iisc, orkut, dating, matrimony, and the ban.
bhOndOO saw an advertisement on the department notice board about a competition by Google: Google Product Prodigy. He was delighted to read that the winners would receive awards worth Rs.20 lakh. Hence he sent an idea proposal to Google. To his surprise, his idea got shortlisted!
The next step was to actually implement the idea. Enthusiastically, bhOndOO started working on implementing the idea. The idea revolved around getting information from the accounts of Orkut and mine (as in data mining) it to give some useful information and statistics. The last date of submission of the project was Jan 31, 2008.
On Jan 30, bhOndOO had his implementation working in his web directory. He sent the url of the working implementation to Google, went to his room, and slept peacefully.
The next day, on Jan 31, he came to the lab and tried opening www.orkut.com. He got a logo of IISc and a sweet message as below:
This is a message from the IT Department.
The web site you are trying to access:
www.orkut.com/
is listed as a site within the category DatingAndMatrimonials
Current Internet Access Configuration does not allow you to visit sites within this category at this time.
That’s a welcome change, bhOndOO thought, It would save a lot of students’ time — may be. At the next instant, bhOndOO was terrified; he checked his project url and found that it had stopped giving any results!
Tags: ban, dating, google, iisc, matrimony, orkut, product prodigy
Feb 1, 2008 at 12:50
As of today, bhOndOO’s project is working (with hiccups), Orkut is accessible. Images from Orkut are still banned.