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Comment by parfe | Hacker News Reader

"I clicked the link, but Hacker News is often blocked in the Marshall Islands, so I got a 404."

Is there reason for the blocking? Is it the government censoring content? Or is it simply an island nation has to ration its bandwidth?

I ask because Marshall Islands are in a free association with the United States (where the US provides services and protection). Preventing residents from reaching US websites really rubs me the wrong way.

Maybe I'm just reading too much into the word block when he really means unreachable. Marshall Islands are rated as Free under the Freedom of Press Report, but are unclassified by the OpenNet Initiative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_country

edit: I am sorry for my tangent based on a single line in your write up. It really jumped out at me and I hope you can expand on the situation.

You have a cool product and congratulations on the exposure. Good luck!

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I've occasionally been at public wifi spots in the USA where HN is blocked, because on some 'safe internet' services, the site may be categorized as being related to illegal or controversial activities.

The HN name and occasional subject matter -- about censorship controversies, security breaches, and circumvention techniques -- contributes to this impression. Some paranoid law-and-order nothing-that-risks-the-children types will classify HN that way, and then choose to block all sites of that classification on certain public/free wifi services.

(IIRC, my experience may have been at a Whole Foods market in the US, which was subscribing to some classification lists via OpenDNS. This was years ago, though, and I reported it as a misclassification at the time.)

Yup. Sadly, we need to keep in mind that the word "hacker" still has negative connotations with the public at large (especially as regards security concerns). So it's a likely term to appear on very conservative blacklists.

The issue most likely is bandwidth. I can remember living in Taiwan as recently as 2001 when the access to United States websites was often slowed by the narrow pipes of cables across the Pacific Ocean. The Marshall Islands, with their low population, are not on the most favored path across the Pacific for high-bandwidth cables.

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

http://asia-pacific-map-2012.telegeography.com/

I spent a year teaching in the Marshall Islands. There is definitely room for conspiracy theories, if you lean that way, relating to the testing that occurred there and even basic unexploded ordnance. I vaguely remember potentially relevant websites seeming blocked, but I never bothered to investigate and can't really provide more details. I certainly don't see why hacker news would have been blocked, anyways.

Hacker News was blocked, unblocked, and then blocked again in my 3 months there.

My experience was that the Marshall Islands blocks domains with a wide net (for example, new domains or blogs with their own domains would almost always be blocked). I suspect that "Hacker News" would be blocked by a conservative algorithm or human censor, but on review ycombinator.com, the incubator, would be whitelisted.

I have a back of the mind low grade worry that some insecure squinty eyed troll at work IT is going to accuse me of vague and scary things if anyone ever notices "Hacker News" has been coming through the fire wall to me. "See! He's reading about Hacking!"

"hacker" in the domain? Yikes - must be a dangerous site.

"Hacker" doesn't actually appear in the domain.

That's one of the things I love about this place. It's too underground to even have it's own domain name ;)

I joke, but the lack of 'hacker' in the URI probably does help keep some of the "riffraff" away.

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