Fergie's Tech Blog

India Calls It a Error, But Blog Filtering Continues

Somini Sengupta writes in The New York Times:

After two days of angry inquiries and charges of government censorship, the Indian government took a step Thursday toward explaining a mysterious blockade on personal blogs, calling it “a technological error” that would be repaired soon.

In an e-mail message sent early on Thursday, India time, an official at the office of the Consulate General of India in New York said the order to block a handful of Web sites, including the popular blogspot.com, which plays host to thousands of personal blogs, had been prompted by the discovery of a site that contained what the official called “two impertinent pages” rife with material considered to be “extremely derogatory references to Islam.”

In an effort to stave off potential sectarian violence, the official said, the government’s Department of Telecommunications instructed Internet service providers to block access to the two pages. “Because of a technological error, the Internet providers went beyond what was expected of them, which in turn resulted in the unfortunate blocking of all blogs,” the official explained.

As of Friday, however, the sites remained blocked.

posted by Fergie @ 7/22/2006 06:35:00 AM