India’s Web Censorship
Is India on the way to becoming the next China of censorship?
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
