Whenever I said India was a third world shit hole with semi-communist politicians, some agreed with me but a lot people raised their eyebrows. Others gave a "wtf" look and some told me outright that I was a moron. Well, I have the last laugh. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has passed an order to the Indian ISP's (Internet Service Providers) to block several websites (actually 18, I think). These include xxx.blogspot.com, xxx.typepad.com and geocities.com/xxx (replace xxx with relevant subdomain names). That's right, so when I click "publish post" and it's posted, no one from India can read my awesome blog :(. The Government hasn't given any explaination (yet) to why it has banned these high traffic blogging sites along with the other websites. And we're supposed to be a democratic country that allows freedom of speech (or thought). Since no explainations have been given, there are several speculations as to why this has happened. Some say it's to keep Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI, a small time terrorist group) activists from communicating (apparently they use blogger and typepad according to the "intelligence"). Others say it's to stop terrorists from communicating after the mumbai blasts. Wha? Apparently these fucking morons in the Government forgotten a medium that can be easily used even by 3 year olds: a telephone? They could have their own radio transmitter/reciever too. You never know. By blocking these sites, it's not going to prevent them from communicating. Shivam Vij says, "The trouble is bloggers don't even know which sites the DoT wants blocked. To make matters worse, ISPs seem to be blocking entire domains on which these blogs are hosted (instead of blocking specific blogs that contain pron or that spread hatred)."


There are other numerous ways these "terrorists" could communicate, and banning blogging websites will not cut off a significant percentage of their communication. Coming back to the Government not giving any explainations (after all, its a country where its spelt democrazy)... I just remembered reading somewhere that a CERT-IN (Computer Emergency Response Team - India) official responding to a famous blogger about the ban "Somebody must have asked for some sites to be blocked. What is your problem?" [source]. You can conclude two things from that response. One, the guy is ignorant of the ban, does not know the reason for it and gets pissed when asked about it over and over again. Two, he is plain stupid. He is very much ignorant of the fact that a lot of Indians are into blogging. In fact, India is ranked 3rd in terms of highest number of bloggers. I wonder how this fool ended up in the CERT team. Oh n03s, j00 kn0w w4t t0 d0 wh3n s0m30n3 h4x?!?!?!? Moron.


And the funny thing is, even after the ban, users are able to make blog posts. And it is possible to read blogs using anonymous web proxies like Unipeak (thanks to Jay) and pkblogs.com or by using a proxy program like Privoxy along with Tor. If the ban were actually to prevent terrorists from communicating, I'm sure they'd know all these methods to get around the ban. Let's not under estimate their intelligence. So why ban anyway when porn and hatred can still be spread and viewed? By doing this, they're causing unnecessary problems/worries to hundreds of thousands of innocent bloggers and blog readers.


Okay, enough has been said on this. And I heard some of them are filing a RTI (Right To Information) suit. That's probably..... not going to work, as we know our Government very well. They'll probably arrest them saying that they were actually the terrorists filing the suit because their "medium of communication" had been jeopardized.



Sources: Desipundit.com, IndiaCensored.com, Rediff News

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