Given the gaffe-prone Government of India trying to repeatedly curtail the rights of its citizens in the face of technically challenging adversaries, it wasn’t hard for me to fall prey to a very misleading news article a few days ago from the sensation-hungry Times of India.
Here’s the article. In effect it meant that all email ids of Indians must be hosted on Indian servers. Not only that, the ids MUST end with .in and not anything else, like the ubiquitous .com. Are these guys kidding me, I thought. Nowhere in the world has such a ridiculous ruling been implemented. It’s technically impossible to achieve and circumventing it would be child’s play. I know most of our ministers are poorly educated, but they aren’t really illiterate!! They aren’t really thinking of designing a mini-Internet just for Indians, are they?!! I was immensely perturbed.
A search dispelled the cloud. I heaved a sigh of relief and restored my faith in our netas. I couldn’t help thinking of what happened a few years back when the government banned access to all blogs in India as they were perceived a security threat! To be honest, the government only wanted some malicious blogs to be banned, but our ISPs took the opportunity to ban all blogs as they didn’t have the knowhow to ban specific sites! And India is an IT superpower! Thanks to some guys in Pakistan who helped me access my blog uninterrupted.
I’ll never open a .in mail id. If you know me, you won’t ask why.
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