This is the message I sent. If someone is lazy to write their own, please use this as a template, make changes and send to the PM. Unfortunately, we can send only upto 500 chars long messages. My message is 477 chars and communicates the intent. If you want add/modify/remove something from/to the message to make the message more effective.
Honorable Sir,
Yesterday an order issued by DoT blocked 32 websites including Github and Codepad which are used by scientists/engineers/researchers/students for collaboration in academic/professional/research work.
As an ambitious engineer from India who is passionate towards nation building, I request you to instruct concerned authorities to revisit the decision for blocking full github.com website instead of just the specific pages which contained objectionable material.
Should we ban pencils, because a terrorist wrote a threat on a paper?
This is exactly what has happened.
Honorable Sir, Yesterday an order issued by DoT blocked 32 websites
including Github which are used by scientists/engineers/researchers/students
for collaboration.
This is clearly an un-informed decision, and engineers across the
world are wondering how this was arm-twisted as a policy.
I have never interacted with the PMO, but I voice the opinion of
millions of engineers like me.
Bypassing a mere DNS block such as this one, should be trivial for anyone with basic network knowledge IMHO. I will offer a couple of solutions quickly:
1) Have you tried Tor[1]? Should be fast enough for Github push/pull and browsing. You can route all your traffic easily through the Tor network or even configure which requests (based on DNS) should be routed through the tor network and which ones should not. There are other solutions as I2P (google it).
2) You can buy a VPS and set-up a proxy from the Netherlands or the US, for 5 USD/month at Digital Ocean.
3) You can scan the internet for anonymous proxies, there are many lists available.
The most secure and cheap solution of course is Tor.
UPDATE: Some people report that it's not a DNS level block?! Anyway, using Tor should work for anyone. You can even setup a router running Tor and get over with it, DNS requests are router through tor.
Do NOT follow this. Circumventing the block might be crime. Wait for few days either they will unblock or file petition in court or to respective department. If many people do this , then gov will start blocking only content no the site.
They have issued a circular instructing ISPs to block the websites, but haven't made accessing the sites illegal for consumers AFAIK. There are perfectly good reasons to already have been using Google or OpenDNS that have nothing to do with the block.
If I'd already been using these perfectly legitimate services, and went onto Github like any other day, would I be committing a crime?
Off topic, but Indian English fascinates me. For example, "Honourable" is abbreviated to "Hon'ble" everywhere on that site, saving very few letters. (Of course, it's also somewhat weird to bestow a special formal title on someone, and then abbreviate it out of laziness. If you don't type out their title, how much are you really honoring them? English. Weird language.)
"Sorry your session has expired. Kindly login again to continue."
even if I have just logged in. I cleared cookies, etc. but no use. And that error text is in white font over pink background -- hard to read without mouse-selecting.
I see GitHub accessible to our team all day yesterday and today as well. A news appeared that some of the sites where unblocked after the offending material was removed and the websites complied to the governments ask.
Name-checking terrorists is so thin it's transparent.
Also, the SourceForge link was for pastebin source code[0] and not an actual pastebin.
IMHO it was a lazy request from the copyright lobby, which is seeking to criminalize anonymous text and links. They don't care that it's insane, the world isn't changed by being reasonable; at worst they'd have shifted the Overton window and made the other wing of the lobby look sane. The politicians barely care, and another level of jaded drones didn't bother to contact anybody[1], put up a DNS block and went home.
I personally use bitbucket for my repos, yet I would not want to loose access to github.
GitHub has become more than a DVCS: Loads of relevant Open Source projects are hosted there. If I want to contribute - or even browse issues - I need access to GitHub. Same goes for discovery.
Also, lot's of tutorials will provide their example project on GitHub. Plus, GitHub both hosts a fair amount of static pages of Open Source projects and individuals, plus some blogs/tutorials embed gists when the use code samples.
If your release and branching is based on Git and all the work you did resides there, it becomes difficult to switch horses mid stream.
If your open source contributors and have accept pull requests then the history gets lost.
Repo isn't centralized, its distributed amongst Github not across systems (Github to Bitbucket or Cloudforge etc.)
git itself is distributed. However, GitHub has more or less broken that model in the sense that many rely upon Github's web-based features for workflow. Additional, a number of processes (CI, deployment, static analysis, etc) rely upon Github's webhooks.
In addition to writing to the government and officials, everyone should also push their ISPs to be more transparent about implementing internet censorship diktats from the government. If we don't know that sites we're trying to access are blocked and the reasons why, we won't be able to take up the matter with the authorities.
I just called up my ISP (MTS) and made enough noise for them to hopefully take notice.
Generally speaking IMHO will be a drop in the ocean. If you're talking about India-only devs/projects then you might have some drop but not substantial. IMHO those who's job depend heavily on github are pushing/pulling code through proxies already without even bothering about the silly block.
I made a chrome extension + desktop software a while ago so people can shield themselves from this spontaneous blocking of websites and service. You can get it from http://getolive.org
Honorable Sir, Yesterday an order issued by DoT blocked 32 websites including Github and Codepad which are used by scientists/engineers/researchers/students for collaboration in academic/professional/research work. As an ambitious engineer from India who is passionate towards nation building, I request you to instruct concerned authorities to revisit the decision for blocking full github.com website instead of just the specific pages which contained objectionable material.