What an Irony....

Disclaimer: This post and for that matter any other post is solely my opinion (which might not have to be true/correct). Also, these opinions have nothing to do with my institute and my professional life at the institute. The opinions are very personal and cannot/should not be generalized to a group of people/users/students/others. These are strictly my personal thoughts which are not driven by motivation/influence from anyone. Readers of this post are free to use their comments on the post. However, I'll not by any means be responsible for comments from users on my post.

What an irony ! I just wished that we saw the world and the world of internet with a very open frame of mind. MDI (Management Development Institute) of which I am a doctoral student has blocked orkut.com. This is quite sad because of the wrong notion about orkut which most people believe is that it's just an online dating/relationship site, which is quite ironical because orkut.com is a platform where you also get to meet people of similar interest when it comes to your professional life as well. Say for example there are communities which are dedicated for "Doctoral Program in Management". Let me start assuming the reason behind the ban:

1. Just because it's a dating/relationship site.
2. Because people are wasting too much time on orkut (however the definition of wastage has to be critically scrutinized)
3. Because it's taking up too much of bandwidth.

Now let me start refuting the above assumptions based on further assumption (which are much closer to reality)

Assumption 2 that people are wasting too much of time holds no argument because there are countless other sites on internet which can cause the same problem.

Assumption 3 it's taking up too much of bandwidth holds no argument because there are other sites like youtube which has streaming videos and can cause a much larger collateral damage to the philosophy of saving bandwidth.

It's quite a sorry situation because I never thought that a matured institute will do something like this. The problem also is that Orkut is a big brand name. There are other sites like facebook.com which is also a platform to meet people and is not blocked. I am also pretty sure that the kind of filtering that is taking place based on either very well known restricted sites database or based on the heuristics/keywords matching in URL. There are countless other dating sites when you perform a google query:

online dating -inurl:dating

and will even have sites like http://www.socialfriendsonline.com/.

I am just hoping that this is a temporary testing that's been taken on. Otherwise we might have to even block google.com and other search engines which are gateway to stuff like the one above. Also, this leads to a more bigger and complex scenario. We all know that kids are smart enough to use web proxy (I am not going to suggest how it can be used because of the sensitivity of the issue) and this would lead to a 2 fold problem:

1. Bandwidth consumption: Proxy sites use too much of ads on their sites which clogs the network.
2. These sites are usually the ones which run on business model of downloading adwares/spywares/Trojans/viruses etc which compromises privacy of the user. You never know how long your online bank account password will be safe...

Let me just wish that this won't last for long because there is both good and bad side of technology and you have to chose whether you want to weigh bad one over the good one.

Peace!

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