Blockspot

Blogspots get blocked and they instantly start blaming the government about it.
I won't do it because
1. Government issued a letter to ISPs to block *some* blogs and ISPs goof up and block the whole domain name-not fault of the government.

2. Bloggers point that their "freedom of speech" is being crushed by the government- Not exactly. Govt. never tried to block blogpsot on the whole. It was the ISPs. They also say that blocking even a few websites is not good and is "censorism". Well, yes it is censoring and yes it may be violating the spirit of internet. But violating the freedom of speech. Don't think it is the same. One of the websites quoted there was hinduunity, which is a hindu extremist website, spreading hatred, and thus government took a correct step by banning that. But then aren't we disallowing those extremist to express their views? Yes we are! But would you
allow LeT to run a advertisment campaign on say some private news or tv channel?
allow al-quida to start a news channel in India to air their 'beheading' acts and give justifications about it ?
allow a banned hindu extremist organization to run a radio channel which airs programs about how to start riots and how to kill most number of muslims in your locality?
allow a terrorist organization to give newspaper Ads asking for donation to their cause?

Nahi na?
Then why should we allow such sites to exist or remain accessible? They are not much different than radio, tv or newspaper. They are also source of news, data, views, articles and advertisment...form is a little different.

Anyways, lets explore the technical part of it. Why did all these ISPs goofed up ?
Well banning a *.blogpsot.com is very easy. Just do a DNS lookup of blogspot, get th IP address and put it into "access denied" list. But banning a particular subdomain such as http://abc.blogspot.com is much difficult task. As this subdomain has no seperate IP address.

So now that ISPs are slowly allowing the domain .blogspot.com to be accessible, can we say that this is all was there to the story ?

Maybe or maybe not!
For the starters bloggers are still fighting it out on the google groups and blogs
Also there may be a small subtle point we may be missing here. Banning of these blogs may have been a exersize by the security agencies to locate those people who access these blogs. And this maybe the very reason not to make the ban list public. The ISPs may have been asked to route the access requests to these particular blogs/sites to govt. servers which in turn register the IPs and thus secuirty agencies would have been able mark out locations from where people are accessing it. This may not be a very intelligent idea to get the IP addresses of the culprits but a very practical idea...yes definitely.

Blogspot -> blockspot? Not really

This is entirely a different take at cureent 'blogger crisis' in India. I think it is just indianized-"american-style-paranoia" and is extremely and utterly stupid move of the Indian blogger community to start a hate war against the government before getting the facts right. It is as if the government will gain anything by blocking these sites! Do not forget that this is the same government who passed RTI act and has enabled so much information into public domian.

So what exactly happened tonight ?
1. Government agencies find some terrorist activity at various websites.
2. Shoots off a letter to ISPs to block them.
3. --my guess->Some ISPs (stupid enough) block the domain name instead of that particular blog! and hence blogspot got blocked