How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers | Hacker News Reader

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

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91 pointshnyk38 comments

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...

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.

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.

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

> 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.

You should realize that what you say here is very relative to your cultural context. Some other group could say "The max stipulation should be on what content is appropriate to which as demonstrate the ability to handle it" while another could say "where is there a max stipulation ? Why should they dictate something like that ?".

Also, our gov do censor a lot of things as well, by different mean. Using laws, economic influence, information flooding, etc.

I get that we should aim for as much freedom (and associated responsibility) as possible for the people, but your analysis that "Indian state wields too much power over everything. I guess it's remnant of a socialistic past." quite a shortcut.

> 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.

> virtue of refusing

cant do that with all the brainwashing about respecting your elders.

Do you think my parents didn't do that and still do (I'm in my 50's)? Respect is not the same as uncritically accepting authority decisions.

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.

> CBFC is film certification board that can block a movie's release until appropriate cuts are made subject to their whims and fancies

This kind of board exist in almost every country I can think of.

> 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]

It sounds good but price ceilings rarely help people. The free market generally does a good enough job at finding the optimal price. It's easy enough to say that movie theater owners are greedy and just want more money, but that's exactly why they're even in the business--to make money. If you remove that incentive, they really have to reason to continue operating.

You can see this in action in New York with its rent controls: the government decided the common man needed to be able to afford housing. Seems like a noble goal, but soon landlords couldn't afford to fix their houses or pay for utilities, and so they left the market. And nobody was going to start a new apartment and nobody was going to fund one because it's unprofitable. As a result, the housing situation is even worse than how it was before.

There is no free market. They would sell popcorn at 2x the movie ticket cost. And the movie ticket costs are absurd here in karnataka. And its all one player game.

I understand what you are trying to say, but the movie ticket prices had sky rocketed beyond reach of a large section of the population. Now, you may argue that it is somehow the loss of the multiplexes by alienating people, but movies are somewhat of a necessity for cultural and social reasons.

Imagine having a consortium of telecom companies deciding to charge $100/Gb of data (assuming they are making profit nevertheless). There is no incentive for them to reduce the price.

To give you an example, a movie ticket would cost upto $20 in an economy where a bottle of water costs ~$0.2.

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.

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. I can access it however using my Wifi instead. Similarly, few website that are blocked by one are accessible on others carriers.

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/

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?

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.

But if we are speculating on what sort of websites are blocked, that method would reduce the uncertainty. It might even lead to the uncovering of something scandalous, like the discovery of a website being blocked for revealing evil truths about the current government.

Not true anymore. https are getting blocked too.

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

    => 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 ?

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

"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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Yes, that's fine. The problem is offering flexible ssl in the first place. It is not the end user's job to verify if the traffic between cloudflare and origin is encrypted.

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

Then why do you offer it?

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

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

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