Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Blogger Ban ...

... phew. For a bit I was worried that Bada Bhaiya (Big Brother) in the Sarkar had banned blogger.com (the URL for the Blogger dashboard, where one creates and edits posts) as well. Seems like it's just really slow. Tracert can reach it, but it's taking forever to load in a browswer, so I'm using email.

Anyway, MSM (Indian and overseas) is going all out on this story (. NDTV interviewed a couple of bloggers on the 9 pm News. According to this story, the Government might be backtracking ... Here's a great chrnology of the fiasco so far, including stories about RTI (Right to Information) requests filed, and here's a wiki on the press coverage this is getting. Babu, wake up soon! Your idiocy is on display for the world to see:

Officials at the Ministry of Communications here did not return repeated calls. An official at the ministry's department of information and technology, Gulshan Rai, said he was aware of "two pages" that had been blocked for spreading what he called "antinational sentiments," but was unable to provide details.

The secretary for telecommunications, D. S. Mathur, that bureau's highest-ranking civil servant, hung up the phone when reached at home.The minister of communications, Dayanidhi Maran, was traveling in San Francisco and unavailable for comment.

One of the ironies of this latest episode of babugiri is that one uses a Pakistani proxy site (set up when the Pakistani government banned blogspot over the Danish cartoon row) to bypass the ban. It's banner reads: "Is your blog blocked in India, Pakistan, China or Iran?" Oh what august company.

And the other weird thing -- to access typepad.com one uses a different proxy. Which has ads on the top. So, I've been surfing Open Book with a banner advertising all kinds of delectable delights with college girls. [Guess most folks wanting a proxy server to surf the Net, one that can bypass firewalls, and allow anonymous surfing, are searching for porn.]

Ah the Internet.

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