I sent the following message last week; I've had several accesses to my pages on the new site from India and one from the United Arab Emirates; time will tell whether it makes much difference...
Some of you may have clicked on a link on one of my messages and got an error message or given up waiting for the page to load, and probably assumed that this was due to a technical glitch or slow connection between computers on the internet. Even if you live in a Western country, a supposed democracy, this could be due to internet censorship.
I view statistics about my websites quite regularly (as anyone can by clicking on links at the end of my home page), and the detailed country information strongly indicates censorship, with users in some countries only able to access certain kinds of files (typically music) and those in others unable to access the websites at all. The main pages on my main website (socialiststeve.me.uk) have a lot of buttons at the top and accessing one of them should result in a lot of hits from graphic files for each page. Most countries have the same number of pages as hits, suggesting that only music has been downloaded (but perhaps the graphics files haven't been instead, as happened once on my mobile).
I was quite relaxed about this censorship until earlier this month I discovered that uncensored access to my main website was now only possible from Europe, the USA and Canada. It occurred to me that censors were trying to use my websites against me, as a subtle strategy to engender racism trying to aid those who claim that non-Westerners are less intelligent than white people. More to the point, censorship could hinder struggles for democratic socialism. Perhaps it is easier to do censorship at the servers connecting continents together than in each individual country. Islands are probably easier to censor than countries linked to by land (there have been no accesses at all from the Irish Republic this month or last, unless they are included in the European Union counts) and accesses from New Zealand are negligeable compared to Australia. The pattern of accesses is slightly different later in the month with Australia and China having slightly more hits than pages suggesting that censors in those countries are reading my stuff to decide what to let through!
The increase in censorship lately is probably due to me posting my New Good Intentions Manifesto (you can find a link to it from the top of my main website home page or go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PRsocialism/message/161). This provides a coherent analysis of my philosophy, with a scientific basis, as an alternative to Marxism.
This censorship may not be all bad - some socialists got elected in Ireland in the recent elections, including the Socialist Party's Joe Higgins to the European Parliament (as one of three from Dublin); the SP also won some council seats as did the People Before Profit Alliance which included the Socialist Workers Party. [As an aside, the form of proportional representation used there is single transferable vote, which I advocate with my Foundation for PR-based Socialism; this gives the left a chance but would hinder fascists as they are unlikely to get many transfers from other candidates.] My ideas can be a threat to such Marxists but not those who want to think themselves rather than toe a party line. In the long run, they need to incorporate ideas such as mine to stand any chance of coming to power, but it was certainly good news they did well, as a partial counterweight to successes of some right-wing parties across Europe.
Anyway, to undermine censorship, I have set up an Indian "mirror" (at www.socialiststeve.in) containing the same files as those on my main website (www.socialiststeve.me.uk). Try one if the other fails. [One of my other websites has recently been hacked into; if anybody spots any discrepancies between the two sites, please let me know.]
Other ways to deal with censorship are suggested on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship (and links on the left hand side provide translations to other languages), with proxy servers a suggestion. I get quite a lot of accesses to my websites from "unknown" countries, and suspect that they are accesses using proxies.
On the topic of internet censorship, emails may be censored as well as web accesses. The US Department of Homeland Security ensured that internet service providers use programs designed to filter out spam to check for political keywords too (and I think they use artificial intelligence software to read the emails rather than just scanning for keywords). When I created a hotmail account (located in the USA even if you put it at hotmail.co.uk) I found that messages sometimes appeared normally, went in the spam folder, bounced back with an error or disappeared into hyperspace! Probably due to consumer pressure, the latter two possibilities may not happen any more (but if anybody has more information on this I'd be pleased to hear it).