Malaysia-today.net is blocked by Malaysia government???
After a controversial police report by Mat Taib against Raja Petra Kamarudin (RPK), the webmaster of Malaysia Today (MT) on July 23, it seems like the government has up their ante in the battle against MT by blocking the accessibility of the website from Malaysian IPs.
I couldn’t access the website earlier on, and I thought that the website might be overloaded server or something… but I just realized that MT might be blocked by Malaysia ISP instead (Hat tip to Shadowfox and Kai).
I tried accessing MT from an anonymizer, and the site is working just fine. You can access MT using proxies – find one from this link.
The censoring is not 100% proven yet, as some people are not able to access MT with proxy as well [Hafiz]… but it is likely that the ban is on.
I am not a regular reader of MT so I guess I won’t be much affected, but I will be really disappointed if the government decided to impose internet censorship against their critics. It will be another blow to MSC’s Bill of Guarantees for ensuring no Internet censorship, and more importantly… it shows that Malaysia government is not ready to handle criticism.
Besides, it is easy to find another route to access the website; does government really think they can just shut down a website like that? This kind of cheap act will likely to create more retaliation against them instead… not the smartest move.
Update – MT is back online on 11pm… I guess I was a bit paranoia. I am not sure what was happening; I am guessing that RPK was migrating MT to a new server, and the DNS was resolved in a different pace with various ISP.
My apology regardless.
Update July 29 – MT’s explanation on the downtime