Monday, January 31, 2011

Corporate Dictatorship? Or Just Censorship?

A useful reminder (via):

Other than in a handful of pockets across the U.S. - including Ohio, Vermont and Washington, D.C. - cable carriers do not give viewers the choice of watching Al Jazeera. That corporate censorship comes as American diplomats harshly criticize the Egyptian government for blocking Internet communication inside the country …

Also:

Readers can demand Al Jazeera English here. Here are the contact pages for Comcast, Time Warner and DirecTV.

4 comments:

Substance McGravitas said...

The downside of the site is that Al Jazeera seems to want me to use RealPlayer, which has been such a shitty player on the various computers I've used it with that I will not use it again.

bjkeefe said...

I know what you mean about RealPlayer. However, what site are you looking at?

Their English-language live stream is just Flash. So is a randomly-chosen video from their special coverage in Egypt page.

I don't have Real installed on this machine, and I'm pretty sure I don't have any Real plugins installed in my browser, and the above all played for me.

Substance McGravitas said...

I'll betcha it's just a NoScript issue.

bjkeefe said...

That sounds plausible.

I tried that add-on for a while and found it too blunt an instrument. What I would like to see them implement is a way to list only the sites where the no-script policy would apply. As it is, though, I find it easy enough to turn off Javascript through Tools→Options prior to visiting, say, Gawker or Wonkette.

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