On 26 May 2010, Bangkok Post published an article entitled "Why the govt lost to the UDD on the tech battlefield" saying that "Norporchor IPTV transmissions have been made via different Prachathai domains" and that security experts found Prachatai's "correlation with the Norporchor network". Below is what Chiranuch Premchaiporn, Prachatai Director, has written to the Bangkok Post in response to the article.

29 May, 2010

Dear Editor,

Your article ‘Why the govt lost to the UDD on the tech battlefield’ (by Sasiwimon Boonruang , Database, 26 May) could easily be understood as saying that there are links and connections between the UDD and Prachatai, especially for less tech-savvy people. Behind a lot of technical terms which are not understandable for everyone, there is at least the suggestion that Prachatai and UDD are linked to each other in the technical domain (and going by some of the online reactions to the article it is indeed understood that way). This impression is false.  

‘Based on in-depth correlation technical analysis of the UDD network, it was found that Norporchor IPTV transmissions have been made via different Prachathai domains registered with the GTLD (general top-level domain), ... 

At mail relay server level, they found the UDD technical team had applied Web 2.0 technology via Google applications, with only one big group and one small group, and they identified the webmaster of Prachatai and finally the correlation with the Norporchor network.'

If using any Google application, especially Gmail, identifies a correlation with the Norporchor network, I am confident that there are more than a million people correlated to the Norporchor network. If you or the anonymous security experts that you quote really want to substantiate the claim in your analysis, you have to prove that the origin of Norporchor IPTV is one of Prachatai servers. In other words, you must prove that one of Norporchor IPTV sources is owned by Prachatai. 

In addition, the fact that two domain names are on the same IP address does not mean they are related. Those two domain names may share a single IP address in a shared web hosting service. 

The claim that URL filtering technology can block http://www.xyz.com, but will fail to block ‘subsequent pages inside the website, such as http://www.xyz.com/abc’ is laughably untrue as our readers have repeatedly discovered trying to access pages on any of blocked domain names.

Please be informed that your article describes the results of a very weak analysis, but tries to make it look convincing by referring to "security experts". It would be useful if you could disclose the names of these experts so that they can be held accountable for their "analysis".

‘Your "experts" present non-facts and omit very well-known facts in their "analysis". This is reporting of a very poor standard, it besmirches the name of Prachatai with no reason, and it appears to support the idea of censorship.  We are surprised to see this in the Bangkok Post.’

Best regards,

Chiranuch Premchaiporn, Director of Prachatai