Thursday, July 19, 2007

Indian Govt. Blocking Blog Sites

The Indian Govt decided to block certain blogs that spread hate for India in an attempt to fight back against terrorism. They ended up blocking all sites on Blogspot.com and other blog sites. For example, my photo blog, Mo-Chitra, is blocked. I can of course still access it from work because our gateways are in Japan & Singapore. It is only from home that I am unable to access my blog.

I ran a tracert to mo-chitra.blogspot.com and got the following output:

d:\>tracert -w 20000 mo-chitra.blogspot.com

Tracing route to blogspot.blogger.com [66.102.15.101] over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 13 ms 8 ms 8 ms 172.30.69.1
2 25 ms 10 ms 12 ms 203.109.92.1
3 18 ms 26 ms 22 ms 125.16.0.73
4 24 ms 23 ms 24 ms 59.145.0.226
5 43 ms 34 ms 25 ms 202.56.223.109
6 59.145.11.73 reports: Destination host unreachable.

Trace complete.

Querying the IP Whois tool for the last two IPs shows that they belong to Bharati Tele.

inetnum: 202.56.223.0 - 202.56.223.255
netname: BTNL
descr: Bharti Telenet Ltd.
descr: Bhopal
descr: India
country: IN
inetnum: 59.144.0.0 - 59.145.255.255
netname: BHARTI-IN
descr: BHARTI INFOTEL LTD.
descr: ISP Division , Long Distance Group - Telesonic
descr: 234 , Okhala Phase III
descr: NEW DELHI
descr: INDIA
country: IN

So Bharati is blocking access to blogspot.com... Mr. Mital, I assume you are not a fool. With this assumption, I hope that you will instruct the idiots in your IT department to work a little harder and not block legitimate web sites. It takes a few seconds to block an entire domain. It takes a lot longer to block specific web sites. Somebody in your organization is cheating you of the salary you pay him.

I managed to access my blog inspite of your blocking access by the simple device of using TorPark. Only a fool tries to stop the Ganga from flowing to the sea. Are you one of them Sonia, Manmohan and Mittal?

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