Via CNN.

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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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TechEd India Day One went great. High points: Office 2003/InfoPath sessions from Raj Chaudhari and Deepak Gulati (excellent speakers, both of them). The Longhorn video was great too, hope to see more in October and November!

The demos just confirmed what I felt after playing with the betas: with InfoPath’s and Word’s writing out data to user-defined schemas, and Word’s ability to mark up documents as XML after-the-fact, Microsoft has the strongest and friendliest XML processing toolkit on the market today. (Of course, they weren’t the first — anyone remember SoftQuad’s XMetal Pro?)

Biggest boo-boo: A certain *cough* speaker at the keynote, claiming SPOT was based on Wi-Fi :-p.

No I was wrong about the biggest boo-boo: this is the bigger boo-boo. This is what I still get when I try to log into MyTechEd online (as of Sep 24 9.30pm):

http://server1.msn.co.in/sp03/teched/register.asp :
Active Server Pages error ‘ASP 0126′
Include file not found
/sp03/teched/register.asp, line 67
The include file ‘/navigation/header/tech_edtop.asp’ was not found.

This is after two Microsoft event management partners and one Microsoft employee assured me all possible wrinkles have been worked out on Sep 23.

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Indian businesses often tout India’s “Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence” as one of its key competitive advantages over China. Re this groups.yahoo.com censorship mess, I wonder how many folk coming to do business in India will notice how ad-hoc India’s rulemaking really is. (Of course, anyone who has invested in India in anything but IT can tell you horror stories anyway, and will also tell you that IT or no, leopards don’t change their spots.)

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This story in The Pioneer says

The IT Act 2000 has no explicit provisions to block websites, unless they promte pornography, slander, racism, gambling, terrorism or violence, which cannot be challenged under laws governing freedom of expression.

Can you imagine a government agency trying to block every one of the gambling sites on the web? (This is in a country where various states have their own lotteries!) But of course, like any Indian will tell you, in India, selective enforcement is not the exception: it is the rule. Laws are not made with enforceability in mind, they are made because they “look good on the books”.

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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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Here’s a clue for career bureaucrats who fail to understand the Internet. The Internet is like a mirror, it reflects the real world. Banning a little nook of the Internet is not only futile, it makes about as much sense as smashing the mirror because you don’t like the mole on your face.

If — if — the kynhu Yahoo Group was a forum for illegal activities, talk to Yahoo and bust ‘em for violating Yahoo’s terms of service (which includes illegal activities such as violent crime and terrorism). Or track the member lists (the GoI already eavesdrops on large portions of India’s Internet traffic) and arrest list members in India. But for Cthulhu’s sake stop showing yourself off as a retard by censoring the Internet. All it does is attract more attention to whatever it is you were trying to suppress.

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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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