Saturday, February 12, 2011

Blogspot blocked in India! - Is Emergency in the offing?

feb 11th, 2011

the fallout from mubarak's demise?

typical babu-neta-jholawala/journo mentality: shut down dissent.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: HARAN BR
Date: Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 11:26 AM
Subject: Blogspot blocked in India! - Is Emergency in the offing?
To:


Message from Bloggers: - 

It is to bring to the notice of readers of blog-spots that there is a deliberate attempt by the UPA government to scuttle the freedom of speech through blog-spots. Bloggers are able to access their blogger dash board, read the comments and post them, but not able to access their blog spot. Sources reveal that those using the ISPs such as Airtel, BSNL, Tikona, Tata, Idea etc are not able to view any blogspot.Those using other ISPs are able to access them.Only blogspot seems to have been denied access. That means this problem is India specific only.

Though many complaints have been lodged with the service providers, nothing has been done until now to correct it. This seems to be a deliberate attempt to deny Indians to voice their views at this critical juncture when more and more skeletons are tumbling out of investigations of unending scams. Such a thing happening in a democracy like India is an utter shame to all those in power. Even while totalitarian regimes are falling down near the Nile, a democratically established government resorting to such means needs to be checked. This governemnt must go. This government has no moral right to rule the country as it had only acted as a facilitator to all kinds of scams satrting from the one at ISRO. Above all, a government that is indulging in cyber terrorism is not at all a custodian of its citizens. The Emergency days are coming again, it seems.


An article on the crisis in blogspot can be read here posted in wordpress.



http://tljind.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/blogspot-domain-blocked-in-india-again/

Blogspot Domain Blocked In India Again

Internet service providers (ISPs) in India have done it once again. They are systematically blocking the Blogspot Domain, upon which popular blogging happens on a daily basis. ISPs that have reported to blocked Blogspot include Airtel, BSNL, Tikona, Tata, Idea, etc.

As usual, measures to fight this website blocking exercise have already surfaced. The best way to view and access the blocked blogs is to use a proxy server to access the same. Since ISPs in India cannot block internet protocol addresses located out of India, this can restore access to the blocked blogs.

Till now there is no official response from Google in this regard. A dedicated help thread has been created at Google's help forum to circumvent this blocking exercise.

India has a draconian cyber law in the form of information technology act, 2000 (IT Act, 2000). It was deliberately amended by the information technology amendment act, 2008 (IT Act 2008) for the sole purpose of getting absolute and unaccountable e-surveillance, internet censorship and website blocking powers.

Although all these powers were granted to Indian government and its agencies yet till now the government of India in general and ministry of communication and information technology (MCIT) in particular have defaulted in providing such civil liberty protection safeguards.

Repeated requests to the Prime Minister of India Dr. Manmohan Singh in this regard also proved futile. Till now the prime minister's office (PMO) has not shown any willingness to reform this situation.

In these circumstances self defence seems to be the only choice for citizens of India.