India

Silly, but funny. This is a sketch from the 1967 comedy show, At last the 1948 show, and the actress—with the voice like a "a choir of frantic mice"—is Aimi MacDonald.

Well, India may not be one of the worst place to be born into on this planet. Worser might be a closer approximation if you go by a "quality-of-life" index published in The Economist.

The Economist has a fascinating visual piece correlating India's states and union territories to equivalent countries of the world in terms of economy and population.

After the low key response to the June 9 protests, Anonymous India has labelled it only "Phase 1" of their plans and have announced "Phase 2". The second phase has been dubbed "Operation RTI" and appears to be an elaborate recce to unearth information related to Internet censorship in the country. The plan is to get "citizens of India" to file RTI applications pertaining to any communications between government officials and companies such as Google and Facebook.

In light of the recent blocking of websites in India and the cries of "CENSORSHIP!" all across Twitter, spare a thought for our Chinese neighbours who have long been suffering beneath the cudgels of the Great Firewall of China.

India Ink's story about a photograph of a newly wed Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi linked me to an interesting gallery on Corbis. While the photographer behind these images, Baldev, appears to have had free access to the Gandhis, the archive also catalogues news events from the 1970s to the early 2000s.

Recently, WSJ's Tripti Lahiri has blogged a couple of times on the legal status of the slaughter and consumption of beef in India. Apparently, the law directing states to protect the cow was (perhaps seemingly) enacted to organise agriculture and agriculture on modern and scientific lines.

ZSecure, a security consulting company which made a few ripples last year when it announced vulnerabilities detected on HDFC's website, has made a similar discovery, this time with payback.in. Payback is a firm providing loyalty (reward points) programs for customers, in partnership with a number of well known brands.

Since the beginning of this month, certain ISPs have been blocking access to streaming video and torrent sites on their networks. As of today, just about every ISP in the country is reported to be blocking the following sites: