[ Sajith M ]

The fact that our I&B (Information and Broadcasting) ministry is banning thing again comes as no major surprise. Talk of censorship and ban coming from I&B ministry is no longer surprising. Here is the latest:

Two underwear ads banned for vulgarity

The government has banned two underwear advertisements for indecency and vulgarity. The information and broadcasting (I&B) ministry has directed all television channels to stop screening advertisements of Lux Cozy and Amul Macho with immediate effect.

Television channels have also been instructed “to be more careful in future in selection of advertisements and to strictly adhere to advertisement code”.

This is not the first occasion that advertisements have been found objectionable. Channels had been issued a warning in April regarding a similar advertisement of Gen-X undergarments.

How long will we have ministers treating people as dumb folks who can’t decide what they want to watch and need to be protected against evil content.

Posted under: Thoughts , Censorship
Tagged with: ban, banning, Censorship, I&B

Indiatimes reports Google’s social networking site in trouble

The Aurangabad bench of Bombay High Court has directed the Maharashtra government to issue notice to Google for the alleged spread of hatred about India by its social network service Orkut.

The order was issued by Justice A P Deshpande and Justice R M Borde Monday in response to a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by local Advocate Yugant R Marlapalle.

A picture of burning the national tricolour, bearing anti-India message, has been put on www.orkut.com and a community “We Hate India” has been created on the site, the petition said.

The petition has also appealed to the government to appoint a ‘controller’ under the Information Technology Act-2000 to regulate all such communities being in operation on the internet.

Now what do they expect Google/Orkut to do? Moderate every single community? Maybe moderate every single post and scrap as well…
Or better still maybe a “controller” to control every single line of text or image on the net. wow!!!

Did the litigant and the court seriously think that people are complete idiots and will believe whatever they see, and so need to be protected from such content… Why can’t you trust people to make their choices without any interference from the government and judiciary?

Seriously makes me wonder when will we have courts and governments that do not try to censor information or curtail expression of opinion?

Posted under: Thoughts , Censorship
Tagged with: Bombay High Court, censor, expression, Google, Information Technology Act, opinion, Orkut

Internet access monitoring and filtering is a growing industry with an annual growth of 36% and the biggest consumers are not parents who don’t want their children to access inappropriate material, rather its corporations that do not trust their employers and want to monitor or filter the content that they access.

Let’s start with the usual arguments in favor of this monitoring

1. Assists in making the work environment free from hostile and harassing activity. This improved work environment lowers the exposure to employee lawsuits as monitoring assists in creating a safe and secure working environment.
2. Employees maintain efficient and productive work habits. These improved work habits would boost efficiency, increase productivity and improve customer service.
3. Employees avoid misuse of the employer’s equipment and resources. This misuse could clog up network bandwidth and computer disk space.
4. Employees accessing various inadvertently download Trojans and viruses onto their machines making it a security threat.
5. Sensitive information about trade secrets, intellectual property, customers, employees, and financial data is properly protected.

Well, so say those who want to implement these measures or the companies that develop the software to enable this. But do they actually stand up to scrutiny. Here are some facts:

1. Contrary to popular perception, monitoring may actually increase a company’s potential liability. Employers aren’t liable for harassment unless they are made aware that harassment is occurring. But if a company monitors employees, business assumes responsibility for everything it sees and everything it monitors on the Internet, whether an employee brings it to the company’s attention or not and then suddenly have a duty to investigate everything.
2. Loss of respect and trust for employer resulting in higher turnover, loss of productivity and decay of a positive work culture. Workplaces that are subject to high surveillance typically are culturally in trouble where trust is missing.
3. People are paid to do a job, and so long as the job is done within the specified parameters, they should be allowed some personal freedoms at work. And anyway, monitoring costs the company more than it saves.
4. While it is true that potentially sites that could infect the machines be blocked, rarely if ever is this the case. Also more often than not a good anti-virus solution will prevent these anyway.
5. Sensitive information about trade secrets, intellectual property, customers, employees, and financial data need not always be lost by visiting a site or sending an email, they can as well be lost by a face-to-face conversation, or a letter written on paper, or a telephone call, or an employee resigning and joining another company.

At the end of the day, all that such measure do is:

1. Invades worker privacy
2. Increases employee stress
3. Undermines employee trust
4. Reduces individual autonomy
5. Focuses on quantity rather than quality of work
6. Reduces employee morale and overall productivity

Philosophically and morally, employees are first and foremost people who are autonomous moral agents, where their moral status is defined by a set of rights. These rights include the right not to be used by others solely for the purpose of personal or organizational enrichment … They are entitled to respect, which implies some right to privacy

Michael J. Meyer, SCU Professor of Philosophy

Posted under: Thoughts , Censorship

Is India on the way to becoming the next China of censorship?

BoingBoing reports:

India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites. The list is confidential. Indian ISPs have been slowly coming into compliance. SpectraNet, MTNL, Reliance, and as of Monday afternoon, Airtel. State-backed BSNL and VSNL have not started yet but likely will soon. The known list of blocked domains is *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/*.
Yes folks, the Indian government has decided to censor blogs and refused to explain why. This morning Shivam Vij managed to talk to Dr Gulshan Rai, director of CERT-IN, the only body authorised to issue directives to ISPs. His response: “Somebody must have asked for some sites to be blocked. What is your problem?”

Am still wondering if someone in DoT thought that entire domains need to be blocked because some subdomain was not acceptable to them? Or was it non-technical folks at the ISPs who thought that blocking entire domains might be easier that individual subdomains. For some strange reason the list of blocked sites is not public (its confidential for god knows what reason), and as such we may never know if idiots are at DoT or at the ISPs

Bloggers Against Censorship has more info on this. Neha Viswanathan has a time line of events. Here is the post by Mridula that seems to have alerted everyone.

Nikhil informed by email that I could still access blogspot sites by using pkblogs.com. For example if you want to get to sajithm.blogspot.com (my old blog), type http://www.pkblogs.com/sajithm in the browser’s address bar.

Update 1: more info on Bypassing The Ban
Update 2: The easiest solution seems to be to use Google Web Accelerator.

Posted under: Thoughts , Censorship