Censorship: 3 Quarks Daily and millions of other blogs no longer available in India!

From The Guardian:

A couple of years ago, the government of India decided to ban a Yahoo newsgroup allegedly run by Naga insurgents. In the process, all Yahoo newsgroups were inadvertently blocked, leading to a furore among internet users in India. After about a week, matters were rectified, but the lessons seem not to have been learnt.

Now, internet users across India have been unable since this weekend to access any sites hosted on Blogspot or Typepad, two popular domains for India-based blogs. (Geocities is also blocked.) Again, it seems that there isn’t a blanket ban on these blogs, merely a government order to block of couple of blogs that has gone awry.

When I first heard from a friend on Saturday that he couldn’t access either his blog or mine, both of which are hosted on Blogspot, I assumed that it was just a temporary blip. The Indian government does not have a history of internet censorship, and bloggers have never faced the kind of issues with free speech that their Pakistani and Chinese colleagues have had to deal with. However, it soon became evident that the blocks were due to a government order. As it spread across the internet providers, a process that took a couple of days, bloggers monitored the situation, and set up a wiki against censorship and a public-access newsgroup to discuss the matter.

More here.  [Thanks to Aditya Dev Sood and Tony Cobitz.]

And here is one way to bypass the censorship. A more comprehensive list of workarounds is available here at Wikipedia.

We encourage blogs which are not on Blogspot or Typepad to publicize this information so that people in India can see it.