive countries you mention.

KetszeriCs,

First, I want to say that I agree with Ed that we need to reject unthinking censorship and that we are subjected to a great deal of overly paranoid intrusions for our “safety”.

But, one thing we should note is that this isn’t really about free speech. This is not the government censoring anything. There is no government involvement here. It’s about a business providing a service to its customers. As such, the coffee shop has a fair amount of latitude as to how it offers that service. They want customers to come to their shop and drink coffee. Internet access helps get them there.

The unfortunate thing is this case is that the filtering they are using is probably mostly so that people don’t surf porn, because that’s what people do. This is a real problem with public internet access. Something that libraries, which are government institutions really struggle with because of 1st amendment issues. As a father with children, I am sympathetic to the notion that there is a time and a place and that a business has the right to tailor its internet offering in that way.

Unfortunately other sites that probably aren’t offensive in any way, including some gambling sites like NPA, seem to have gotten swept up in the filtering they use. The difficult part about this is that those sites are only going to appeal to a small number of people who won’t have the numbers to complain enough to get them unblocked. I guarantee, if enough people complained, those sites would be unblocked.

Ed,

Did you give the coffee shop owners a little hell?

Ay Ay Ay…more big brother BS. This kind of crap is happening everywhere. The fuzz busted up my low-stakes home game 2 weeks ago in San Mateo, CA after a 3-month sting by the Sheriff’s Dept. We played tourneys with $20-$50 buy-ins for Pete’s sake! CRAZY!!!!

He who would trade an ounce of freedom for a pound of security loses both and deserves neither

Benjamin Franklin

Two things you can do about the situation:

1) Get the h… off your couches and vote! Even on a slow election day we scandinavians have a turnout rate double than an average american.

2) Get your own coffee maker, then the problem goes away.

/j.

joxum: At least as regards the selection of our president, the popular vote here has zero meaning. The two dominant political parties both use a delegate system to decide who will receive their respective nominations, then our electoral college elects a president.

While we can vote directly for our congresscritters, our congress is essentially worthless unless/until they can achieve a 2/3 supermajority capable of overriding a presidential veto or impeaching.

These things are designed into our Constitution, so the net benefit of casting a ballot is the small amount of physical exercise we get from standing in line at the polling place.

One of the few things even worse than censorship is self-censorship.

The proprietor of said coffeeshop succumbed to “popular opinion” that “public access to teh internets needs to be filtered to protect teh innocent childrens” and installed the nannysoft that was marked down that day.

While I too wouldn’t approve of my children (5 and 2) being subjected to pr0n (what would my kids be doing in a coffeeshop anyways?), it’s the price I would be willing to pay for potentially unrestricted access to information.

It’s a matter of civil courage, as well, to leave it to some government (or, in this case, some company) to decide what you should not be looking at. If I find my neighbor surfing pr0n with my children attending, I’d point him out in a manner that would leave him wishing he’d rented a DVD or something

Anyhow… what was it I wanted to say…
it’s a sad state of affairs, when a coffeshoppe owner needs to block loads of content lest he be declared “Ye Olde Porne Shoppe” by the towns religious fanatics.

It’s early and I’m rambling, but you get my meaning.

/2

Why did your post include a homeland security seal, when you make clear that the censorship was not by the Government?

Well, point taken that this isn’t strictly a First Amendment issue because the government isn’t censoring anything. But when power becomes very concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, a censorship can result that’s almost as pernicious.

To give an example, I occasionally need to make a transaction using an online payment service. I would prefer to choose a provider that isn’t advocating the destruction of online poker. But because eBay’s PayPal service commands, what?, 90% of the market or something, and because both clients and vendors expect me to use PayPal, I don’t really have a choice in the matter. eBay is a vile vile company and I’d like to see them destroyed, but I still have to use their services. (Apparently PokerTracker feels the same way, and they certainly have more of a vested interest in the health of online poker than I do.)

Has anyone one stopped and considered that the site was blocked because of a false positive flag on the word “pot” due to its drug related definition? This seems like a more likely scenario. At least Ed should hope this is the reason because it would greatly reduce the number of government sponsored body cavity searches in his future.

40ozslushy: The error message was explicit: “…due to a security policy that prohibits access to category
Gambling.” Not drug-related, but gambling.