Read Blogger Blogs That Are Blocked in China, India or Pakistan

blogspot banned India has clearly joined the Internet Filtering Club of China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Euthopia.

Several bloggers in India wrote that geocities web pages and blogspot blogs hosted on Blogger.com were blocked by some ISPs in India following Government orders.

The issue is getting considerable amount of attention because Google's Blogger software is the online home of several hundred thousand Indian bloggers.

How do I know if my ISP blocked access to Blogs ?

» Using DOS Ping Tool. Type the following commands in the MS DOS window (Start->Run->Cmd->Enter): ping blogspot.com; ping blogger.com

If your ISP has not restricted access to blogspot site, you should see something like this:

Pinging blogspot.blogger.com [66.102.15.101] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 66.102.15.101: bytes=32 time=329ms TTL=239

Ping statistics for 66.102.15.101:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 294ms, Maximum = 337ms, Average = 323ms

I am Blog Reader. How can I read a blocked blogspot.com site ?

Luckily, there are a ton of alternatives to access restricted websites. Here are some of the most popular workarounds:

1. Use RSS Readers - Open the home page of Newsgator Online, Bloglines or Google Reader and subscribe to the blogger blog rss by typing xxx.blogspot.com/rss.xml or xxx.blogspot.com/atom.xml in the URL field. You'll be able to see the content because it's served from the cache of web readers, not from Blogger's server.

2. Via Email Services Go to Feedblitz or FeedBurner, type the blog address and you will automatically receive the entire blog posts in your email inbox as soon as the blogger posts a story. You will however miss reading the comments.

3. Via Google Translate - Open Google Translate, type the address of the blogspot blog you want to read and select Chinese to English from the language drop-down. The older English-English Google proxy server trick isn't working anymore. You can also use Google Translate to translate English into Hindi.

4. Via Google Transcoder - Google allows you to read websites on mobile phones using their Transcoder service. You may use the same service to read website on the desktop served via Google .

I am a Blogger and my blog is hosted on a blogspot.com domain. How can I ensure that readers see my blogspot.com blog without interruption ?

Here are a couple of things that may help your blog readers in India, China, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan read your blog even when the local Government has blocked access to the sites:

1. Use Feedburner for syndicating Blog Content [tutorial] - even if the blogspot.com site is blocked, feeds hosted on feedburner will still be accessible.

2. The good news is that while blogspot.com site is blocked, blogger.com is still accessible which means bloggers can create/edit/delete posts or reader comments from the blog control panel. However if the blogger.com site is also blocked, here's what bloggers can do to administrate their blogs:

» Convert the Blogger.com Hostname to a Numeric IP address (http://66.102.15.100) - Most ISPs block site by name but not by IP address so this should work.

» If the ISP is smart and even blocks the numeric ip address, convert the IP address (66.102.15.100) to a decimal number (1113984868) - Now access the blogger start page by typing http://1113984868

* Looking at the server referral logs, I can see recent traffic from BSNL, Satyam Sify, Airtel Broadband, TouchTel India, VSNL Sancharnet, AsiaNet and Bharti Cellular. However, there are no current referrals from Reliance Infocom, MTNL, Star Hathway and Tata Internet Services which may signal that they are indeed blocking access to blogspot sites.

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Reader Comments:

i am using sify broadband and i can access blogspot very well i think this issue may have been started because of some porn blogs and some defamotory blogs. But they should have blocked that specific blogs and its useless to block all the blogspot domains...

Too wiered. Why need India block blogger.com? I know China block it due to democratic infomation. But India is the biggest democratic country in the world. I think you should suggest government that doing business via blogger.com is much more important than avoiding religionous or porno conflit.

HOw do we protest and make our protests count?
This is alarming to say the least...we cannot allow a bunch of "babus" to thrash all the respect India has won for its freedom - especially that of expression.

Hi Amit, have you seen any connection with the attacks on the people of Mumbai last week? Many such attackers have used free communication services in the past, which might explain the intervention of the Ministry of Communications here...?

yeah well, john, terrorists also use phone services, so all mobile operators should also close down their services, no? if this is the govt's excuse, its one of the lamest excuses I've come across!! there's no shortage of free services which terrorists can use, blocking these 3 services(blogspot, typepad, geocities) doesn't mean that nothing else is available & TypePad is not a free service. besides, these terrorists are very well funded, so what stops them from making a private intranet which they can access from anywhere!! the govt will be able to block that only if they know what it is!!!

and then its not to be overlooked that these blocked services are still accessible via proxies. so the purpose? maybe the govt doesn't think that terrorists have any tech guys or maybe the govt needs to fire their own people who make such suggestions & hire new techies!!

"terrorists also use phone services, so all mobile operators should also close down their services, no?"

No, I think that reducing information vulnerabilities in mobile might be more difficult than for a single WWW domain. The latter is easy; the former would impose immense costs on all society, because it's difficult to filter analog data like voice.

(Reason I ask is that I know the various communication services have indeed been used by those conspirators who wish to harm civilians... if there's even aa suspicion of similar attacks near-term, then it's plausible to disrupt (what might be) a significant communications medium. I don't know either way myself, just asking if you've seen other evidence.)

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Read Blogger Blogs That Are Blocked in China, India or Pakistan

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