Monday, September 25, 2006

The NTSCMP Affair.

Did Richard Li's PCCW Netvigator and papa Li Ka-shing's Hutchison Global Communications block with malicious intent the English-language satirical website Not the South China Morning Post (ntscmp.com)? There is/was a prima facie case, after all. For details see previous posts.

Or, has some other commercial enterprise with another sort of malicious intent either hi-jacked or compromised in some way the IP address of ntscmp.com -- 69.49.101.19 [reverse DNS - hostedc10.megawebservers.com]. In that case, so as to launch the occasional phishing expedition and other forms of online fraud?

Based on some suberb detective work by EastSouthWestNorth, Mister B suspects the latter is looking increasingly likely. For why that is, please visit: EastSouthWestNorth or ESWN

Other than the evidence presented there, ESWN also has a report furnished by well-known IT expert Charles Mok. The report will be of interest to those of a technical bent: report.

What else? Having read a translation of the report in the Chinese-language mainstream media Apple Daily -- no friend of the Li family commercial empire -- on 22 September, one was waiting with some excitement to reading some more in the English-language newspapers South China Morning Post (paid subscription; no link) or Hong Kong's The Standard.

Nothing yet, though.

All we have is this, according to NTSCMP (via proxy server):
". . .South China Morning Post reacted to the NTSCMP censorship story by booting it quickly downhill to a columnist in the Business department who then got instructions to spike it."
Would that be SCMP's Lai See column?

As for The Standard:
"The Standard's local news team on the other hand seems to be a man, his girlfriend and a bicycle these days."
Erh, discuss.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

No, it wasn't Lai See, it was another columnist.

Thanks for brealing this story to everyone.

The technical analyses are interesting but no one has explained connection only fails on Netvigator and HGC.

I stillsuspect censorship, knowing the petty-minded and vindictive Lis.