Indian Govt to block Bloggers.com and few others

Indian Govt blocks blogspot, typepad and geocities
Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Govt of India has banned blogs that are hosted at blogger.com's service (blogspot.com).
Two more services Typepad.com and Geocities.com are also blocked by the Indian Govt.

India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites.

An Indian political blog is reporting that the ban was initiated by the Indian intelligence service to stop terrorism. According totheir source, the terrorists are using blogs to communicate. It ia useless (because the terrorists can simply use proxies),and it's similar to shutting off the country's telephone service because terrorists talk to each other through phones.

So, whats the solution now?
For serious users of blogger.com, i suggest moving your website to some other server instead of hosting at blogspot.com
Here's the procedure (its what i did minutes back)

1.Log in into " blogger.com "
2.Go to your blog's settings
3.Select "Publishing"
4.Click on a small link called "Switch To: FTP "
5.Enter FTP details of your website there and click on "Save Settings"
6.Republish your Entire Blog
7.Your blog will be hosted on the server of your choice now.

Thats for users with access to a FTP server, for others, create a FTP account in any of the freely available webhosting solutions such as www.50webs.com
50webs provides free FTP access and subdomain based hosting, so you can have
http://yourblogname.50webs.com instead of http://yourblogname.blogspot.com

If any users want detailed information about hosting with 50webs or with configuring blogger, submit comment on my site, so that i can put up an elaborate tutorial on my site.

Lets hope that Indian Govt doesn't block blogger.com and 50webs.com !
Tutorials over, now for the technical part.
The Indian Govt is not correct on its part to block these websites.
If India is worried about terrorists, let it track suspicious blogs or block selective blogs.
Its insane to block out such premiere websites such as blogger and geocities.
Technically, terrorists can have thousands of ways to communicate online, if so, will the Indian Govt block the entire Internet?
So much for all the speeches about India shining in IT sector.
Setbacks such as these can have the potential to erase the IT future of India and spoil the reputation of Indians online.

All said, is the Govt Listening???