Copyright 2012 by John T. Reed

I have received a number of emails from military personnel saying my articles were blocked on military computers including at West Point.

Here is an email I just got explaining that it was not me but Wordpress that was blocked. For a year or two, I used Wordpress to post my articles. But one day it seemed to erase or not allow access to any comments that had been posted. To this day I still receive blank comments that I am supposed to moderate and post. So I stopped using Wordpress. The emailer who claims to be in charge of any such blocking says he did not block me but did block Wordpress and that was what caused it to look like I was being blocked. Here is his email:

Mr Reed -

I enjoy your articles and will be sending you an email later with some of my
own comments. Regarding your articles being blocked at USMA or on DoD
computers in general, I can give you the scoop.

I manage the Army's DNS servers, and those that are accessed by users at
USMA. I can assure you that johntreed.com is not blocked by us, as I would
be the person instituting any block of Army DNS. However, Wordpress itself
is indeed blocked and if your article was previously hosted on a
Wordpress.org system, it would have been blocked by collateral damage. I
can't say for sure why Wordpress is blocked but then I don't have access to
the brilliant logic that directs us to block any site. Typepad and Blogspot
are all blocked as well. As long as you stay on your own domain and don't
have your DNS hosted by a number of the DNS servers we block regularly
(which kills thousands of innocent and innocuous sites within the Army
networks), you'll be fine (tongue-in-cheek). In addition, DISA also has
their own blocks outside of what the Army has, so it is possible for them to
block one thing and we block another; in general any blog-hosting sites are
blocked for whatever strange reasons.

regards

name redacted by john T. Reed