6 ms·

Whistleblower provides blocking orders for over 4000 websites in India

119 points by searchableguy 6y ago

lowmemcpu 6y ago
There's a decent write-up about the legal issues around blocking the satirical website called Dowry Calculator, written here: https://internetfreedom.in/delhi-hc-issues-notice-to-the-government-for-blocking-satirical-dowry-calculator-website/ https://internetfreedom.in/delhi-hc-issues-notice-to-the-gov...
searchableguy 6y ago
The list only seems to contain small portion of what is blocked mostly torrent sites and piracy stuff. Almost all porn sites are banned yet not mentioned. The scariest part is that there is no visibility. Interestingly, reddit blocks nsfw subs in india with few non nsfw too. Telegram web is blocked. Streamable, redgif and few other content sites are blocked on specific ISPs. They blocked reddit as a whole too before. They have issued orders for sites like github and pastebin in the past. - https://qz.com/india/319866/a-threat-from-isis-prompts-india-to-block-github-and-a-handful-of-other-sites/ https://qz.com/india/319866/a-threat-from-isis-prompts-india... [1] 28 internet shutdowns this year. 106 in 2019, and 134 in 2018. IFF is doing good job in fighting against censorship. Check their page [2] for information and support. What can people do about the draconian laws coming? People support this. If they were uneducated, you can educate them but many of them are educated indians, how do you change their mind? 1] https://internetshutdowns.in/ https://internetshutdowns.in/ 2] https://internetfreedom.in https://internetfreedom.in
- ankit219 6y ago
  There is more. Individual ISPs can ban or even slow down websites as per their own wishes. Airtel in india (which is about to raise an investment by Amazon) blocked a lot of websites like Streamable when it wasnt even legally banned. Just showed the error as address could not be found. I circumvented by changing my DNS to cloudflare and it started working. Jio totally blocked telegram with no directions from court or govt.
  - npmn 6y ago
    Yes, one day out of nowhere, web.telegram.org stopped loading for me over jio, I didn't think much about it and switched on a VPN, which loaded the SPA. The SPA can now fetch messages after a manual retry over jio networks as well.
- zackees 6y ago
  Whats hilarious is that the left will go on and on about how so and so needs to be shut down and canceled in America because someone somewhere said something offensive. They use words like "why is youtube/twitter/etc... giving a platform to <X>" until they get canceled. I know because my PR fundraiser for Judy Mikovits got canceled by GoFundMe when the NYT ran a hit piece on me. My recourse is zero. I can't appeal. Now the Indian government is censoring porn and Isis and the leftist publisher here is waxing concern about how this process is arbitrary and unappealable. Yeah... nobody cares anymore. The left has normalized censorship so your anti-censorship articles just show that you only care about censorship of leftist topics, and fully support it otherwise.
  - compscistd 6y ago
    That sounds difficult, it seems like your feelings are still pretty raw. I’m sorry you went through that. Out of curiosity, do you think there’s a difference between me asking a government to remove something from a web platform vs me asking the platform to remove something? Perhaps my position is I don’t think anyone should appeal to a government for web censorship, but hold platforms socially accountable for the content they host. If they hear my (and the potentially ensuing mob) complaints about content I found objectionable, the platform can either ignore my complaint or acquiesce. What can I do if they ignore me? Start a boycott? That kind of pressure is an economic one which leads to the platform making a business decision. The content creator that feels slighted starts their own competing platform for a different user base. We now have meaningful competition. It’s the kind of libertarian value that I think is just right for the web. It might seem unfair, but it doesn’t feel like mob rule/leftist hypocrisy more than the invisible hand of the information market working against your content.
    - pnako 6y ago
      Is there a difference between you asking a government to remove someone vs you asking the mob to remove someone? This is typical libertarian logic, where you completely disregard outcomes provided they come from the market and not the government. It actually mimics socialist thought; "sure, we don't have a lot of food or stuff in general, but whatever we have was produced using the principles of scientific socialism!" In reality, people care about having food, not being murdered or being allowed to express themselves. Whether it's the outcome of the institutions called "the government" or the ones called "the market", who are joined at the hip anyway, makes very little difference.
- sumedh 6y ago
  > What can people do about the draconian laws coming? I dont have the answer but I guess if you have money to spare give a donation to them.
- naruvimama 6y ago
  Democratic governments too have genuine reasons to regulate the internet access, however half brained the implenmentation is. Instead of "activism" and protests, what we need is solutions. Against - Child pornography - Bullying - Privacy - Terrorism - Hate speech that leads to violence or murders - Orchestration of riots, esp. by foreign intelligence - Misinformation and foreign interference in democracy - ... - .. The list goes on, please work on solutions and provide practical tools or regulations and lobby for it.
ve55 6y ago
Some ommenters are stating that some subreddits are specifically banned as well, such as r/NSFW. Given that reddit uses TLS, I assume Reddit is assisting governments in banning content like this as well?
- RealStickman_ 6y ago
  Sorry if this is a dumb question, but wouldn't it suffice to just ban the subreddits by their URL?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ivanbakel 6y ago
    It's not a dumb question, since it's a natural assumption. But HTTPS - specifically HTTP over TLS - establishes the secure tunnel to the particular domain (reddit.com) first, and only then transmits elements of the HTTP protocol, such as the path, any query parameters, and so on. I believe that TLS could be used (and is used) in combination with other protocols, which only require the domain to use for DNS. Everything after that in the URL bar is HTTP-only.
    - searchableguy 6y ago
      DNS over https solves the problem of plain text DNS. Firefox already supports it. Also check more about ESNI since ISPs like jio employ SNI inspection to block sites - https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/what-is-encrypted-sni/ https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/what-is-encrypted-sn... Cloudflare has a small demo which you can use to test your browser and learn more about specific parts - https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni/ https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni/
      - ignoramous 6y ago
        I use https://getintra.org https://getintra.org on Android and point it to a recursive DoH resolver running on Cloudflare Workers (free tier has been more than enough for 3 devices worth of queries). Quick tutorial from StackPath (much of it applies to Cloudflare Workers, too): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19514791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19514791
Animats 6y ago
The actual orders.[1] These are all in India. Most of these are over copyright issues. It's like reading DMCA takedown notices. [1] https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XtWN1FGTnalCIOiEdCLtIbuGM-d_3IYR https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XtWN1FGTnalCIOiEdCLt...

119 points by searchableguy 6y ago

There's a decent write-up about the legal issues around blocking the satirical website called Dowry Calculator, written here: https://internetfreedom.in/delhi-hc-issues-notice-to-the-government-for-blocking-satirical-dowry-calculator-website/ https://internetfreedom.in/delhi-hc-issues-notice-to-the-gov...

searchableguy 6y ago

The list only seems to contain small portion of what is blocked mostly torrent sites and piracy stuff. Almost all porn sites are banned yet not mentioned. The scariest part is that there is no visibility. Interestingly, reddit blocks nsfw subs in india with few non nsfw too. Telegram web is blocked. Streamable, redgif and few other content sites are blocked on specific ISPs. They blocked reddit as a whole too before. They have issued orders for sites like github and pastebin in the past. - https://qz.com/india/319866/a-threat-from-isis-prompts-india-to-block-github-and-a-handful-of-other-sites/ https://qz.com/india/319866/a-threat-from-isis-prompts-india... [1] 28 internet shutdowns this year. 106 in 2019, and 134 in 2018. IFF is doing good job in fighting against censorship. Check their page [2] for information and support. What can people do about the draconian laws coming? People support this. If they were uneducated, you can educate them but many of them are educated indians, how do you change their mind? 1] https://internetshutdowns.in/ https://internetshutdowns.in/ 2] https://internetfreedom.in https://internetfreedom.in

ankit219 6y ago
There is more. Individual ISPs can ban or even slow down websites as per their own wishes. Airtel in india (which is about to raise an investment by Amazon) blocked a lot of websites like Streamable when it wasnt even legally banned. Just showed the error as address could not be found. I circumvented by changing my DNS to cloudflare and it started working. Jio totally blocked telegram with no directions from court or govt.
- npmn 6y ago
  Yes, one day out of nowhere, web.telegram.org stopped loading for me over jio, I didn't think much about it and switched on a VPN, which loaded the SPA. The SPA can now fetch messages after a manual retry over jio networks as well.
zackees 6y ago
Whats hilarious is that the left will go on and on about how so and so needs to be shut down and canceled in America because someone somewhere said something offensive. They use words like "why is youtube/twitter/etc... giving a platform to <X>" until they get canceled. I know because my PR fundraiser for Judy Mikovits got canceled by GoFundMe when the NYT ran a hit piece on me. My recourse is zero. I can't appeal. Now the Indian government is censoring porn and Isis and the leftist publisher here is waxing concern about how this process is arbitrary and unappealable. Yeah... nobody cares anymore. The left has normalized censorship so your anti-censorship articles just show that you only care about censorship of leftist topics, and fully support it otherwise.
- compscistd 6y ago
  That sounds difficult, it seems like your feelings are still pretty raw. I’m sorry you went through that. Out of curiosity, do you think there’s a difference between me asking a government to remove something from a web platform vs me asking the platform to remove something? Perhaps my position is I don’t think anyone should appeal to a government for web censorship, but hold platforms socially accountable for the content they host. If they hear my (and the potentially ensuing mob) complaints about content I found objectionable, the platform can either ignore my complaint or acquiesce. What can I do if they ignore me? Start a boycott? That kind of pressure is an economic one which leads to the platform making a business decision. The content creator that feels slighted starts their own competing platform for a different user base. We now have meaningful competition. It’s the kind of libertarian value that I think is just right for the web. It might seem unfair, but it doesn’t feel like mob rule/leftist hypocrisy more than the invisible hand of the information market working against your content.
  - pnako 6y ago
    Is there a difference between you asking a government to remove someone vs you asking the mob to remove someone? This is typical libertarian logic, where you completely disregard outcomes provided they come from the market and not the government. It actually mimics socialist thought; "sure, we don't have a lot of food or stuff in general, but whatever we have was produced using the principles of scientific socialism!" In reality, people care about having food, not being murdered or being allowed to express themselves. Whether it's the outcome of the institutions called "the government" or the ones called "the market", who are joined at the hip anyway, makes very little difference.
sumedh 6y ago
> What can people do about the draconian laws coming? I dont have the answer but I guess if you have money to spare give a donation to them.
naruvimama 6y ago
Democratic governments too have genuine reasons to regulate the internet access, however half brained the implenmentation is. Instead of "activism" and protests, what we need is solutions. Against - Child pornography - Bullying - Privacy - Terrorism - Hate speech that leads to violence or murders - Orchestration of riots, esp. by foreign intelligence - Misinformation and foreign interference in democracy - ... - .. The list goes on, please work on solutions and provide practical tools or regulations and lobby for it.

ve55 6y ago

Some ommenters are stating that some subreddits are specifically banned as well, such as r/NSFW. Given that reddit uses TLS, I assume Reddit is assisting governments in banning content like this as well?

RealStickman_ 6y ago
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but wouldn't it suffice to just ban the subreddits by their URL?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ivanbakel 6y ago
  It's not a dumb question, since it's a natural assumption. But HTTPS - specifically HTTP over TLS - establishes the secure tunnel to the particular domain (reddit.com) first, and only then transmits elements of the HTTP protocol, such as the path, any query parameters, and so on. I believe that TLS could be used (and is used) in combination with other protocols, which only require the domain to use for DNS. Everything after that in the URL bar is HTTP-only.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    DNS over https solves the problem of plain text DNS. Firefox already supports it. Also check more about ESNI since ISPs like jio employ SNI inspection to block sites - https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/what-is-encrypted-sni/ https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/what-is-encrypted-sn... Cloudflare has a small demo which you can use to test your browser and learn more about specific parts - https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni/ https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni/
    - ignoramous 6y ago
      I use https://getintra.org https://getintra.org on Android and point it to a recursive DoH resolver running on Cloudflare Workers (free tier has been more than enough for 3 devices worth of queries). Quick tutorial from StackPath (much of it applies to Cloudflare Workers, too): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19514791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19514791

Animats 6y ago

The actual orders.[1] These are all in India. Most of these are over copyright issues. It's like reading DMCA takedown notices. [1] https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XtWN1FGTnalCIOiEdCLtIbuGM-d_3IYR https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XtWN1FGTnalCIOiEdCLt...