groups.yahoo.com is now once again accessible through my Indian ISP (VSNL).

But, visit an arbitary URI and my browser returns:

Forbidden
You were denied access because:
Access denied by access control list.

I smell an application layer proxy.

I hear the gentle sounds of Article 19.1.a being
ripped apart in the background.

I see the Internet in India as restricted as Dubai, China or Iran in one year. I pray that I am wrong.

The worst part is, now that access to Yahoo Groups is (mostly) restored, this issue will die. If readers’ opinion in the Times of India is anything to go by, no one in this country cares a rat’s arse about liberty. And not-so-oddly enough, in this democratic society, their government doesn’t either.

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groups.yahoo.com has been blocked by government diktat for the second day running now. Please write to your nearest Indian embassy (or NRI/PIO ambassador, if you happen to be of Indian origin) to let them know what you think of India turning into the next China or Iran.

If you live in India, I’m not sure what you can do. Unfortunately the time-honoured method of writing to one’s MP does not work in India. Ideas appreciated.

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Well, now VSNL has gone and done it too — groups.yahoo.com is now inaccessible. From what I understand from this informative culling by Fred Noronha, most other ISPs have complied too. Ironically, all this attention caused the group in question — “kynhun” — to exceed its download quota and is now effectively inaccessible.

Make no mistake, this is a black day for the Net in India.

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The IAB nails it wrt DNS wildcards (re Verisign and the SiteFinder fiasco). Long, but a worthwhile read.

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Dear Government of India, if you must censor the Internet, can you please do with a bit more style and technical savvy? Maybe by spending a bit of money asking Cisco to build you a decent firewall? Hamhanded efforts like these to censor Internet access kinda kill India’s rep as a “software superpower”. Maybe you can get cybersavvy folk like SM Krishna or Chandrababu Naidu to consult before writing dumb memos like these? Yours very sincerely, a scandalized Indian Internet User.

Some background: Essentially, the government of India directs Indian ISP Dishnet to block one group in Yahoogroups. Dishnet, displaying that it can bend over and take it better than anyone else, blocks the whole of Yahoo Groups. It is not known if other ISPs like VSNL were similarly directed — they seem to be allowing that URL just fine. Posts on india-gii have pointed out that Dishnet could have blocked only that URL, but at the cost of increasing the strain on their own routers, so that was probably why the blanket block approach was chosen, freedom of expression for the rest of their customers be damned.

The blocked group seems to be (according to this post by Suresh Subramaniam on the india-gii list) a mailing list started by an ethnic minority outfit in Meghalaya, and cribs about how corrupt the Indian government is, how public money is swallowed up, etc. All I can say is if issues like these have to be censored by the Indian government, then the Indian press had better watch out, it is headed for the gulag in short order.

Another interesting point is contents of the fax itself — Mr J Random Bureaucrat is “directed to convey the approval of competent authority” that the group be blocked. Who is this competent authority? What process did they follow while deciding that this group be blocked? Was Due Process™ with respect to Article 19(1)(a) observed? Were constitutional experts consulted? Such questions are Best Not Asked in the world’s largest democracy.

What also surprised me was the outrage, or rather the lack of it, in groups such as the india-gii. There almost seems to be relief that the mai-baap sarkar has decided to block only one group, and not the whole site. I’m not going to get into slippery-slope arguments here, but will point out that things like these set a precedent, and if it’s going to be a little ethnic minority in Meghalaya today, it can be google.com tomorrow.

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Where’s a good trademark lawyer when you need one? I got this email (screenshot) that for many users would be a dead ringer for an official MS email (exhortations that Microsoft doesn’t distribute software by email notwithstanding). Virus writers do seem to be getting smarter, don’t they?

Update: I believe this worm is W.32/Swen. Be careful while downloading attachments!

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The Intarweb (sic) is a small in-joke among the geek set. It’s a dig at the web-is-the-internet attittude prevalent among large numbers of newbie net-users. Today, however, the Intarweb is one step closer to reality, thanks to one of the companies charged with one of the crucial pieces of the Net’s infrastructure — and ICANN, the organization responsible for Internet names, is asleep at the wheel as usual.

Starting today, all nonexistent entries in the .com and .net top-level-domains will resolve to a Verisign server called sitefinder. From an viewpoint of an interactive (”Intarweb”) user, this may seem harmless enough, but this makes life much more difficult for the anti-spam community, network operators and ISPs, not to mention hapless developers who now have to add && !(isWildcardAddress()) snippets all over their host lookup code.

Technically, if implemented right (which it isn’t — sitefinder’s Mail Reject Daemon seems to be a flawed SMTP implementation), Verisign will not “break standards”. DNS does allow for top-level wildcards, but this move is bad for users from many practical standpoints, including privacy and flexibility. Verisign’s best practices document (PDF) notes that several other TLD operators provide such a service as well, for example the .nu domain takes you to a generic page for sites which don’t exist. Which is fine, except that vanity domains like .nu don’t get used anywhere as much as the staples of .com and .net, and does not change the fact that wildcards are not a good idea at any gTLD level anyway.

PS. chaoszone is a dot-org, the registry of which is maintained by ISOC, not Verisign. Misspelt dot-orgs are not likely to get you misleading pages anytime soon.

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BengaliLinux.org has a better rendition of Google’s Bengali interface than Google itself!

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Google’s calculator tool does a very good job of unit conversions in addition to expressions.

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Nice. Google India in Hindi Bengali Telugu Marathi Tamil. Bengali and Telegu are still largely represented using a romanized alphabet — any volunteers?

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