11–20 of 34 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Countries that block "Wikipedia or something like that" already exist. And citizens, corporations, and governments are fine with it.
Are citizens really fine with this? Most of the blocking countries have an active underground VPN scene.
DDG was blocked for the past several days. The issue came up on /r/duckduckgo and /r/india, following which the Internet Freedom Foundation wrote to the Department of Telecom [1] DDG is working for me again (it's my default search engine) so that's a relief. In the past, the government or the ISPs in India have nonchalantly blocked several websites and even NSFW sub-reddits. The IFF even has a dump of blocking orders…
I would love to be able to say "use ddg, they respect your privacy and they're almost as good as Google" but several times today I got mind-bogglingly bad results from it. Same search in Google... Yes, these are the results I was looking for.
What's really odd is that i reran one of those searches just now and the results aren't actually as bad. Super confused.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much. In addition there is no real enforcement to see that only the sites requested are blocked. And ISPs (Jio especially) have started taking creative license with block orders. For a lot of ISPs this blocking is implemented at DNS resolution level, which is easy to bypass (just change your DNS resolver), but the most popular ISP (Jio) does not do it this way, and is pretty much impossible to get around.
How does Jio do it? Would encrypted SNI help in thwarting that?
Check the status here - https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni/
Your best bet would still be a vpn which will work on all the sites.
DDG was blocked for the past several days. The issue came up on /r/duckduckgo and /r/india, following which the Internet Freedom Foundation wrote to the Department of Telecom [1] DDG is working for me again (it's my default search engine) so that's a relief. In the past, the government or the ISPs in India have nonchalantly blocked several websites and even NSFW sub-reddits. The IFF even has a dump of blocking orders…
I'm fairly annoyed that the list of websites blocked is not made available. Also, how do you block a specific subreddit!?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17VJKBTBnHDpLTXOrB58L...
DDG was blocked for the past several days. The issue came up on /r/duckduckgo and /r/india, following which the Internet Freedom Foundation wrote to the Department of Telecom [1] DDG is working for me again (it's my default search engine) so that's a relief. In the past, the government or the ISPs in India have nonchalantly blocked several websites and even NSFW sub-reddits. The IFF even has a dump of blocking orders…
I'm fairly annoyed that the list of websites blocked is not made available. Also, how do you block a specific subreddit!?
Now they can have awful search results again. I would love to be able to say "use ddg, they respect your privacy and they're almost as good as Google" but several times today I got mind-bogglingly bad results from it. Same search in Google... Yes, these are the results I was looking for. What's really odd is that i reran one of those searches just now and the results aren't actually as bad. Super confused.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are citizens really fine with this? Most of the blocking countries have an active underground VPN scene.
This is true, but it's important to consider that most of the population is entirely oblivious. It's a little sad.
Edit: better analogy than arsenic.
Now they can have awful search results again. I would love to be able to say "use ddg, they respect your privacy and they're almost as good as Google" but several times today I got mind-bogglingly bad results from it. Same search in Google... Yes, these are the results I was looking for. What's really odd is that i reran one of those searches just now and the results aren't actually as bad. Super confused.
It's quite scary to think that some countries can just instantly axe access to important services like that. This time it was, supposedly, a mistake. What if next time they decide to block Wikipedia or something like that? I know they tried to block Telegram before the citizens pushed back.
It isn't that simple. Just look at China. To enforce their internet censorship they have to spend billions on a massive technological complex. But the locals still know how to get around it when necessary. Once upon a time TOR was a complicated little tool requiring multiple layers of software to run properly. Now The Tor Browser is an app that any kid can download and use on any device. The days of governments turning off websites by removing their DNS entries are long gone.