India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by cweiske » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 6:59 PM UTC

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.

I'm the developer of phorkie, and I also have not been contacted by anyone official about the block.

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

#312

Post by xnull2guest » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 7:23 PM UTC

happyscrappy wrote: post #61

milesskorpen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that ISIS isn't a terrorist organization doesn't mean that user is defending the organization. Terrorist has become a catch-all term that is used way too broadly (seems to cover any armed force motivated by Islam for many people). ISIS can be an awful organization without consisting of terrorists.

They are terrorizing local populations for a political goal. They are not just fighting battles they are slaughtering civilians into compliance. How is that not terrorism? Edit: He also claimed that it would be better if ISIS was in charge of the area. That is quite ridiculous.

Let me chime in here as I am the original commenter.

I did not say that it would be better if ISIS was in charge of the area.

I did say that a three state solution would be an improvement to the way that state boundaries are drawn in the Middle East - they were drawn the way they are now specifically to keep the area unstable by the British as a result of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. This is a sentiment also expressed by many nations in the UN and by scholars who study stability in the Middle East.

Regarding their 'slaughter of civilians into compliance' I would point out that as this is war, in fact the most violent geographic location today, that the cost of innocent civilians is a historical certainty (completely 'typical' even in its horrendousness) and that there is no side that is innocent of such things including the United States and our contractors, allies and the militant extremist (anti-ISIS) factions that we fund, support and arm there - and that also our lauded drone program institutionalizes compliance with slaughter of innocents. Again this is not to say "Go ISIS!" or "Boo America" - it's to say "Boo war!".

If you'd like to ask for more details, supporting media coverage, or clarification about any of my comments including this one please feel free to ask(/challenge).

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

#313

Post by code_duck » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 7:24 PM UTC

iopq wrote: post #143

code_duck wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments should be in the customer service business. Typically, they provide many services that, if they were provided by private companies, which they very well could be, would be customer service oriented. The concept that a government employees such as police are not working for the people is exactly what's wrong with the attitudes surrounding police in the United States. They are providing a service that we pa…

You're not a customer because you're being forced to pay. You have no choice in the matter. If they provide really really bad service you still have to pay.

Sure, that's the situation in a monopoly. It's not that we're not in a customer role, just that we're poorly served customers of a monopoly where management doesn't seem to understand for whom they're working. If the whole system wasn't sondysfunctional, poor service would be addressed by our elected representatives, who are supposed to be properly planning government services for us.

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

#314

Post by aselzer » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 9:29 PM UTC

phit_ wrote: post #294

aselzer wrote: post #18

This one is interesting: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phorkie/ According to the list it has been specifically blocked. It appears to be a pastebin clone written in PHP. Almost all of them are pastebin-like sites. http://atnsoft.com/atnsoft.com/textpaster/ seems very unrelated. My assumption would have been that a government crawler stumbled upon some messages it didn't like and the sites they were on ended up on t…

It is actually related, this software allows you to fill out webforms automatically. Now these bans are mostly around websites that allow you to host text online and this tool helps easily getting your text on tons of websites. So I see why this is related.

In that way it is related, but it is not in the same category as the other sites listed. It is a tool that can be used to spread spam, propaganda, and possibly automate entry of data into inflexible systems.

If governments can justify censoring access to a program like this for those reasons, then I am worried.

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

#315

Post by ufmace » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 10:23 PM UTC

xerophyte12932 wrote: post #262

ufmace wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you got that textbook definition, but it sounds useless to me. What violence and intimidation is not done in the pursuit of political aims, aside from low-level street crime? Even adding the qualifier against civilians doesn't seem to help much, as civilians not being deliberately targeted is very much the exception in warfare historically. My definition is "Violence and intimidation, conducted by…

> Violence and intimidation, conducted by an organization not directly under the control of a national government, targeted deliberately at civilians, for a political purpose I kinda like this as this separates attacks by these militants on military bases as "guerrilla warfare". But what do you call when the attack is "targeted" at an armed force but with complete disregard to high number of civilian casualties? Exam…

I think that the name of the tactic is dependant on the intent of the attack, rather than the results. This does admittedly get dicey at times.

If the intent of the attack is direct attrition against an enemy force and supporting infrastructure, then it's guerilla warfare, even if most of the victims are civilians due to poor planning, bad information, etc. This may get particularly tricky in the case of suicide bombings in Israel - since virtually the entire country is part of the reserves, you could make the argument that any attack is an attack against the military infrastructure. I'd say that for it to be legitimate guerilla warfare, there must be at least a vaguely plausible plan for success. In the case of suicide bombings in Israel, they would then have to have a plan of killing the entire population of the country as a way of ending the fight, and their tactics would have to be a plausible way to carry that out. I don't think it fits that definition, so that would make it terrorism.

2 and 3 are ordinary warfare IMO, because they are both done by states and have the intent of attacking enemy forces. They may or may not be done with flimsy information, and the state in question and the militant group they are fighting against may both be in violation of assorted laws of war under various legal systems, but it's still conventional warfare.

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

#316

Post by ufmace » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 10:37 PM UTC

neilcrj wrote: post #266

ufmace wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you got that textbook definition, but it sounds useless to me. What violence and intimidation is not done in the pursuit of political aims, aside from low-level street crime? Even adding the qualifier against civilians doesn't seem to help much, as civilians not being deliberately targeted is very much the exception in warfare historically. My definition is "Violence and intimidation, conducted by…

The only difference between your definition and that of the parent is that you explicitly deny the existence of state terrorism, and I don't think that is an improvement. I think we would all be better off separating terrorism (a tactic) from identity (organization/state). Then we could categorize militant groups as whatever you want: state, statelet, militia, guerrilla force, freedom fighters, caliphate, NGO or what…

By my definition, violence carried out by the state is not terrorism because it's a different tactic.

The message sent by terrorist actions is that your state is illegitimate because it cannot protect you from our tiny little group. It makes no sense for the state to send this message to its own citizens - it's goal is the opposite, by definition. If a state is directly trying to send the message to citizens of a foreign state that their state can't protect them from you, that's ordinary warfare.

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

#317

Post by vithlani » Fri, Jan 02, 2015, 12:25 AM UTC

1971genocide wrote: post #174

vithlani wrote: post #171

LOL... welcome to the third world, with a tinge of fascism. I would like to see what all the curry apologists on HN come up with to defend this bullshit.

wow "curry apologists" ! ??

Yes curry apologists.... the idiots who defend a 10,000 year old civilizations' failure to provide basic amenities to it's citizens by saying "Look!! We made it cheaper to Mars than whitey!!! YAY!! Progress!!!".

They conveniently ignore the enormous patrimony of their ancestors and even recent history such as India having nuclear power and technology 40 years ago and yet having most of it's citizens missing basic sanitation every morning. They look at the hate mongering of the current Indian leadership as progress and emancipation for "Hindus", again conveniently ignoring the fact that 85% of the population has always been Hindu.

Are you aware that there is a movement in the current education ministry to re-write history books to say that India invented genetics millennia ago (the current Education Minster, being a year 12 graduate and TV starlet, is obviously an expert)?

Of the forced conversion of Christians and Muslims to Hinduism at the point of a knife?

Of course, I expect people to defend this as righteous right off the bat...

Yes...curry apologists... sounds about right....

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

#318

Post by lenkite » Fri, Jan 02, 2015, 1:10 AM UTC

peterfirefly wrote: post #292

okpatil wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being an Indian, I wish that this was true.

Would it be better if India was broken up into much smaller states, possibly more or less along the current internal borders? Is India really seen as a country by the Indians or is it seen more like a bunch of unwanted outside overlords ruling over your local part of India, whichever that might be? I'm asking partly because I live in the EU where we are explicitly trying to create a big, state-like construction for m…

We have a national identity that is very strong. And devolving into different nation states won't solve anything - it will lead to wars and violence and a broken economy. We would also be easy pickings for China and Islamic states like Pakistan. All our eastern states would be annexed by China in a couple of years. Kashmir and Punjab would be annexed by Pakistan. It is the Indian military and the fact that we have nuclear weapons that gives them pause.

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

#319

Post by rajbot » Fri, Jan 02, 2015, 1:29 AM UTC

meta-coder wrote: post #301

rajbot wrote: post #245

I am trying to find out if archive.org is still being blocked or not, as we are hearing conflicting reports from users. I queried the Indian DNS servers on this list that are marked 'valid' or 'new': http://public-dns.tk/nameserver/in.html Only one of them (182.59.1.235, operated by MTNL ISP) returned the fake IP being used for blocked sites (59.185.3.14). The other 1843 servers returned the correct IP. I am trying t…

Yes, archive.org is still being blocked by BSNL's default DNS server in Maharashtra as of Thu Jan 1 20:40:11 IST 2015. $ dig +nocmd +nostats +nocomments @218.248.255.211 archive.org ;archive.org. IN A archive.org. 86400 IN SOA localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400

Thanks!

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

#320

Post by munkay » Fri, Jan 02, 2015, 1:56 AM UTC

walshemj wrote: post #152

pkhagah wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually that tweet was not from government official. It was from ruling political party IT cell here. Government officials from DOT and IT ministry are still silent on this issue.

what is a "political party IT cell" is this some committee of MP's? or some Indian political slang?

cell == division