India May Ban Facebook, Orkut and Foreign Social Networking Sites

Lord Nemesis

Lord Nemesis

Overlord
Skilled
Close on the heels of the recent directive to telecom operators to provide for lawful interception of Blackberry and other encrypted messaging services, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has now asked Social Networking sites based outside India to fall in line.

"Sites such as Orkut and Facebook allow for heavily encrypted exchanges of information", a highly placed source at the MHA told Tech2.com. MHA officials are believed to be especially worried about the phenomenon of "scraps" and "pokes" respectively on these two sites.

"Imagine if applications such as SuperPoke fell into the hands of anti-national and anti-social (no pun intended) elements", remarked a senior MHA official who did not wish to be named. "The consequences could be disastrous, especially considering the lack of sufficient monitoring of Indian users' walls," he warned.

Intelligence operatives are of the belief that Jehadi terror cells could work out a sophisticated system of communication by "throwing sheep" at each other using a site such as Facebook.com whose servers the Indian government cannot access. The government has asked all Indian social networking sites such as BigAdda.com, Yaari.com and Minglebox.com to maintain records of all user activity including "change of status, profile picture, favorite sitcoms etc." in keeping with the law of the land.

It seems that unless their overseas counterparts such as the big two as well as other popular sites such as Hi5, Bebo, LinkedIn and MySpace reach an agreement with Indian authorities on making user data originating and terminating in the country available on demand, they could soon be blocked by local Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

A spokesperson for ISPAI (ISP Assoc of India) clarified that preliminary talks had been held in this regard and ISPs had begun making preparations to block networking sites in the event of an official directive being issued. The ISPAI executive also sheepishly (no pun intended there either) admitted to tech2.com that he was in the process of figuring out a way to export his Facebook friend list to ibibo.com.

Spokespersons for both Google, which owns Orkut.com and Facebook declined to comment till they received any directives in writing. However along with Yahoo, AOL and MSN, both companies were adamant that "the privacy of our users is of the greatest importance to us" though special considerations were being made for "countries in which the growth potential of the market outweighed the prospect of challenging draconian security laws".

A senior NASSCOM official welcomed the move though she admitted that the industry was worried less about the security implications and more about the alarming decline in productivity. "Young engineers 'on the bench' at IT companies seem to be spending more time on Web 2.0 sites like Twitter, Digg & Last.fm instead of improving, for instance their SAP implementation skills," said the official.

"God forbid if all this online socializing actually translates into a real social life for young techies", sighed the worried official.
Click to expand...

Tech2.com India > Tech2 Exclusive: India May Ban Facebook, Orkut and Foreign Social Networking Sites > News on Internet Internet & Software
 
stalkeragain said:
read to the bottom of the article. theres a tag 'april fools'

they think they'r intelligent.
Click to expand...

Spoilsport :p

I was actually scanning various sites for such fake articles and I found the perfect one to post Only that its too bad those people tagged the article with 'Fools Day', otherwise this would have been perfect. :p
 
The problem is that there is no such thing as intelligence in our country. If the MHA was half as smart as the terrorists, they would be leveraging technology to locate them and use it to gain information and possibly, install countermeasures and/or thwart planned activity.

As of now they're only asking for sites to maintain records. This is tantamount to saying 'We need to catch them once they've murdered a few of our people'. On the other hand, all SN sites are quite public and easily accessible to registered users, so the question of using them for covert ops is counterintuitive.

IMO this is just cloaked censorship, and suppression of free speech. I personally have no problem as I don't use any SN sites but LinkedIn, which is a major business resource and shutting it down effectively disables any links Indian professionals have to their counterparts across the world. Which I guess is OK with the MHA and the GOI.

This is getting old, and is the typical myopic ways of our government. May as well migrate, I see that's what they want us to do. Maybe it's really the problem of having too many educated, intelligent professionals in the country, whereas what we really need are more politicians and ministers, followed by a bunch of stupid blind cows who obey all directives unquestioningly. Oh yes, that works wonders for us, doesn't it?[/sarcasm, in case you thought I was serious]

One of the times I have no other contribution to a thread other than vituperation. Unfortunate.
 
SN sites are the plague of the internet, so this only brings a smile to my face. No, actually, I think this isn't good enough. We should just set up entire task forces that monitors every bit of our forums, chatlogs, blogs, SN sites etc. etc like the US does.
 
its an april fool joke......read the tag at the bottom of the story "april fools day 2008" ............lol.......looks like many fell for it :p
 
I wud be a happy person if these sites are banned , they are total waste of time.

If u want to talk use Personal msg or emails.

I prefer emails more. :)
 
Back
Top