xonen's Journal: First week without digital contrabande

It's the 10th day now, of the dutch censurship. A foreign website is blocked, by both DNS and IP. And despite earlier discussions that mostly revolved to 'easy to avoid', i can only come to the conclusion that it still s*cks. Big time.

I'm not such of a downloader. Occasionaly, when i hear something, on some radio stream, i might check out. Youtube first, probably. But sometimes, or quite often, it's simply not there. Too obscure, or whatever it is. So the next choice would be to find some copy - that's where file sharing comes in.

It's also still legal in our country. Downloading, for personal use, is legal. But one of the means to do so conveniently, is blocked.

I joked in advance 'Using TOR will give me that bit of holiday feeling - like i'm in China'. Unfortunately, it's true. Not that i feel in China. But i feel the hot breath of an almost fascist regime breathing in my neck. This regime feeling has nothing to do with file sharing though, more with the other means of control. Holland excels in telephone tapping, for example. Anything is trapped, analyzed. Every bit i send over the internet is weighted, scanned, duplicated and stored. The blocking is just a solid reminder on that.

I had a daydream, or more nightmare, vision, today. Of risking getting shot at street by a drone, because you said something wrong on the internet.

The pain is not in a technical filesharing thingy working no longer as intended. Well, that's a bit of pain too. It's not only the site that's down, it are important trackers that are down too. Even with the torrent, stuff seems to run a lot less smooth. But that's all irrelevant. By the feeling that i live in a regime, not a democracy.

I apologize to all out there in egypt, or syria, or whereever. Where i know the situation is really bad. Risking your lives is nothing compared to a spoiled file sharer. Therefore, i think, no-one really dares to complain. Because then we are spoiled.

Yet.. another step, to our big brother, big cyber brother, controlling us. Now, let me fill in facebook what i all did today else intelligence service will start to worry what i'm doing, i can't risk that.