ZDNet: Website geoblocking is not that widespread, study finds. “Geoblocking, the practice of websites blocking users from certain countries from accessing their content, is not as widespread as most people believe, a recently published study has revealed.”
MakeUseOf: The 15 Best Web Proxies for Geo-Blocked Content and Online Privacy. “Want to improve your online privacy but don’t want to use a VPN? The alternative is a web proxy, but with so many available, the experience can differ wildly. If you’re looking for a free web proxy that actually works, keep reading. We’ve listed the top 15 services available today.”
The Next Web: This free Chrome extension lets you watch geo-blocked videos on YouTube. “Every once in a while I would stumble upon an interesting video on YouTube only to discover the uploader hasn’t made the clip available in my country. Switching my VPN to another region usually solves the problem, but thanks to this new Chrome extension, there is now a way to do this entirely VPN-free.”
Phys.org: Springer Nature blocks access to articles in China. “Academic publisher Springer Nature says it has blocked access to articles within China to comply with demands from the Chinese government. The company said Wednesday about 1 percent of its content available online in global markets has been blocked in compliance with ‘local distribution laws.’”
Techdirt: Elsevier’s Latest Brilliant Idea: Adding Geoblocking To Open Access. “We’ve just written about a troubling move by Elsevier to create its own, watered-down version of Wikipedia in the field of science. If you are wondering what other plans it has for the academic world, here’s a post from Elsevier’s Vice President, Policy and Communications, Gemma Hersh, that offers some clues. She’s ‘responsible for developing and refreshing policies in areas related to open access, open data, text mining and others,’ and in ‘Working towards a transition to open access’, Hersh meditates upon the two main kinds of open access, ‘gold’ and ‘green’.”
The ResearchBuzz Firehose is regular RB content presented as individual posts.
For digest-type posts a couple of times a day, please visit ResearchBuzz.
Want to know how to best use the Firehose for content discovery?
Check out this handy article.