Gagged bloggers fume at ban

NEW DELHI: Having been deprived of their personal space in cyberspace by a government ban on blogs related to Mumbai terror attacks, netizens have slammed the internet censorship through messages expressing outrage in other web forums.

"Government has really gone crazy... is Blogspot the only medium for sending messages? The Internet is flooded with free and paid services... (to carry hate messages)," said blogger Gurpreet Singh Modi, reacting to the ban on 18 websites in a bid to check hate messages following the July 11 blasts.

While messages expressing disgust at the ban flooded almost all general blog sites, some sites that were banned moved to other servers under a different name.

'Mumbaihelp', one of the sites on which the government pulled the plug, moved to a 'Wiki' server under the name mumbaihelp.jot.com.

Bloggers logged on to the new homepage to check if the service was still working fine and after reassuring themselves, started exchanging comments.

Elsewhere on the web, messages spewed pure hatred against the decision-makers with some netizens comparing India with China when it comes to clipping civil rights.

"The government has recently taken a page right out of the Chinese playbook - Internet censorship," an anonymous blogger said in a message on a tech blog.

"Governments of other countries are offering free municipal wi-fi Internet access, our great nation is still struggling to provide basic facilities like power and water... bloggers are already affected by massive power cuts... now government is trying to kick them with the ban?," said Ravish, a blogger, who gave only one name.

DIT blames technology:
Meanwhile, facing stiff opposition from Internet service providers and net surfers against blocking of 18 websites following Mumbai train blasts, the Department of Information Technology (DIT) sought to play down its action saying it wanted to censor only a few pages of just one site but technology in India did not permit a limited curb.

A top official of Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), who did not want to be named, said the DoT was told to block four pages of a particular website. However, technologically it is not possible to block a particular page of a site and hence it resulted in blocking of a number of websites completely.

Asked if DoT would lift the ban on so many websites, concerned officials said the Department is talking to officials in the DIT to resolve the problem. --PTI