Chinese whispers

A very interesting article on internet censorship in China in NYRB starts:

[F]or China’s Internet police, message control has grown to include many layers of meaning. Local authorities have a toolbox of phrases—fairly standard nationwide—that they use to offer guidance to website editors about dealing with sensitive topics. The harshest response is “completely and immediately delete.” But with the rapid growth of difficult-to-control social media, a need has arisen for a wide range of more subtle alternatives. For stories that are acceptable, but only after proper pruning, the operative phrase is “first censor, then publish.” For sensitive topics on which central media have already said something, the instructions may say “reprint Xinhua but nothing more.” For topics that cannot be avoided because they are already being widely discussed, there are such options as “mention without hyping,” “publish but only under small headlines,” “put only on back pages,” “close the comment boxes,” and “downplay as time passes.”

India: off the highway

From ET:

The number of active Internet users in the country has grown by nearly 17 per cent in 2008 over the same period a year ago, a study says.

According to a study by Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International, India has 45.3 million active users at the ended of September 2008, of which 42 million are from the urban community.

“Urban users continue to dominate Internet use contributing to 42 million of the 45 million odd users,” a study by the organisations ‘Internet in India’ finds.

In the same period last year, the number of active users in urban India was 36 million, which shows a year-on-year growth of 16.66 per cent.

“The growth rate was alarming compared with the rest in past years as well as with some other countries notably China where the number of Internet users are more than 250 million,” IAMAI President Subho Ray said.

Slumdog rising

From Hindu:

Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, author of the novel on which the award-winning ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ film is based, says he was inspired to write the story when he read a news report on a project in a slum where scientists had installed an Internet connection.

“Under the project called Hole in the Wall, a group of scientists had installed a computer with Internet connection in a wall in an Indian slum. When they returned after a few months, they found that the children living there had started using it,” India’s Deputy High Commissioner to South Africa Swarup wrote in The Sunday Times on Sunday.

“These were the children who couldn’t read and speak English but they were logging on to the worldwide web. It made me think that there must be an innate ability in all of us that can come to the surface,” he said.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, so I can’t say whether it is poverty porn. Even after watching it I can’t say how someone in some other country may think of it. But the story seems like pure old fashioned Bollywood: poor kid grasps at fame. If Bollywood forgets its wonderful slumdog origins, someone has to remind them.

Missed the good bits?

From Telecom Tiger:

Three undersea cables namely Sea Me We 4, Sea Me We3, and FLAG damaged in the Mediterranean Sea resulting in disruption of net traffic between Europe, West Asia and some other regions in Asia including India. The disruption forced PO companies to resort to back-up connectivity to keep their operations running.

Service providers said that they are working towards resolving the issue and said that normal connectivity would resume soon.

My connection is so slow that I wouldn’t notice three broken trunk lines anyway.