
Whistleblower provides blocking orders for over 4000 websites in India - searchableguy
https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/hgnosd/whistleblower_provides_blocking_orders_for_over/
======
searchableguy
The list only seems to contain small portion of what is blocked mostly torrent
sites and piracy stuff. Almost all porn sites are banned yet not mentioned.
The scariest part is that there is no visibility.

Interestingly, reddit blocks nsfw subs in india with few non nsfw too.
Telegram web is blocked. Streamable, redgif and few other content sites are
blocked on specific ISPs.

They blocked reddit as a whole too before.

They have issued orders for sites like github and pastebin in the past. -
[https://qz.com/india/319866/a-threat-from-isis-prompts-
india...](https://qz.com/india/319866/a-threat-from-isis-prompts-india-to-
block-github-and-a-handful-of-other-sites/)

[1] 28 internet shutdowns this year. 106 in 2019, and 134 in 2018.

IFF is doing good job in fighting against censorship. Check their page [2] for
information and support.

What can people do about the draconian laws coming?

People support this. If they were uneducated, you can educate them but many of
them are educated indians, how do you change their mind?

1] [https://internetshutdowns.in/](https://internetshutdowns.in/)

2] [https://internetfreedom.in](https://internetfreedom.in)

~~~
ankit219
There is more. Individual ISPs can ban or even slow down websites as per their
own wishes. Airtel in india (which is about to raise an investment by Amazon)
blocked a lot of websites like Streamable when it wasnt even legally banned.
Just showed the error as address could not be found. I circumvented by
changing my DNS to cloudflare and it started working. Jio totally blocked
telegram with no directions from court or govt.

~~~
npmn
Yes, one day out of nowhere, web.telegram.org stopped loading for me over jio,
I didn't think much about it and switched on a VPN, which loaded the SPA. The
SPA can now fetch messages after a manual retry over jio networks as well.

------
lowmemcpu
There's a decent write-up about the legal issues around blocking the satirical
website called Dowry Calculator, written here:
[https://internetfreedom.in/delhi-hc-issues-notice-to-the-
gov...](https://internetfreedom.in/delhi-hc-issues-notice-to-the-government-
for-blocking-satirical-dowry-calculator-website/)

------
ve55
Some ommenters are stating that some subreddits are specifically banned as
well, such as r/NSFW.

Given that reddit uses TLS, I assume Reddit is assisting governments in
banning content like this as well?

~~~
RealStickman_
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but wouldn't it suffice to just ban the
subreddits by their URL?

~~~
ivanbakel
It's not a dumb question, since it's a natural assumption. But HTTPS -
specifically HTTP over TLS - establishes the secure tunnel to the particular
domain (reddit.com) first, and only then transmits elements of the HTTP
protocol, such as the path, any query parameters, and so on.

I believe that TLS could be used (and is used) in combination with other
protocols, which only require the domain to use for DNS. Everything after that
in the URL bar is HTTP-only.

~~~
searchableguy
DNS over https solves the problem of plain text DNS. Firefox already supports
it. Also check more about ESNI since ISPs like jio employ SNI inspection to
block sites - [https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/what-is-encrypted-
sn...](https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/what-is-encrypted-sni/)

Cloudflare has a small demo which you can use to test your browser and learn
more about specific parts - [https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-
sni/](https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni/)

~~~
ignoramous
I use [https://getintra.org](https://getintra.org) on Android and point it to
a recursive DoH resolver running on Cloudflare Workers (free tier has been
more than enough for 3 devices worth of queries).

Quick tutorial from StackPath (much of it applies to Cloudflare Workers, too):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19514791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19514791)

------
Animats
The actual orders.[1] These are all in India.

Most of these are over copyright issues. It's like reading DMCA takedown
notices.

[1]
[https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XtWN1FGTnalCIOiEdCLt...](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XtWN1FGTnalCIOiEdCLtIbuGM-
d_3IYR)

