Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techdirt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 326 posts

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

#211

Post by kristopolous »

ChristianBundy wrote: post #110
kartikkumar wrote: post #20

Ah that explains it! Haven't been able to push to Github ever since stepping off the plane in Mumbai. Strange thing is that the website works off-and-on. Pushing results in connection refused though. There's also been ZERO information/news provided by the ISP (MTNL) in this regard. Absolute shame that a blanket ban like this is applied. It has a profound effect on everyday activities unrelated to the original reason…

I'm sure you've already thought of this, but you can use a VPS as a proxy to circumvent the ban – I've had a great experience with DigitalOcean.

Furthermore at the shell you can set environment variables such as "http_proxy" which many tools will observe. Search "http_proxy" with your favorite search engine for more info. It's pretty useful.

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

#212

Post by serf »

elwell wrote: post #116
MichaelGG wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the response there is just as lame: "The Home Minister today asked the state government to install CCTVs in all key places in the city." And they're going to ask restaurants to close at 1am on New Year's... As if that'd accomplish anything.

They might have specific intel on something. Just as possibility...

specific intel which would require city-wide CCTV? that's some pretty non-specific specific intel.

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

#213

Post by p3rs3us »

cryptbin wrote: post #206
cmadan wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you send out a tweet from the Cryptbin or your personal Twitter account stating that you haven't received any communication? Retweets should help raise awareness on this. Thanks!

Done! https://twitter.com/cryptbin/status/550455122091077632

As far as I can tell, the ban has not yet been enforced. I can access both https://cryptbin.com/ and https://snipt.net/, though my ISP is limited only to Bangalore area.

Edit: Well, it looks like pastebin & dailymotion are banned, but cryptbin and snipt aren't

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

#216

Post by sounds »

cryptbin wrote: post #55

I run Cryptbin.com, one of the sites on the banned list. As a result of the ban we have seen our traffic surge, with roughly a 1000% increase in traffic from India today alone. Interesting to note is that we also own the domain cryptb.in (a TLD from India) and that has not been banned. However, it is merely a redirect so it does not provide an alternative entrance to the site. We use it only for short URL's on public…

Perhaps you can use this thread to recruit an India-centric team and create a separate site at cryptb.in (not saying you have to but to quote Pirates: "if you were looking for the perfect moment... that was it")

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

#217

Post by sounds »

catchmrbharath wrote: post #128

The sites are blocked only at the DNS level. If you switch your DNS from your ISP to either OPenDNS or Google DNS, then all these sites should work.

This probably partially explains the inconsistent reports on this thread ("it's blocked here" / "it's not blocked here")

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

#218

Post by smsm42 »

lnanek2 wrote: post #31
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?

Obviously, they would have to proceed to ban PHP (since it allows to write such software), Apache (allows to host sites), Linux (the same), any OS supporting TCP/IP and finally conclude by going the North Korea way and disconnect themselves from the internet. That or people of India wake up and give those cretins long overdue kick in the ass and get some bureaucrats that are not completely insane.

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

#219

Post by usbreply »

p3rs3us wrote: post #213
cryptbin wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Done! https://twitter.com/cryptbin/status/550455122091077632

As far as I can tell, the ban has not yet been enforced. I can access both https://cryptbin.com/ and https://snipt.net/ , though my ISP is limited only to Bangalore area. Edit: Well, it looks like pastebin & dailymotion are banned, but cryptbin and snipt aren't

cryptbin and snipt are blocked here (Vodafone network). I presume all the major ISPs have implemented the bans.

I think you should not have commented if you knew that your ISP doesn't care to enforce government ordered bans (I know some small ISPs can't afford the hardware to implement URL blocking.).

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

#220

Post by Crito »

lstamour wrote: post #73
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…

Strange that they're blocking software rather than websites. E.g. the github block says "gist-it" next to it, which implies they maybe wanted to block https://github.com/robertkrimen/gist-it ? There's also http://atnsoft.com/atnsoft.com/textpaster/ blocked and http://sourceforge.net/projects/phorkie/ which is described as "Self-hosted pastebin software written in PHP. Pastes are editable, may have multiple files and…

Either they are deliberately going after the software, or they have failed to understand the difference between hosting a websites source repo and actually hosting that website.
Post reply on HN