Yesterday, India started to censor the blogs of a few major sites. Google's Blogspot, Geocities, and Typepad have been blocked by a majority of ISP's in India. Hence, there is an uprising within the online community in India and people have been blogging to spread the news. Kinda odd though - using a censored blog to pass news. How are people going to notice?
Anyhow, it's making headlines:
Google Groups
Digital Inspiration
India Uncut
Maybe I should care more that India is blocking these major websites and is joining the government censor clans of China, Iran, and the Middle East. But it's in the name of "terrorism". Seems like you can do anything nowadays if you say "terror". Governments that do this are insanely stupid to assume that people can't see through the veneer at what the real motivation is.
But what I do enjoy is that with the recent blocking is that I now have many ways of bypassing censorware to do legitimate work.
You may have it at work under various guises:
Websense, SurfControl, or a slew of others offer this.
While the best thing to do is to ask your system administrator to allow a website, sometimes this isn't possible or efficient enough. As such, you can follow one of many censorware bypassing tricks:
Use Google to translate a webpage that is blocked from English to English
Use the bloglines rss reader
Use the Tor network to bypass filtration
Add nyud.net:8090 to the end of any domain (http://microsoft.com.nyud.net:8090)
Add nyud.net:8080 to the end of any domain (http://microsoft.com.nyud.net:8080)
Add cob-web.org:8888 to the end of any domain (http://microsoft.com.cob-web.org:8888)
... (there are many more available at: http://www.boingboing.net/censorroute.html)
Flickr is a great example of a site that I use a lot that is banned in many countries.
Argh, matey.
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