Censorship

If you can read this post today, 18 July 2006, you're probably not in India. In their infinite wisdom the government have blocked access to various blogging sites and blogspot is one of them. As is the fashion nowadays a wiki and a Google group have sprung up for discussion and further information on the situation. I think this post from the Slashdot article on this matter is probably the correct summary of the situation: Never attribute to malice what is explained by incompetence, especially in India.

The government either has evidence, or just as likely has just decided, that terrorists are communicating via public blogs - so they have provided ISPs with a list of blogs to block. The ISPs took the easy route and just blocked access to entire domains. Now it's hit the newspapers and television news I expect the situation to improve sooner rather than later. I guess the ISPs will get their act together and only ban the sites the government asked them to. Not that I think that will achieve much. There are too many fora on the internet to leave messages on, you'll never block them all. Worse, if the bad guys are daft enough to use public websites to plot and plan, they'll eventually get the hint and start using strong encryption and anonymous proxies to communicate with each other.

As you can see I can still write posts. That's because you write your posts on www.blogger.com and it's only *.blogspot.com that is blocked. Incompetence indeed.

(Edit 20 July 2006) As expected the government and/or the ISPs have found a clue; *.blogspot.com is no longer blocked from within India.