India Uncut
This blog has moved to its own domain. Please visit IndiaUncut.com for the all-new India
Uncut and bookmark it. The new site has much more content and some new sections, and you can read about them here and here. You can subscribe to full RSS feeds of all the sections from here.
This blogspot site will no longer be updated, except in case of emergencies, if the main site suffers a prolonged outage. Thanks - Amit.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Accessing Blogspot blogs
Various bloggers (1, 2, 3) have written in saying that they're having trouble accessing Blogspot blogs, such as mine, and there are worries that the government might have instructed ISPs to block them. I'm getting Blogspot blogs ok (on a Tata Indicom ISP), but if you have problems doing so, now or ever, hop over to this site: http://www.pkblogs.com/.
This was set up earlier this year when there was a similar scare in Pakistan about Blogspot blogs being allegedly banned. It should help you get round the lack of access, regardless of its cause. I hope there's an innocent explanation for this, some technology failure somewhere. I find it hard to fathom that the government could start blocking blogs. (It is entirely possible, though, that they might have wanted to block a hate blog on Blogspot and, in their ignorance, sent instructions that caused the entire domain to be blocked. But why speculate?)
Hey, I hope you're getting to read this!
Update: Neha Viswanathan is tracking this issue and is posting updates. She'd also like as many readers as possible to do a traceroute, so as to identify the source of the block. She emails me instructions on how to do this:
Update 2 (July 16): Reader Aparna writes in:
Update 3 (July 17): Amit Agarwal has posted some useful tips here on how to get around the block. And some of us have also set up a wiki here, to monitor information on the subject.
Update 4 (July 17): There's an updated post here. To my dismay, this doesn't seem to be a false alarm.
This was set up earlier this year when there was a similar scare in Pakistan about Blogspot blogs being allegedly banned. It should help you get round the lack of access, regardless of its cause. I hope there's an innocent explanation for this, some technology failure somewhere. I find it hard to fathom that the government could start blocking blogs. (It is entirely possible, though, that they might have wanted to block a hate blog on Blogspot and, in their ignorance, sent instructions that caused the entire domain to be blocked. But why speculate?)
Hey, I hope you're getting to read this!
Update: Neha Viswanathan is tracking this issue and is posting updates. She'd also like as many readers as possible to do a traceroute, so as to identify the source of the block. She emails me instructions on how to do this:
1) Go to StartAmit Agarwal writes in the comments of Neha's post that "it doesn’t look like the Ministry is involved as in that case, BSNL would have been the first company to block blogspot.com." That's a good point, and I hope this turns out to be a false alarm.
2) Click on Run
3) Type in: tracert blogspot.com
4) You should see something like:
Tracing route to blogspot.com [66.102.15.100]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
5) Right click in the window, select all, and paste it in here as a comment.. then we could figure out where exactly the block is taking place at.
Update 2 (July 16): Reader Aparna writes in:
If you want people to be able to "select all" and copy the instructions should be:So there you have it.
1) Go to Start
2) Click on Run
3) Type in: cmd
4) Type in: tracert blogspot.com
5) etc.
Since if you type the command in directly, the window closes as soon as the command is executed. The cmd command allows the window to remain open for the next command, hence allowing you to copy.
Update 3 (July 17): Amit Agarwal has posted some useful tips here on how to get around the block. And some of us have also set up a wiki here, to monitor information on the subject.
Update 4 (July 17): There's an updated post here. To my dismay, this doesn't seem to be a false alarm.
