Inadvertent sledgehammers: The Last Post

I’m glad my faith in the “system” in India was not misplaced. The sledgehammer was inadvertent indeed.

Thanks to Chukti, I now have quotable information from the authorities in India. It appears that some truly inflammatory material was published on one of the blog sites and an emergency response team was activated as a result.

There is no value in my detailing what the inflammatory material was. Suffice it to say that it was enough to call for a DefCon Five in Indian internet terms.

And that’s where I pick up the story:

The
matter was immediately taken note of by our CERT (Computer Emergency
Response Team) and the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) was informed
of it. The DOT took up the matter forthwith with the search engines and
instructions were also issued to all Internet providers to block the two
impertinent 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. Department of Telecommunications
have now clarified the issue and the error is being rectified and it is
expected that normalcy in respect of blogs will soon be restored.

Service is being resumed, albeit slowly.