Starting today 516 web sites are no longer available to Italian web surfers.

It's not a move to prevent some nasty type of porn to offend anybody or to block any illegal activity, it's a way for the national gambling monopoly to prevent international competition from stealing their business.

Technically it's done at DNS level, basically all ISPs are supposed to redirect DNS entries for these 516 web sites to a page saying that the site is not available because it's not licensed in Italy. It's easy to route around this configuration by choosing a foreing DNS server, while most users will not know how to do it real gamblers will just keep gambling.

This is the first censorship of this kind in a western country. How long before others will join in and also start blocking other web sites?

Tags: Censorship, Italy

Some 15 years ago I was a big fan of Guy Kawasaki, I had read his books and he was my evangelism hero (I still like him and subscribe to his blog btw). In one of his books I found a fax number and I send him a message.

And he replied! It was a message sent directly from a computer (a very modern thing back then). I showed the message to everybody, unsuccessfully trying to explain my enthusiasm for the reply, then carefully folded and put it in one of Guy's books.

Recently, after moving to the new house, I was putting books back on the shelves and I found the book, which still contained a folded perfectly white sheet of paper.

Words on thermal paper don't last forever. :-)

Tags: Guy Kawasaki