Samiz Dat writes in WUWT Tips and notes
Hey, Anthony, just a heads up. I am a chemical engineering student at the University of Adelaide. Loading your page takes a few seconds wherever I am in Adelaide…..except at the University of Adelaide, when trying to access your site from any of the North Terrace campus computers I easily wait up to 10-15 minutes before the site has loaded, individual posts take another 10-15 minutes to load. Yours is the only website this has and is happening with so far.
I have had similar emails from time to time, but I’ve never had any interest in following it up since such things can often be flukes. But this time, maybe not, so I’ve decided to ask if users are seeing similar things when they try to access WUWT via government networks and university networks. I’m really interested to find out if anyone at University of Adelaide can corroborate this story.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Australia has notoriously slow internet. The NBN upgrade probably hasn’t arrived at the University yet and the old copper wiring is probably being backed up by tin cans and pieces of string, which will probably still be needed to connect the University buildings to the Street “node” where the optic fibre cables will eventually reach.
Wrong. NBN has nothing to do with it. Universities have had direct fibre access for years (also CBDs, hospitals, large businesses etc). Google AARNet. Copper/ADSL is perfectly fine for houses.
I suggest that you ping WUWT to see how long the packets take vs a ping of some other US site. One thing that does happen is that ISPs tend to cache stuff en route. The first load of a site that is not frequently visited in your neck of the woods or its content can take a while if the site is not all that local. I read the Nigerian Tribune from time to time. The first access takes a while. After that, it is in the cache someplace and a second access does not take nearly as long.
Samiz should connect through a proxy server while he is on the university network. If he gets better speed through the proxy, it’s probably something on the university’s end. If so, it could be malicious or it could be a misconfiguration or a DNS issue.
Logged in fine from Adelaide.
Here in South America WUWT loads super fast (much faster than when I was in Australia)
Only tried once but blocked at University of Queensland, home of the science for deniers. What a joke.
If you are blocked at Uni of Qld charge them with breach of the Public Sector Ethics Act which specifically applies to all Universities in Queensland, it also applies to contractors servicing any public sector organisation.
While back there was a furore over parental control software also blocking sites of political parties the vendor didn’t support. Wonder if this could be a similar thing? The uni may well have installed filtering software to stop ‘adult’ material from wasting campus bandwidth, and this might have had a few sneaky blocklist additions made by the vendor.
It may be legit “adult filtering”. Has anyone else been seeing WordPress sidebar ads for “prepare to laugh. We’ve compiled the top 100 fails” featuring a bride in a dress with an almost non-existant top, leaving almost nothing to the imagination when it comes to her inflated errr uhmmm? Then there’s “the 50 most beautiful women on earth” series. I can see nanny-filters legitimately blocking this stuff.
About 3 years ago at my local library, WattsUpwithThat was blocked from the computers there but RealClimate was accessible. Some twit there was masking out sites he disapproved of so I never went back.
Well, that was real courageous of you. I bet all unwittingly blocked visitors there, also stopped going? So who will bell the cat?
Australia has one of the poorest performing networks for internet connections. My mate in Pataya, Thailand get’s better performance and no data caps. Also, I think there are various filters now put in place by the Govn’t capturing user metadata. Sure, that’s going to stop outlaws.
There is a university in the US which indeed blocked Steve McIntyre from accessing data. I wrote to complain, and they denied it (deniers come in many forms), but Steve comfirmed it.
I’m on copper and in SW Oz. WUWT loads in three or four seconds. Nothing wrong with copper unless you are Km’s from the exchange.
I use a Squid proxy to block all advert and non-science content that is linked from this site. It does this for every site, actually, and needs constant tweaking, of course. I do this because loading the first page is otherwise crazy slow. A side benefit is I don’t see anything except information that I want to see and which is the reason I visit these pages in the first place. I suspect that I am a 70 year old millennial – no patience for slow sites and unrequested material. My browser, my choice.
No WUWT loading speed problems this end, even with Adblock running…
WUWT cannot be accessed in mainland China, but otherwise I have never had a problem.
I think the Chinese are a bit sensitive about climate. They do not care about CO2 levels, and they laugh and laugh as they watch the West try to destroy their economies over a non-problem.
Just back from a trip to China -slow down in construction very noticeable every where. The Chinese are not worried about climate but in Beijing air pollution from particles and brown skies from NOX both mainly from cars (many coming from Germany such as BMW, VW, Audi Mercedes) and Buses & trucks is a concern but then Beijing (18million) is in a valley and pollution gets trapped. Skies were much clearer and cleaner in the largest Chinese city Chongging of 33 million and in Shanghai (22 million). I recall some years ago in New York it was not possible to see the street from the top of the Empire State building and in Tokyo the car pollution causes watering of ones eyes.
AWG alarmist love to mix up air pollution from particles and smog with CO2 which is a clean, odourless gas beneficial to life (and does not cause any warming as any chemical or mechanical engineer who understands thermodynamics and heat & mass transfer knows)
Anthony,
from the other side of the world: I am frequently accessing your website from a German government Computer Network without any trouble at all. Given the AGW-frenzy that goes as “politics” in my country, this should be proof that there’s no conspiracy going on here.
Oh, and, Ursus Augustus, it’s “Einsatzgruppen”, not “Einzatsgruppen”.
Australians have a history with internet censorship…..
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/296161/australia_web_blacklist_leaked/
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/17/australia-internet-block
I’m in UK (private house) and don’t have a problem with WUWT loading. Bishop Hill had a long delay problem with his ISP/Web Host a while back…now resolved.
Chromium (page bottom left) caption shows what the browser is waiting for. And ticks through incoming elements as the page constructs. Any links to Ads is asking for trouble. And what Google is doing you can only but guess!
I never rated Uni’s or Gov departments of any use…Gov UK is still a mess which is no surprise. Pay peanuts get…..not a lot!
Sorry if this has already been said.
I have noticed that WUWT is always one of the slowest sites to load in any browser on a variety of machines. With my pitiful CenturyStink DSL connection it seems even worse. I have often wondered if this has something to do with WordPress.
@Peter Miller
WUWT cannot be accessed in mainland China, but otherwise I have never had a problem.
I think the Chinese are a bit sensitive about climate. They do not care about CO2 levels, and they laugh and laugh as they watch the West try to destroy their economies over a non-problem.
If the Chinese (and Indians, and much of the developing world) had their way, they would close down WUWT, Climate Audit and all the sceptic sites.
“When the enemy is making a false movement we must take good care not to interrupt him.” (Napoleon)
Not a problem here in Hong Kong, loads very quickly, but a few kms across the border it’s a different story.
@Ex-expat Colin
I never rated Uni’s or Gov departments of any use…Gov UK is still a mess which is no surprise. Pay peanuts get…..not a lot!
Oh! If only we HAD paid peanuts….
https://unemployedtynewear.wordpress.com/2015/05/06/vote-muppet-youll-get-one-anyway/
Of course it might be that your website is so popular in the University Anthony that everyone is overloading the server.
I have no problems accessing WUWT in England.
But the situation is more serious than probably most here realise. Censorship in Britain starts – of all places! – with the British Library. Many websites which may be vital to research are blocked on the grounds of ‘Intolerance’. One such site is The Nation of Islam:
http://www.noi.org/
Its Home Page today leads with the long overdue plea of ‘Saving our (Black) girls’, clearly from the depradations of liberal-sanctioned ‘sin'(drugs etc.). Despite its racial intolerance, it is a serious site dealing with deadly threats to life and existence. On the other hand, it automatically takes the ‘Black’ point of view against the white, even when this involves a defence of the criminal (which it otherwise opposes). Evidently intolerant, but a very valuable source.
An even clearer case exists for Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s site, The AHA foundation, also banned at the BL:
http://www.theahafoundation.org/about-us/
In a similar vein to NOI, it attempts to rescue ‘victims of honor violence’, ie abused women worldwide. Though there is no NOI-type colour bar, it is not hard to guess which religion might be producing the main clients of the site.
It is time our leaders realised they are ruling with our permission, and that no source of information which promotes sincerely held views, no matter how foul, should be censored. Quite apart from anything else, leading the fight against the enemy means understanding the enemy, a point completely lost on the AGW crew.
Which is why they are losing.
If you open up a command prompt (Start, all programs, accessories) in windows and type tracert http://www.wattsupwiththat.com it will show you the hops (jumps between connections) from your PC to this website and where the slowness is coming from, if its early in the trace then its probably the university, if its later then its the general network.. Tracert stands for trace route.
Hope that helps (I work in IT)
I work at another Uni, and EVERYTHING is slow as a wet week compared to at home on ADSL.
Remember that there a huge amount of traffic on these Uni networks and bottlenecks to OS sites can often occur.
It’s not like all of the students are stealing, er… downloading mp3s or streaming full HD movies 24 hours a day.
Try loading httpwatch and check the timings and transactions during the load…fun to see what’s happening during any web access….try for free…
Hugh C
I run a program called PeerBlock and every time I access your site I get spying from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reporting my access to 140.90.213.166.80 and
National Aeronautics and Space Administration reporting to 128.183.168.36.80. It seems big Global Warming brother is watching your site and probably slowing things down.