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This is getting curiouser and curiouser. I didn't know whether to dismiss reports that there has been official word to block access to ".blogspot" and other sites from within India, given that I have been able to access them from my desk in IIT-B (but it takes a while to load, but the blogspot blogs do eventually load; wordpress even faster). Surely, if a government ban went through, IIT would be among the first to clamp down? Some people report that a message that the site is blocked is shown for some blogs - I haven't seen anything so far. One thing that is blocked in ITI sadly is youtube and apparently even google vidoe. Pity - I'm not if the reasons were bandwidth-hogging or other stuff.

Either someone's doing a really bad and slow job of monitoring and filtering content before it loads or there's a genuine technical problem or there's some unofficial "authoritarian" diktat floating around. Many bloggers have decided for themselves that there is something sinister about all of this and have launched a wiki to collect information about it.

It would be laughable, of course, for some babu to decide that blogs can be used to spread anti-national sentiment (you'd have to pull your network cable out to prevent the means to do that in the ultimate analysis). There are so many ways to get around it that it's hilarious.

Still, anything's possible. I'm not sure how terrorists use blogs to communicate. Have I been sending out subliminal messages in HTML, I wonder?