I received an email from the engineers on my team in India that ISPs have started allowing access to the blocked typepad.com and blogspot.com domains after the Bombay attacks. Apparently, they weren’t able to selectively block certain blogs (for whatever reason), but have realized how insanely ineffective it was to attempt to block anything at all. There are numerous ways to get around the block considering RSS aggregators, email notification, and anonymous proxies amongst other things.
Apparently, the basis for the blocking was related to content on 18 blogs that the government deemed to contain “extremely derogatory references to Islam.” Regardless of the precise content, I find it appalling that the world’s largest democracy would implement such far reaching acts of censorship even in the face of possible sectarian violence. I’m also quite surprised that the government thinks that it can possibly manage the process of censoring the sites that might contain questionable content. Only the Chinese are that good.
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