Indian gov blocks Blogspot, Typepad, Geocities blogs!

Fantastic! That's all we need, the worlds largest democracy censoring the Internet, joining the likes of China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Ethiopia.

In any case, there are ways to get around the block which include the following:

• Use the Atom feed via a web based RSS reader
• Coral Cache
• PkBlogs
  
• Babel Fish Proxy
• Google Translate Proxy (Though I'm not sure this is working.)

Of course, all this is contingent on being able to read this post in the first place :(

Update: Apparently the blocking is not related to the Bombay blasts but rather to curb the spread of religious propaganda! This means the ban probably will not be lifted anytime soon. On the other hand, assuming that the ISPs have been asked to block specific blogs on blogspot, it would be up to the ISPs to ensure that they don't block the domain blogspot.com. (If the ISPs have been asked to block the entire blogspot.com domain, then India does really fall into the same league as Pakistan.)

Visit Chennai MetBlogs and NDTV for more details.

Update 2: Blog blockade will be lifted in 48 hours says Rediff. Quoting from Rediff:

"He [Amitabh Singhal] acknowledged that some ISPs -- he insisted it wasn't all -- mistook the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) notice and blocked entire blog domains, adding that it was technically feasible to block a sub-domain and leave others still accessible."

Last Update: So the domain level block on blogspot.com is gone but the block on a few specific sites remain. This makes us better than China and Pakistan but put us firmly with the likes of Germany, the UK and France. I guess we're not quite up there with the US yet when it comes to freedom of speech. But I have hope.