Sarbajit Roy of IAC reports Natgrid's CDACPUNE.IN illegal domain takedown to IT experts at India-Gii (India's pre-eminent IT tech list)
Dear Gii-ites,
Dear Gii-ites,
A few years back Naavi had posted this [http://www.bloggernews.net/124423]
The background is that an emerging political party (!) has recently decided to form various Cab Driver and Auto Chaalak sanghs nationwide. Their acronym is "CDAC" (Cab Driver Auto Chaalak). They initially booked an .IN domain name "CDACPUNE.IN" and intended to setup user sub-domains for user-blogs, like blogspot and tumblr etc. do.
On 2.Aug.2014 (when the domain got activated) I offered to test it out (during the 5 days "Add Grace Period" allowed for domain tasting by .IN Registry policy) by installing a stripped-down open-source highly SEO friendly tasting blog at "natgrid.cdacpune.in" using "TextPress" developed by an Indian coder in God's own country, which is viewable by simple DNS redirects to wherever the blogs are actually hosted, in this case to "natgrid-cdacindia.rhcloud.com", to see how search engines like Google index it. Google indexed it very fast and it was no.3 for "Natgrid" within 24 hours.
2-3 days later I got some phone calls from NATGRID that publication of any material about NATGRID is a violation of Official Secrets Act, and that nothing about Natgrid can be published in public domain since Natgrid is an exempted organisation under RTI Act etc. I disagreed with their interpretation as almost all the material is compiled from reliable 3rd party sources which are easily accessed online - such as DoPT's website, Rajya Sabha reply to questions, and former NATGRID CEO Raghu Raman's own blog in Livemint.
So the "Joint Secretary" Natgrid (which is under MHA) has apparently issued a letter, as did also C-DAC, to NIXI (which has been illegally operating the IN Registry since 2005 as I have established using RTI), and a FIR for impersonation of NATGRD has been filed in Pune by CDAC, and the domain has been shut down by NIXI by deleting its root domain records on 6 August 2014 while still under the AGP period.
No attempt was made to contact the Registrant (an auto chaalak) in this entire process, and the block was all done unilaterally and secretly. The Registrant has thereafter made several complaints to NIXI and CERT-IN but they are evading replying under which provision the domain is disabled or who authorised it or if it was done u/s 69 IT Act.
The blog is still accessible at natgrid-cdacindia.rhcloud.com and CDAC / India Against Corruption are planning to fight this one out and get C-DAC's own website taken down under IT Act and file our own IT Act complaints. The political wing shall probably take a .US domain name and also sue NATGRID and MHA in USA.
We infer that what has actually upset "NATGRID" is that we incidentally posted that the concerned JS is a "superannuated officer" who was last posted as JS in DoPT and also worked on the proposed Privacy Law there. Now Natgrid has apparently also been hiring and rehiring PSU people at astronomical salaries to "nobble" them. So I filed an online RTI using DoPT's portal for this at 1:53 PM on 6-Aug-2014 to MHA which was automatically forwarded to this officer. Within 5 hours he gets the blog shut down at NIXI level. Highly suspicious what ?
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