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India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin

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Re: India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin

#31

Post by lnanek2 »

revelation wrote: post #29

I love Indian government statements, they are always so transparently incompetent, inane and corrupt, as are the accompanying actions, like blocking a random PHP project on sourceforge. I guess we'll just never know why they do these stupid things. By the time some bureaucrat has to give a statement all they can get out is terror , ISIS and anti India .

Well, it's not exactly random. If you follow the link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phorkie/

You can see it's the source code for the same sort of paste text online site they are banning all over the place in the other bans. It seems kind of nuts to ban all source code hosting and clipboard type hosting sites, but clearly they are trying. Wonder what's next, blogs that allow posting comments or signing guestbooks?

Re: India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin

#32

Post by hueving »

[deleted] wrote: post #13
bdcravens wrote: post #2

If Github is truly blocked, that could be devastating for outsourced work, on both sides of the equation.

[deleted]

That makes no sense. Conservative groups are all about outsourcing. "dey took'r jeebs" groups are complaining about immigrants in the US.

Re: India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin

#33

Post by hsivonen »

"However, the key nature of many of the sites affected, and the fact that entire sites, rather than just some of their pages, were blocked, is bound to lead to calls for this blunt instrument to be refined before it is used again."

It would be more worrying if ISPs could block individual pages on https sites like GitHub.

Re: India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin

#34

Post by DINKDINK »

nicksergeant wrote: post #14
bbarn wrote: post #4

Arvind Gupta, the head of IT Cell, BJP Tweeted: "The websites that have been blocked were based on an advisory by Anti Terrorism Squad, and were carrying Anti India content from ISIS. The sites that have removed objectionable content and/or cooperated with the on going investigations, are being unblocked." This is bad. archive.org by default should have all sorts of offensive things on it. Pastebin and github should…

I run https://snipt.net , one of the sites listed as being blocked, and I've never received any communication from anyone with the Indian government or ISPs. So they're not proactively doing anything to unblock these sites, as far as I can tell.

Why would they have any incentive to contact you? From their perspective the problem is solved -- the material offending statist is out of sight, out of mind. You're the one who wants a different situation to exist. Governments aren't in the customer service business.

Re: India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin

#35

Post by suhair »

ehPReth wrote: post #26
suhair wrote: post #12

can access github, archive.org, and pastebin through BSNL, Indian State owned telecommunications company. EDIT: Major news paper in India reports it was b/c of contents related to ISIS and the ban was removed later http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/smartbuy/tech-n...

Are you using non-ISP provided DNS?

No, Hindu online states the ban was removed later so that may be the reason i can access it now.

Re: India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin

#36

Post by hueving »

aselzer wrote: post #27
ToastyMallows wrote: post #8

Is this just a DNS block or do they control all of the ISPs in India? Sorry I'm ignorant about the state of the Internet in India.

If it is a DNS block it wouldn't make much sense to write the full URLs.

The full URLs provide the source of the problem causing the block. It doesn't mean they won't crudely cut the entire domain.

Re: India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin

#37

Post by nicksergeant »

DINKDINK wrote: post #34
nicksergeant wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run https://snipt.net , one of the sites listed as being blocked, and I've never received any communication from anyone with the Indian government or ISPs. So they're not proactively doing anything to unblock these sites, as far as I can tell.

Why would they have any incentive to contact you? From their perspective the problem is solved -- the material offending statist is out of sight, out of mind. You're the one who wants a different situation to exist. Governments aren't in the customer service business.

I actually don't care at all, but sucks for developers in India who 1) want to use Snipt or 2) have already paid for it.

Edit: on item 2, I'll happily refund any Indian developers who've already paid for Snipt and want their money back, but my point is valid.

Re: India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin

#38

Post by ehPReth »

xanderstrike wrote: post #25
bradleysmith wrote: post #9

This is remedied with a simple VPN, correct? only justification in that article: " Arvind Gupta, the head of IT Cell, BJP Tweeted: 'The websites that have been blocked were based on an advisory by Anti Terrorism Squad, and were carrying Anti India content from ISIS. The sites that have removed objectionable content and/or cooperated with the on going investigations, are being unblocked.' "

It is, but only if you have access to a machine outside the ban. So outsourced employees and established companies are going to be fine, but if you're a 15 year old just getting into hacking spending $5 a month on a VPN service or a private server out of the country is going to be a problem. I can't imagine becoming the programmer I am today without the huge resource that is Github.

Does Tor work in India?

Re: India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin

#40

Post by gshrikant »

> A Government source said the decision to block the 32 websites were taken after thorough “filtration process based on a strict regimen”, and there is a proper committee in the Department of Information Technology in place to whet complaints. [1]

This is unbelievably ridiculous, if not downright stupid. Even as our Prime Minister speaks of bringing about a new digital revolution, decisions such as these show how badly equipped the lawmakers are in dealing with issues relating to technology.

Blanket bans like these are not only a form of internet censorship which flies in the face of the establishing principles of the largest democracy in the world, the lack of any details or explanation before issuing an outright ban on several important software hosting websites and content providers just evokes an image of a myopic government with incredibly poor understanding of technology.

[1] http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/now-modi-govt-blocks-3...

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