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How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers

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Re: How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers

#21

Post by draugadrotten »

icebraining wrote: post #17
shubhamjain wrote: post #9

Indian state wields too much power over everything. I guess it's remnant of a socialistic past. Consider this: CBFC is film certification board that can block a movie's release until appropriate cuts are made subject to their whims and fancies. This makes no logical sense. Why should the Govt. interfere in whatever the movie wants to show? The max stipulation should be on what content is appropriate to which age grou…

The power to block movie releases is common. For example, A Serbian Film "has been banned in Spain, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Norway, and South Korea, and was temporarily banned from screening in Brazil." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Serbian_Film

It would have been better to offer free screenings of A Serbian Film to movie critics and bloggers, and then nobody else would have wanted to watch the atrocity.

Re: How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers

#22

Post by narag »

sumedh wrote: post #16
shubhamjain wrote: post #9

Indian state wields too much power over everything. I guess it's remnant of a socialistic past. Consider this: CBFC is film certification board that can block a movie's release until appropriate cuts are made subject to their whims and fancies. This makes no logical sense. Why should the Govt. interfere in whatever the movie wants to show? The max stipulation should be on what content is appropriate to which age grou…

> Indian state wields too much power over everything I think its part of our culture, it begins in our childhood where our parents tell their kids that kids (even when they become adults) should blindly obey their parents.

Against the vice of asking there is the virtue of refusing.

Re: How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers

#23

Post by timthelion »

Aren't there few enough urls that are registered that it should be easy to figure out which ones are blocked? It looks like there are only about a billion http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/

With 1000 connections at 1 dns lookup per second that would be just 12 days. Anyone want to spin up some AWS instances in India and find out?

Re: How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers

#24

Post by icebraining »

draugadrotten wrote: post #21
icebraining wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The power to block movie releases is common. For example, A Serbian Film "has been banned in Spain, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Norway, and South Korea, and was temporarily banned from screening in Brazil." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Serbian_Film

It would have been better to offer free screenings of A Serbian Film to movie critics and bloggers, and then nobody else would have wanted to watch the atrocity.

It has a 5.1 rating on Rotten Tomatoes, that's better than the latest Pirates of the Caribbean.

Re: How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers

#25

Post by [deleted] »

shubhamjain wrote: post #9

Indian state wields too much power over everything. I guess it's remnant of a socialistic past. Consider this: CBFC is film certification board that can block a movie's release until appropriate cuts are made subject to their whims and fancies. This makes no logical sense. Why should the Govt. interfere in whatever the movie wants to show? The max stipulation should be on what content is appropriate to which age grou…

[deleted]

Re: How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers

#26

Post by ekianjo »

confounded wrote: post #11
shubhamjain wrote: post #9

Indian state wields too much power over everything. I guess it's remnant of a socialistic past. Consider this: CBFC is film certification board that can block a movie's release until appropriate cuts are made subject to their whims and fancies. This makes no logical sense. Why should the Govt. interfere in whatever the movie wants to show? The max stipulation should be on what content is appropriate to which age grou…

Many countries have film certification boards with similar powers, though they tend to be lenient. Same for web and television censorship. While you may consider these powers authoritarian, there’s nothing inherently “socialistic” about them. In the UK and US for example, censorship laws are often bundled into anti-terror legislation, which generally has its strongest proponents on the political right.

Socialistic may not be the right word but the idea of central authority and planning is there.

Re: How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers

#27

Post by Tech-Noir »

shubhamjain wrote: post #9

Indian state wields too much power over everything. I guess it's remnant of a socialistic past. Consider this: CBFC is film certification board that can block a movie's release until appropriate cuts are made subject to their whims and fancies. This makes no logical sense. Why should the Govt. interfere in whatever the movie wants to show? The max stipulation should be on what content is appropriate to which age grou…

> Television programmes can be asked to censor everything from expletives

Not only does this happen in the US, it's legendary, and can lead to comedy gold:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4koLWPq2qDY

(Warning: clip contains uncensored expletives.)

> Hell, Karnataka Govt. even tried to cap the price of movie tickets.

This just sounds like a good thing to me.

    The state government was under pressure from Kannada
    organisations to cap movie tickets in multiplexes to Rs
    200 so that a common man can afford to watch Kannada or
    non-Kannada films even in [multiplexes]

Re: How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers

#28

Post by prashnts »

therealmarv wrote: post #14

I heard once that Cloudflare is widely blocked in some countries. Does somebody know any specifics?

Particular to India, Cloudflare edge data-centres use Airtel network — which is notorious for using MITM for arbitrary bans. If cloudflare fetches your site without SSL then Airtel can and does block it and even inject ads; this is regardless if you use cloudflare's https to serve content to your clients. More info here [1], and hn discussion here [2].

[1] https://medium.com/@karthikb351/airtel-is-sniffing-and-censo...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12091900

Re: How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers

#29

Post by jgrahamc »

prashnts wrote: post #28
therealmarv wrote: post #14

I heard once that Cloudflare is widely blocked in some countries. Does somebody know any specifics?

Particular to India, Cloudflare edge data-centres use Airtel network — which is notorious for using MITM for arbitrary bans. If cloudflare fetches your site without SSL then Airtel can and does block it and even inject ads; this is regardless if you use cloudflare's https to serve content to your clients. More info here [1], and hn discussion here [2]. [1] https://medium.com/@karthikb351/airtel-is-sniffing-and-censo.…

This has nothing to do with Cloudflare, though. If you use HTTP instead of HTTPS then you are at risk on any network (India or elsewhere) of the things you describe.

Use HTTPS.

Re: How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers

#30

Post by bubblethink »

jgrahamc wrote: post #29
prashnts wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Particular to India, Cloudflare edge data-centres use Airtel network — which is notorious for using MITM for arbitrary bans. If cloudflare fetches your site without SSL then Airtel can and does block it and even inject ads; this is regardless if you use cloudflare's https to serve content to your clients. More info here [1], and hn discussion here [2]. [1] https://medium.com/@karthikb351/airtel-is-sniffing-and-censo.…

This has nothing to do with Cloudflare, though. If you use HTTP instead of HTTPS then you are at risk on any network (India or elsewhere) of the things you describe. Use HTTPS.

This is a more subtle point about how cloudflare's flexible ssl works. The linked post describes a situation where the end user sees the ssl padlock, but the traffic is still getting MITM'ed between cloudflare and origin because it is not over https.
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