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How India Censors the Web
- disown 6y ago(11th April 2020)
- hackpert 6y agoI have always suspected that this "whimsical" attitude stems from technical inability on the ISP's end in India. Most ISPs seem to run off the shelf equipment and few people have an adequate understanding of networking beyond the very basics, which leads to such easy-to-circumvent censorship. What terrifies me is that they might just end up learning at some point in the near future.
- srean 6y agoPlease don't give me nightmares now. There is enough totalitarianism going on in this country already.
- d3nj4l 6y agoGet a VPN. It's not a perfect solution, and I sure hope we don't expect everyone to have to use a VPN to be private, but it's good enough - for now.
- cvrjk 6y agoThis. I've given up trying to figure out new ways to get around all the censorship. Not to mention, the current govt. has proven that it's ready to use any excuse to take punitive action against any citizen it disagrees with. Seen enough of journalists getting jailed and raided, people sharing comics criticizing the govt. getting charged with sedition and in some cases getting beaten up by the local 'gundas'..
- rishav_sharan 6y agoWaiting for Mozilla to come to India
- 411111111111111 6y agoWhy? You can just use mullvad directly with a wireguard or openvpn client. It's the same service mozilla packages for the us market....
- salmaanp 6y agowith SNI based blocked, its almost there. The solution to that will be TLS1.3 ESNI or VPN. (but they can block VPN as well from SNI)
- d3nj4l 6y agoYou can bypass SNI-based VPN blocks by getting a cheap DO box and running wireguard on it. They sure as heck can't block all of DO.
- ignoramous 6y agoNot really. https://getintra.org/ https://getintra.org/ and its forks work just fine in bypassing SNI based censorship in India and do not require a VPN. Disclaimer: I work on one such fork.
- httgp 6y agoI just wish there was an iOS client for Intra.
- salmaanp 6y agoI just see encrypted DNS on the website. Is there more information somewhere else on how it avoids SNI blocks?
- ignoramous 6y agohttps://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1306707615926423558 https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1306707615926423558
- piyushpr134 6y agoOne day they will start blocking all traffic from outside which is not "registered" with the. We are close to that happening actually with people accepting Chinese app ban
- salmaanp 6y ago
- captn3m0 6y agoThere will always be BSNL the state owned telco) with a 10-yr old solution ;)
- kranner 6y agoEvery couple of weeks one of my internet connections (here in India) slows down dramatically. I used to call and complain, and my ISP would say they would "reset my account" which always brought things back to normal. For months I tried to persuade them to find and fix the underlying problem. Now I just call and ask if they can reset my account, please.
- milankragujevic 6y agoIn Eastern Europe I use 4G home internet when visiting my parents' village house. Every week like clockwork, the quality will drastically decrease from the usual 100 Mbps, on Saturday to 40 Mbps (minimum for the package) and Sunday to 10 Mbps. This will remain forever on 10 Mbps, even on Monday at 4am. The only fix was to call the support line on Sunday and ask for a "network reset". Since this is a home internet, it is bound to the cell tower and it is drastically deprioritized elsewhere. The reset deletes and re-adds the device to my tower and sets the tower as the SIM card's home cell. This was annoying but bearable, I got good at quickly calling and getting it done. Except starting two weeks ago they refuse to do it, saying they're "not allowed to" anymore. No amount of persuasion helped. They will report a technical problem and the support people will close it as resolved with a braindead blah response "maybe your signal is bad" or "maybe the tower is busy with traffic". Very sad. These days I just change the IMEI if the modem and that seems to fix it... For a while.
- kranner 6y agoVery amusing except for your connection troubles. I also had intermittent disconnection issues with the same ISP that they fobbed off with "maybe your WiFI is bad/has interference" or "you may be running other processes that are saturating the network connection". I had no devices with ethernet ports so I bought a USB ethernet adapter, booted up a barebones linux dist, ran a script that tried to connect to an upstream server, plotted a graph (which showed a disconnection every 20 minutes) and presented that to them. To their credit they admitted there was a problem and moved my microwave antenna to another tower. (For all I know the former tower still has that issue)
- wobbly_bush 6y agoI was expecting a rant or an ill-informed position. It's nice to see a data-driven article for a change.
- captn3m0 6y agoAlso see OONI’s post on the same topic (the same author was involved in the study): https://ooni.org/post/2020-tls-blocking-india/ https://ooni.org/post/2020-tls-blocking-india/ References in the post above to CIS also detail some past research.
- elSidCampeador 6y agoCan anyone shed light on why the author writes the '@' sign on his email as "at-thing" and not "at"?
- kazinator 6y agoMaybe e-mail harvesting bots have figured out how to reverse a foo (at) bar (dot) com address, but are thoroughly defeated by (at-thing). For now.
- missosoup 6y agoSOTA neural networks can summarise entire articles or books down to a few paragraphs accurately. Thinking that replacing @ with 'at' or anything else in an email address that a human can infer to be an email address, and assuming that a modern bot can't make the same inference, that's just silly in 2020.
- kranner 6y agoGP's comment was about the probable capability of currently performed bots, not the SOTA performance of bots that may be deployed in theory.
- kazinator 6y agoHarvest bots are almost certainly along the lines of Perl and Python scripts armed with regexes.
- ignoramous 6y agoAll they want is to thwart a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_kiddie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_kiddie
- justDankin 6y agoI'm one of the authors of the paper in the post, we're trying to extend this work by crowdsourcing censorship measurements from different vantage points in India. We've compiled these tests into an android app, please consider running it if you live in India and would like to contribute to the research :) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.censorwatch.netprobesapp https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.censorwatc... It's completely anonymous, doesn't require any permissions, and does not store any user related information.
- wtmt 6y agoDo you have any plans of releasing an iOS app anytime soon? I’m going to recommend the Android app to people I know, but it would be good to have something for the iOS users too.
- justDankin 6y agoUnfortunately we don't have the expertise or bandwidth to make that :/
- sbmthakur 6y agoThe sites/domains that the app checks while running the probe are listed anywhere?
- justDankin 6y agoWe released a subset of the data along with the paper (~5K hostnames), can be accessed at https://github.com/kush789/How-India-Censors-The-Web-Data https://github.com/kush789/How-India-Censors-The-Web-Data The app uses a more updated list (roughly 10K hostnames)
- dheerajvs 6y agoIn the interest of openness, would it be possible to open-source the app and host it on F-Droid[1]? [1]https://f-droid.org/ https://f-droid.org/
- 6y ago
- piyushpr134 6y agoIndia is going to dogs under current leadership
- mkbkn 6y agoThis is so true. And the majority of people around me are fine with it as long as it fuels their bigotry.
- Heat_engine01 6y agoWell as long as my ideology is not in power, the country is going to dogs. Amirite ?
- sbmthakur 6y agoHow exactly?
- srean 6y agoOne wrong decision at a time. Starting with demonetization. The economy has tanked and our minister attributes that to an act of god rather than take responsibility of the ill-conceived partisan measures. Mishandling Covid. Giving a fee pass to cow-urine-prevents-Covid bandwagon while planting stories about Jamaat being a conspiracy to spread Covid in India. This plays to their political base but has been recently called out by the court. Court has declared these to be cases of politically motivated misreporting. Filling WhatsApp groups by fakenews and fake incidents of Muslims killing/burning/human-sacrificing Hindus to incite more communal violence which plays to the ruling parties narrative and a polarized society, the latter earns them more votes. Close ties with BJP cell and WA comes convenient. Doing nothing to give protection to medical staff against violence (Covid related) other than platitudes. The perpetrators of such violence gets bail immediately, whereas university professors get jailed under made up charges of terrorism that conveniently do not require a proof in court and is nonbailable. Essentially throwing the medical staff under the bus for their own political gains. Incarcerating sources of credible criticism by abuse of laws that do not require allegations to be proved in court. Looking the other way while hate crime against Muslims and other beef eaters increases. Stopping the record of hate crime by government order, so that one cannot point to statistics. Moving towards a "papers please" society. I don't maintain the urls of the news I read so I don't have the links immediately available. However with a few hours on google, one should be able to get to the primary sources of the examples I have called out.
- wtmt 6y ago> The whimsical attitude towards web censorship from both ISPs and the Government necessitates the development of a crowdsourced tool to monitor and measure such censorship from different vantage points in the country. I have to say, the whimsical attitude towards all kinds of censorship (not just the Internet) and to control people’s behavior is pervasive. Mass media does not focus on issues that have ramifications for the future generations, and the masses have been drugged into believing high pitch and nuance-less broadcasts as the truth. What’s worse is that legislators themselves don’t know or care much about these freedoms or are easily misled by vested interests in the bureaucracy. Edit: As to why such problems not only exist but also thrive, I have to add the patronizing attitude that the governments (central and state) have towards citizens, residents, critics, dissenters and protestors. This is accepted and nurtured by many people who don’t understand the impact. It’s a long standing phenomenon that could almost be classified as core culture, IMO.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wait_a_minute 6y agoWhat’s worse is that legislators themselves don’t know or care much about these freedoms or are easily misled by vested interests in the bureaucracy. Oh, they definitely know and care about it. Except what they care about is to roll out the censorship and monitoring. They are openly anti-privacy and pro-censorship. This is especially obvious in the UK and the EU.
- sbmthakur 6y agoCourt orders have been mentioned in the article. So, if a Sessions Court orders blocking of a website, will the site be blocked across the country?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]