July 18, 2006
 

If you're reading this, you're probably not in India

The Indian government has blocked access (from India) to several blogging sites (Blogger's .blogspot.com for one) for the last 2-3 days. The aim is to apparently prevent terrorist groups from being able to communicate with themselves and with the public/readers. But what this has done is to also prevent access to the whopping majority of blogs which are harmless and as remotely related to terrorism as you could get.

It's yet another classic case of muzzling the majority to capture a minority. A few years ago, the government decided to ban mobile phone services in J & K for fear that terrorists would use those to communicate. Again earlier, the government blocked access to all groups on Yahoo! Groups just because they wanted to block a specific group from being able to be accessed.

Most of the time this is because someone lower down has botched up by blacking out the entire domain rather than just the sub-domain. Of course, you could still be reading this through a proxying service or through a web based feed reader. That's besides the point, as you'd agree!

The irony is that when all of Mumbai was under water last year and when there were blasts last week, several blogs (notably MumbaiHelp) came to the rescue of citizens who were looking for all sorts of help.

Follow the updates on DesiPundit. I understand that CNN-IBN will be running a story on this at 9 pm tonight.

Rambled @ 6:18 PM

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1 comment(s)

Dai shankar here, i was able to acess blogs no problem at all

By  Anonymous (Jul 20, 2006, 1:30:00 PM)  

I'd prefer if you posted comments with your real name to add more credibility to your opinions. Obviously comments containing offensive and unsuitable language will be deleted. The opinions in the comments are your own views. You are welcome to provide a URL to your own blog, especially if it discusses issues you find here.