People outside the European Union’s borders can again freely browse the Planning Authority’s website, the regulator having quickly fixed geographical restrictions after Times of Malta raised the issue.

Internet users in non-EU countries from the US, Canada, Australia to Singapore and Vietnam were being denied access to the website, the newspaper discovered late last month. It was unable to access www.pa.org.mt/ when ‘tricking’ the site into thinking the connection came from a variety of non-EU countries, using a proxy server.

A proxy server is a form of intermediary between a device and a network. It allows a device to mask its original location and, instead, appear as though it hails from somewhere else. 

Accessing sites from non-EU countries led users to receive an “ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED” error message.

Conversely, the PA website loaded without problems when the Times of Malta used a proxy server to connect using IP addresses from within EU member states such as Spain, France and Germany.

The findings were corroborated by individuals in the US, Vietnam, Mexico and Australia, who all confirmed they received an error message when trying to access the site. Planning regulator websites in a variety of other EU countries had no such geographical restrictions.

A PA spokesman initially told Times of Malta the regulator did not employ filtering techniques of any sort on its website and instead suggested individual users’ internet connections were to blame. 

“If there are any blockages related to geo-location, then these are occurring at an internet service provider level,” the spokesman said, adding the issue would be communicated to the PA’s own ISP for “verification”.

The PA website was subsequently taken offline for a routine end-of-year maintenance period. When it went back online, geographical restrictions were no longer in place. People in Australia, the US and Singapore have all confirmed with Times of Malta they could now visit the website without resorting to proxy servers.

Every single time I reported hitches I was told the problem was my computer

When contacted, New York-based environmental activist Astrid Vella said she had been frozen out of the PA website for the past six months.

“The website used to work fine until the end of June,” she said, adding, somewhat skeptically, that access problems “coincidentally” began immediately after overseas activists, including herself, had used the PA website to campaign against trees being chopped down to make way for a widened Rabat road.

“Every single time I reported hitches, I was told the problem was my computer,” she added.

Geo-blocking filters, which limit website access to users from specific countries, traditionally work by identifying a computer’s IP address, a string of numbers indicating where in the world it is connecting to the internet from.

Companies employ geo-blocking techniques for a variety of reasons, from enforcing copyright restrictions to fraud prevention or altering prices for products from one market to the other. The same flight, for instance, might cost more or less depending on which country you access the internet from when buying it.

The European Union introduced new rules concerning the geo-blocking of digital media services last April. The rules require digital media providers, such as video streaming service Netflix, to ensure EU customers can still access their home country’s version of the service when they travel to another member state.

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