Last week the UK High Court ruled that several of the country’s leading ISPs must block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay. The decision is designed to limit traffic to the world’s leading BitTorrent site but in the short-term it had the opposite effect. Yesterday, The Pirate Bay had 12 million more visitors than it has ever had, providing a golden opportunity to educate users on how to circumvent blocks.

Factual correction: the ruling came this week.

MG Siegler, whose profile picture on Google+ in which he was extending his middle finger (offensive? Maybe in the US) was deleted, points out that Michael Arrington's default picture if you search for images of him show Arrington… extending his middle finger.

"So the rules seems to be that if you want a middle finger picture to be the image associated with you, too bad. Or if you don’t want a middle finger picture to be associated with you, too bad. Heads, Google wins. Tails, Google wins. 

"We’re seeing some of the problems with Google’s expansion to do everything on the web. Some of their policies in certain places seem to directly contradict their policies elsewhere. And there’s no easy solution. As a result, these types of debates will continue."

This has spiralled from being trivial to being very important.

"According to TheDomains, 21,054 domains were transferred away from Go Daddy on Friday alone. At $6.99 a pop, that would make for a loss of $147,167, not taking future renewals into account. The day before wasn’t a good one for the company either, with 15,000 people taking their domains elsewhere. That means that even though Go Daddy changed its stance, people have had enough."

Easier than lobbying politicians, of course, to move a domain. But doesn't really get to the root of the problem.

So the DCMS put out a redacted PDF. Turned out the redaction was easy to reverse. "The full, unredacted version now appears on Scribd. As can be seen from that document, the material which was redacted was all improperly removed. The tactics discussed to circumvent blocking are all well-known, even to a mere lawyer such as myself, and the redactions appear to be motivated more by considerations of security theatre than anything else."

"As of today certain aspects of the Flipboard experience have been blocked for Chinese users, at the very least access to Facebook and Twitter according to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. While direct access to Facebook and Twitter is routinely blocked in China, the Flipboard app talked to its own US-based servers, which in turn talked to Twitter and Facebook so this block is particularly interesting."<br />
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Where "particularly interesting" means "the sort of censorship that the Chinese government does reflexively".

"Despite much attention paid to Egypt and Libya's Internet shutdowns, Tunisia's pervasive Internet filtering, and Morocco's arrests of bloggers, little attention has been given to Internet censorship issues throughout the rest of the African continent. Events in recent weeks, however, have brought the region's online troubles into sharp focus."