8 ms·

I 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 a

I 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 ago
Please don't give me nightmares now. There is enough totalitarianism going on in this country already.
- d3nj4l 6y ago
  Get 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 ago
    This. 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 ago
    Waiting for Mozilla to come to India
    - 411111111111111 6y ago
      Why? 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 ago
with 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 ago
  You 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 ago
    Not 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 ago
      I just wish there was an iOS client for Intra.
    - salmaanp 6y ago
      I just see encrypted DNS on the website. Is there more information somewhere else on how it avoids SNI blocks?
      - ignoramous 6y ago
        https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1306707615926423558 https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1306707615926423558
  - piyushpr134 6y ago
    One 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 ago
There will always be BSNL the state owned telco) with a 10-yr old solution ;)
kranner 6y ago
Every 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 ago
  In 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 ago
    Very 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)

srean 6y ago

Please don't give me nightmares now. There is enough totalitarianism going on in this country already.

d3nj4l 6y ago
Get 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 ago
  This. 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 ago
  Waiting for Mozilla to come to India
  - 411111111111111 6y ago
    Why? 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 ago

with 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 ago
You 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 ago
  Not 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 ago
    I just wish there was an iOS client for Intra.
  - salmaanp 6y ago
    I just see encrypted DNS on the website. Is there more information somewhere else on how it avoids SNI blocks?
    - ignoramous 6y ago
      https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1306707615926423558 https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1306707615926423558
- piyushpr134 6y ago
  One 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 ago

There will always be BSNL the state owned telco) with a 10-yr old solution ;)

kranner 6y ago

Every 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 ago
In 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 ago
  Very 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)