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Investigating TLS Blocking in India

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Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#21

Post by throwaway8941 »

wtmt wrote: post #14
saagarjha wrote: post #2

> In the absence of a publicly available official list of blocked hostnames This is the icing on the cake right here. It's just awful that not only do websites get censored largely arbitrarily, there is no insight into the process and what is even blocked–the fact that someone had to literally check sites to see if they are being blocked (via a variety of different methods largely indistinguishable from a malicious a…

Yes, it’s frustrating to see the lack of transparency and the sheer futility in some cases to find who issued an order for what purpose in which jurisdiction affecting which ISPs. DuckDuckGo was blocked a couple of o this ago. The nebulous words “national security”, without any context, are used as the justification for blocking many sites.

At least Indian authorities seem to be relatively open about the censorship. Here in Kazakhstan they simply block everything they want, taking down many "innocent" sites as collateral damage, and write it off as "temporary networking problems" and "works for me, what are you talking about?".

For the past week I've had numerous problems connecting to TLS directly, without using a VPN. I still update my system directly from a mirror to avoid wasting limited data on a remote VM, that's how I discovered it personally. I worry they're trying to implement something nefarious behind the scenes, again.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#23

Post by alexmingoia »

pacificleo12 wrote: post #19
djsumdog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging from the details, a Proxy/VPN to another nation should work.

Noob question : How is that effective if "SNI travels on the network in cleartext"

SNI is part of the HTTPS request, which would travel through the encrypted VPN channel. All network traffic would travel through your VPN, which is encrypted. The other end of the VPN channel is in another country which doesn’t block the website.

Your computer https communication to blocked website

What a country could do but we haven’t seen before, is block all VPN protocol traffic, effectively banning VPNs. This would be disruptive to business or politicians using VPN for privacy, so it’s not as politically feasible.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#24

Post by Sophistifunk »

pacificleo12 wrote: post #19
djsumdog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging from the details, a Proxy/VPN to another nation should work.

Noob question : How is that effective if "SNI travels on the network in cleartext"

That's cleartext within your TCP/IP connection. If you use a VPN, that connection itself is encrypted.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#25

Post by ShorsHammer »

httgp wrote: post #10

It isn’t clear from the article, but how do we circumvent this? Would a VPN work?

Shadowsocks has reliably worked for a long time in China, a country with arguably the best DPI capabilities on Earth.

Tor's pluggable transports also have been at this stuff for a long time.

The internet is for everyone.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#26

Post by wozniacki »

djsumdog wrote: post #11

I remember visiting India as a kid with my family, and one of my cousins telling me about an America TV series that was banned. I didn't think much of it at the time, but as I've grown older, I've really come to appreciate the freedom of speech we have in America. I just wrote a post about it: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/why-i-no-longer-hate-amer... India is literally the largest democratic country by populati…

What good is all of this semblance of free speech when the communication and print platforms of our age that enable the transmission of vast portions of our speech essentially dictate what they will carry and what they wont.

Unless you publish a physical book of course and then promote it and distribute it yourself or on a much smaller scale, you post pamphlets on utility poles or other such low tech-low reach media, a FB or a Twitter or a Tik Tok can take down even your "missing pet" posts, because your pet breed offends some people in some manner. They reserve the right to do so. Of course you wont find them doing that, but the fact that they have to power to do so, in itself should be disconcerting.

I don't know what you're getting at ( in this post ; I havent read your blog post yet ) but America currently is one of the most restrictive places on earth to express your thoughts and then hope to have them transmitted fairly to a wide swath of people, both geographically and ideologically.

  America still has some of the strongest court 
  prescient when it comes to speech laws
Also, I don't know what that means.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#27

Post by daliusd »

djsumdog wrote: post #11

I remember visiting India as a kid with my family, and one of my cousins telling me about an America TV series that was banned. I didn't think much of it at the time, but as I've grown older, I've really come to appreciate the freedom of speech we have in America. I just wrote a post about it: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/why-i-no-longer-hate-amer... India is literally the largest democratic country by populati…

https://rsf.org/en/ranking It seems you are not that right.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#28

Post by lotsofpulp »

wozniacki wrote: post #26
djsumdog wrote: post #11

I remember visiting India as a kid with my family, and one of my cousins telling me about an America TV series that was banned. I didn't think much of it at the time, but as I've grown older, I've really come to appreciate the freedom of speech we have in America. I just wrote a post about it: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/why-i-no-longer-hate-amer... India is literally the largest democratic country by populati…

What good is all of this semblance of free speech when the communication and print platforms of our age that enable the transmission of vast portions of our speech essentially dictate what they will carry and what they wont. Unless you publish a physical book of course and then promote it and distribute it yourself or on a much smaller scale, you post pamphlets on utility poles or other such low tech-low reach media,…

>I don't know what you're getting at ( in this post ; I havent read your blog post yet ) America currently is one of the most restrictive places on earth to express your thoughts and then hope to have them transmitted fairly to a wide swath of people, both geographically and ideologically.

I'm in America, and I can access plenty of racist, sexist, government propaganda, anti government propaganda, anti religion, pro religion, anti police, pro police, violence, pornography, and so much more with the click of a button. If I wanted to, I can also upload any of these thoughts myself to someone else's computer (or use my own computer) and then post links to it to any number of online forums or chat groups where people would have access to them just by clicking on a link.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#29

Post by Oricle »

djsumdog wrote: post #11

I remember visiting India as a kid with my family, and one of my cousins telling me about an America TV series that was banned. I didn't think much of it at the time, but as I've grown older, I've really come to appreciate the freedom of speech we have in America. I just wrote a post about it: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/why-i-no-longer-hate-amer... India is literally the largest democratic country by populati…

Your funny,

Freedom of speech? @merica has never had it! The Jews that own and run Briton were the ones telling colimbas to take them lands at no matter the cost! Britain has been owned by J's for 100s of years. Back in 1600 they said about just needing some criminal goyhim (non jew) but they have enough already in law, goverment etc. And that was the 1600!

And look now, they have the whole world on lockdown over a bullshit virus that's no worse than any other cold or flu!

Your not allowed see friends, visit, and in the case off Scotland, not leave your dorms at uni! Yes, them freshman have moved into prison!

Worse in fact, prisoners get let out of their rooms! This is a power grab, and white man been dispersed off. Why? Well, jesus, King of the Jews, taught us gentiles how to be better than an individual! Of which the Jews killed him for lol. Since then a war for over 2000 years as raged.

Not rocket science, and easily proven when you get the schooling (indoctrination) out of your head

Educate yourself, no one else can!

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#30

Post by indiablock »

I run a tech company that got randomly blocked in India. There's no way it wasn't some kind of mistake. It's been months and there's no way to find out why and there's no documented method to resolve the problem.

While looking into this, it turns out it happens all the time and many websites have been blocked for years. If you're big enough then maybe you can get unblocked. Or you might just be SOL.

Some examples:

https://www.alexa.com/ has been blocked for over 1 year (https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/b084so/why_alexacom_...) (wtf?)

Trinet.com, an HR tech+services company is blocked in India (wtf?)

Adobe-owned behance.net is blocked in India. (why?)

reddit.com or parts of it are frequently blocked/unblocked https://thenextweb.com/apps/2019/03/14/isps-are-reportedly-b...

9gag and collegehumor have been blocked for over 5 years (https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/comedy-websites-colleghumor...). At least there's some reason here.

Three environmentalist websites were blocked (and eventually unblocked): https://scroll.in/latest/967589/centre-run-agency-blocks-web...

The NYTimes was blocked for a while: https://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/new-york-times-access...

In 2014, India blocked Github for a while: https://qz.com/india/319866/a-threat-from-isis-prompts-india...

India is known for filtering websites belonging to NGOs, feminist groups, and others https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-tops-list-of-w...

As far as I can tell, if there's some random bureaucrat that doesn't like you, your website is going to get blocked. Equally likely, the process is so poor that you might get blocked for no reason at all.

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