Infowars and Prison Planet Not Available for Most Internet Users in New Zealand

February 8th, 2010

Update: Infowars and Prison Planet Are Accessible Again

The sites are loading normally now on Telecom NZ.

—End Update—

The New Zealand site infonews.co.nz reported that infowars.com and prisonplanet.com are mostly not accessible inside New Zealand. I can confirm that this is the case on Telecom New Zealand, the main provider of Internet access in the country. Many other ISPs in New Zealand actually use Telecom’s “wire” so to speak, and just re-brand the service as their own.

Apparently, Telstraclear, Vodafone and Worldxchange Communications users are not affected.

On Telecom, I’m able to ping and tracert the sites, but HTTP is blocked. The sites load fine via proxy servers.

Research Credit: Zenc

Posted in Coincidence?, Technology | Top Of Page

2 Responses to “Infowars and Prison Planet Not Available for Most Internet Users in New Zealand”

  1. dt says:
    February 8, 2010 at 7:32 pm

    I’ve always seen Alex Jones as an attention seeker at best.

    It occurs to me that selectively dropping incoming packets might be a good way to appear censored and, by implication, to be the state’s enemy. A bit like getting deliberately arrested protesting Bilderberg.

    I don’t think that’s what happened here, but if I were Alex Jones I’d be giving it thought.

  2. Ace says:
    February 8, 2010 at 11:43 pm

    I had a similar thing happen the other day on Telstraclear NZ, for YouTube and Wikipedia: HTTP was blocked for several hours, but ping, tracert and proxies worked fine.

    Telstraclear uses a transparent proxy; not sure if the same is true for Telecom.

    I’ve heard rumors that new proxy caches are being installed for certain high-traffic overseas sites, and that some of the caches will be shared between ISPs. Perhaps that explains it?

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