
How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers - hnyk
https://factly.in/many-urlswebsites-blocked-india-government-two-different-answers/
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shubhamjain
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 group.

Websites can be blocked by people who have zero clue what they are about.
Television programmes can be asked to censor everything from expletives to
kissing scenes. (Try seeing Kill Bill with all violent scenes removed). Hell,
Karnataka Govt. even tried to cap the price of movie tickets. [1]

The fact that a random litigation can persuade a judge to order to block 1000+
sites is downright scary. I don't see anything changing near future.
Politicians (and even judiciary) rarely want to do away with any power they
have.

[1]: [http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-
affairs/kar...](http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-
affairs/karnataka-caps-movie-ticket-prices-in-cinemas-multiplexes-at-
rs-200-117050201455_1.html)

~~~
confounded
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.

~~~
shubhamjain
Maybe not "socialistic" in the traditional sense but if you see India's
history, from 50s to 90s, you'll see how it all evolved. Govt. ran everything
(Banks, Telecoms, Automobile manufacturing) and installed thousands of
institutions to regulate everything. Even after liberalisation, there's a
strong tendency to regulate and feeble support to give a free-hand.

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nsomaru
I've found non-https archive.org (!) to be blocked in India on a government
ISP.

Interestingly it seems to depend on the ISP used. Same site worked fine on a
mobile connection.

~~~
nitin_flanker
Yes, as far as I've tried, it entirely is ISP dependent. Here's the message
that my ISP show when a website is blocked:
[http://ibb.co/mvSMRR](http://ibb.co/mvSMRR). I can access it however using my
Wifi instead. Similarly, few website that are blocked by one are accessible on
others carriers.

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akerro
OONIProble is a project from TorProject group, that tests your network
connection for possible censorship, MITM and network manipulation
[https://f-droid.org/packages/org.openobservatory.ooniprobe/](https://f-droid.org/packages/org.openobservatory.ooniprobe/)

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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/](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?

~~~
zuron7
Not worth it. The blocking that the government uses blocks only the http
version of the sites. Append an s manually and access is restored. But to the
uninitiated that block poses enough of a challenge.

~~~
wav-part
Not true anymore. https are getting blocked too.

Last few lines of `curl --trace -
[https://thepiratebay.org/`](https://thepiratebay.org/`) on Jio ISP. Full log
[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/27ddfa674233d8d17a007f1b3f...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/27ddfa674233d8d17a007f1b3fc1106e)

    
    
        => Send SSL data, 5 bytes (0x5)
        0000: 15 03 03 00 1a                                  .....
        == Info: TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS alert, Server hello (2):
        => Send SSL data, 2 bytes (0x2)
        0000: 02 46                                           .F
        == Info: error:1408F10B:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_RECORD:wrong version number
        == Info: Closing connection 0
    

So TLS handshake is being interrupted. If you think about it, https blocking
is actually more efficient.

curl log does not show the last fake rcvd packet. Anyone know how to do that ?

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forkLding
The rationale for blocking websites is pretty convoluted, what are they
saying? I mean aside from the usual censorship justification

~~~
nischalsamji
"Objectionable content", "Hurting religious sentiments" are the reasons given
when github/ vimeo/ pastebin etc., were banned few years ago. The rationale is
pretty vague and it's often tough to understand on what info a certain site
gets blocked.

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derefr
I would assume it's much the same as Canada's law against publishing hate
speech. Just with a very wide net on what constitutes hate speech.

~~~
keganunderwood
I think someone mentioned that politicians in India enjoy wide freedoms due to
generous libel laws as well.

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Ravisg
Blocked sites can easily be accessed using proxy or vpn. I end up doing that
on a regular basis :)

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

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prashnts
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...](https://medium.com/@karthikb351/airtel-is-sniffing-and-censoring-
cloudflares-traffic-in-india-and-they-don-t-even-know-it-90935f7f6d98)

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

~~~
jgrahamc
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.

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bubblethink
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.

~~~
jgrahamc
There's no reason to use Flexible SSL. Cloudflare will support any certificate
on the origin server (e.g. Let's Encrypt if you don't want to pay someone), or
will give you a free "Origin CA" certificate.

~~~
aptwebapps
"There's no reason to use Flexible SSL."

Then why do you offer it?

~~~
jgrahamc
Because there are instances where the customer cannot put an SSL certificate
on their server. So, I probably should have said "almost no reason".

------
senthilnayagam
during a major movie release, court backed banning of thousands of torrent and
media sharing sites happen

