Live data from Hacker News

How India Censors the Web

iamkush.me

21–30 of 56 posts

Re: How India Censors the Web

#21
> 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.

Re: How India Censors the Web

#23
post #21

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: How India Censors the Web

#24
post #22

India is going to dogs under current leadership

This is so true. And the majority of people around me are fine with it as long as it fuels their bigotry.

Well as long as my ideology is not in power, the country is going to dogs. Amirite ?

Re: How India Censors the Web

#25
post #13
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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.

Not really. 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.

Re: How India Censors the Web

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe 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.

SOTA 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.

All they want is to thwart a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_kiddie

Re: How India Censors the Web

#29
post #20

I'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.censorwatc... It's completely anonymous, doesn't require any pe…

Do 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.

Unfortunately we don't have the expertise or bandwidth to make that :/

Re: How India Censors the Web

#30

I'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.censorwatc... It's completely anonymous, doesn't require any pe…

The sites/domains that the app checks while running the probe are listed anywhere?
Post reply on HN