I was out drinking with a few buddies when one of my friends received a phone call. Apparently there was a mob heading our way and we were told to get the heck out of the bar we were in and go home. We looked at each other, unsure what to do, trying to make sense of the phone call, when an enormous tank rumbled by outside. A coincidence, surely. Not a chance. We were in the middle of a military coup.

We shared a taxi home and on the ride back we passed tanks and soldiers and some very big guns. Back home and the local TV channels had been taken over. This was Bangkok, Thailand, on September 19 last year.

When most of you blog there are probably a few things you take for granted. For starters, I’m sure you don’t live in fear that your blog will be censored. Internet censorship is a huge problem in Thailand. In June alone more than 10,000 websites were blocked. That includes voices speaking out against the current military regime.

Blogs in Thailand are often the best sources for getting information about what is happening in the country. Take the simultaneous bombings on New Year’s Eve as an example. Bloggers around Thailand shared what information they had and stayed ahead of even the news wires. But even bloggers can suffer at the hands of the government, as many blogspot users found out last month when the domain was partially blocked for a period. Some bloggers couldn’t even access their own blogs!

Did you know that we haven’t been able to access Youtube since April when a video deemed offensive to His Majesty the King was posted? Just this week, July 24, some people in Thailand on some ISPs could log on to the video-sharing resource. The minister of information and communications technology keeps telling us the ban will be fully lifted soon, but we’re still waiting. Every time one of you guys posts a video up from you Youtube on your blog we normally get to see a big, blank space.

These aren’t the only problem faced by bloggers in Thailand. Internet connections are notoriously slow and unreliable. My wireless cuts out several times an hour, and the fastest download speed I have ever achieved was 50kbs. This makes updating blogs and tweaking code a slow, monotonous process.

On July 18 a new law was passed giving police the right to monitor computer activity of people they think might be breaking the law. In a country like Thailand you can be sure that such a law will be abused by the authorities. And did you know that it is now illegal to send a private email with porn in it? The authorities can wade through anyone in Thailand’s personal files on the vague premise that a person is breaking the new cyber laws.

So next time you write you blog post and hit “Publish” and you only have to wait a few seconds for your new, shiny post to load, think about me and my blogging buddies over here in Thailand, where I can’t go to sleep anymore unless there is a chorus of dogs barking outside my window.

You guys have got it lucky.

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Tags: Blogger rant //