[Alert : This is a hair-pullingly confusing post that gets nowhere. It’s possible that you won’t understand a word of what I’ve written.]
If you curse your ISP for their horrible service, do read this post and you’ll be amazed how good your ISP really is. Relatively speaking. Everyone else should read as well!
I’m an avid Internet user. I also happen to be a student at National Institute of Technology, Rourkela. Unfortunately, these two things don’t go together very well. Let me be frank – NIT-R is a top tier educational institution, providing us with excellent facilities (by Indian standards). We even get round-the-clock wired and wireless Internet access in our hostels and most of the institute buildings – something many institutes don’t provide. Still, our Internet facility sucks. For someone who stays a better part of the day online, life at NIT-R is hell. Everything about this place that makes me happy, simply vaporizes once I go online on my laptop.
I could go on and on about the junk service that we’ve to endure, but then I’d be boring you enough to flee from this blog! So I decided to put up a few screenshots to showcase how stupid, pathetic and traumatic our IT department is. Yes, the IT department controls when, how, and why we use the Internet.
We stay in Rourkela. We also happen to be in Bangalore at the same time.
You’ve probably heard of Wolfram Alpha and all the cool stuff it can do. A search for “Where am I?” on Wolfram shows that we are located in Bangalore. Yeah, this means that our institute routes all traffic through servers located in Bangalore. The question is : WHY? Bangalore is almost a thousand miles from here. If at all we’ve to route, why not through Kolkata! It’s hardly two-hundred miles away. That would certainly reduce a majority of the outages we face.
IT Department says :
1.We’ll block half the Internet.
Our IT department thinks we’re too young and innocent to stumble across the dark side of the Internet. In an attempt to protect us, it has installed the stupid Cyberoam software which blocks half the Internet. What those guys do NOT understand is that we’re all a thousand times smarter than they are, and we shall always find our ways through their walls. UltraSurf, Your Freedom, and Tor are a rage here.
2.We’ll redefine the purpose of websites by categorizing them (and then blocking them).
The gits think they know the purpose of a website better than the owner of that website. All the ridiculous notifications that we get on accessing a blocked website is probably a result of this. Have a look.
As you can see above, both Facebook and FriendFeed apparently are places you use for dating and then for marrying your date. Okay, I can (maybe) consider Facebook, but FriendFeed?! How on this goddamn earth is FriendFeed a dating site? I’m not sure if these rules are present by default in Cyberoam, or if they were added by our IT gits; either way they’re totally pathetic.
Oh, and it doesn’t end here.
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Digital Inspiration, probably the largest technology blog by an Indian, is apparently a source of endless entertainment. Other tech blogs like TechCrunch, Lifehacker, Gizmodo and Mashable don’t entertain at all, because they aren’t blocked here.
The most shocking blockade is yet to come.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————–The IT gits have decided that we shouldn’t allowed to use any security tool other than the institute licensed eTrust Security Management System. So they have promptly blocked access to home pages of security products like Norton, Avast, McAfee, Kaspersky etc. Even if you do manage to get your favorite antivirus from other sources, it won’t update because the update servers are blocked as well (you’ve got to use proxy tools to update them). eTrust, while not bad, is enormous and resource-hungry. Aimed at business organizations, it also provides tons of extra features that nobody is gonna ever use. Thankfully, some free antivirus like Comodo Security, Microsoft Security Essentials, and Avira AntiVir Personal do update without problems.
3.We’ll allow Twitter (for now). But we’ll disfigure it so much that you’ll start hating it.
That’s how Twitter looks here. This is the only reason I’ve almost entirely stopped visiting the web interface lately. Even TweetDeck and other Twitter clients don’t work perfectly – you can’t see profile pictures as they’re filtered by our servers.
Still, something’s better than nothing. Twitter isn’t blocked, and I use it regularly.
4.We’ve blocked a lot. We still won’t give you good bandwidth.
Almost all bandwidth-sucking sites are blocked in NIT-R. So you’d naturally expect we get good browsing and download speeds. No, we don’t. The maximum download rates are something around 30-35 kBps. Browsing is fine, but you stumble across a “This site is blocked” notification way too often.
Surprisingly, Internet life still rocks @ NIT-R.
As this article beautifully describes, I think we Indians are a powerhouse of endurance. We always find a way to get the most out of any adverse condition. I also think we’re quite foolish; we hardly ever try to get rid of those adverse conditions. The condition of Internet at NIT-R might drive you nuts, but believe me – online life thrives here despite all odds. Guys downloads tons of 720p quality movies, enormous games and entire TV series through a deadly combination of proxies, torrents and RapidShare. All this and loads more (about 25 tera-bytes of data, to be exact) is shared in our local DC++ hubs to make life easier for all those who can’t stand the slow download rates. Still, there are things you can’t share. Lots of things. If I could split myself into three thousand souls and possess every other student in the campus, I’d have started a strike long ago and forced the authorities to improve the bandwidth and remove that terrible Cyberoam. Alas, that’s never gonna happen and I’m stuck with it for almost three more years.
The post ends here. I told you – it’s totally confusing and doesn’t get anywhere. 
