Author: JP

This may be familiar to most of you, but it was a revelation to me. So I thought I’d share it just in case.

Malcolm and I were chatting this morning, and the subject of comment spam came up. Both of us had noticed that of late, there had been a profusion of comments that made perfect grammatical sense, had no links, avoided mentioning sex, drugs, rock’n’roll ringtones or organic growth, and seemed to be an extract from something somewhere. The names and reference points of the “sender” were well-formed as well. In fact there was only one problem with all such comments; even the most extreme flight of fancy was inadequate in making a connection between the post and the comment.

You’ve probably had the same experience. Malc’s view of what was happening was interesting; the spammers are trying to get approval for the innocuous comments in order to “teach” the spam filters that they are Orl Korrect. And once that status has been consistently established, the games begin.

Makes sense to me.

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.

I shall comment on it later, but last night I finished reading the latest report from Pew Internet titled Bloggers: A Portrait of the internet’s New Storytellers.

As usual there’s much I agree with, and some bits I don’t. What is important is that we continue to build a body of evidence that explains, interprets and supports the value of social software in general; without this, we will never bridge the gap between the Got-Its and the Whatever-You’re-Smoking-I-Want-None-Of-Its. And Pew are good at helping us do this.

So take a read and see what you think. I promise to comment in detail this weekend.

I hear that all restrictions on access to blog sites in India have been rescinded. It is likely that the patchwork nature of the imposition of the controls is reflected in the process of taking the restrictions off. More later.

• Many financial institutions banned staff access to internet mail. So the staff used proxy sites.
• Then they banned (or at least tried to ban) proxy sites. So the staff used Google to get to the site.
• Then they banned that (or at least tried to). So the staff used Babelfish or its equivalent.

I could go on, but won’t. Point made. Where I work, people came in one sunny day to find access to Google Groups had been banned. Compliance had made an apparently valid request to ban access to some elements of Google Groups, and the only response that Information Security could legitimately provide was to ban access to all of Google Groups. Something to do with the lists we bought. There was uproar. And we couldn’t really find anyone who would stand up and say “I decided to do this”. No matter, the key thing was that Google Groups access was banned. And so IT staff regularly went home to work, because they needed access to Google Groups to do their work. And over time we worked out an elegant-ish solution, parts of Google Groups became unbanned by request, all you had to do was explicitly state the group you wanted to belong to and why, and access was granted. And we lived happily e. a.
We live in an intensely regulated highly litigious society, and this sort of thing is part of the price we pay as a result.

Which would be hard, except for the sheer joy of the unintended consequences of sledgehammer actions.

Internet access is not that easy to regulate or control, and it is easy therefore to look for sledgehammer approaches.

Now let’s take a look at what’s been happening in India. [Here I am summarising aggressively, so please do allow me some poetic licence in the process]

• The Indian Government feels that a small number of inflammatory and abusive and religious-intolerant sites should be blocked. It tries to be responsible and proactive. Try being the operative word.
• Some of these sites are nothing more than blogs, and are therefore hosted on blogging infrastructures.
• Government says to relevant agency, block these sites.
• Agency passes instruction to Indian ISPs. Instructions are appropriately amorphous.
• ISPs can’t do this easily, so they go sledgehammer. Bans galore in Bangalore.
• Many blog sites become inaccessible. But not consistently.
• This inaccessibility is neither uniform nor ubiquitous, and in no way comprehensive. Or for that matter comprehensible.
• So the bloggers go to intermediate sites where there are no such barriers.
• One such site is pkblogs.
• Which, I believe, was created to give Pakistanis access to the blogosphere in unconstrained form, reacting to the cartoon backlash.

So we have Indians, denied access in their own country, (denied access as a result of a sledgehammer response to an apparently reasonable Government request), going to a “Pakistani” site (itself formed in response to another sledgehammer) in order to read their own blogs.

Or something like that. Hands across borders.
Snowballs, like nature, abhor vacuums. The blogosphere is borderless. The genie is so out of the bottle it needs a passport to get back. And genies don’t do passports.