Vimeo, DailyMotion, Pastebin, Xmarks & Major Torrent Sites Blocked in India
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Recently the Supreme Court of India, has ordered that all cars must get rid of their sun films. Even tinted glasses of any tint percentage aren't allowed. This is because they think the kidnapping, terrorism and crimes against women will stop if the cars get rid of sun films and tint on windows. People are predicting heavy bribe business in early days after ban is enforced.
In another instance, the court has also ordered that heavy vehicles like lorries, trucks and other goods/passenger vehicles get speed regulators fixed preventing them from going above some level(I guess that is 60 Km) this is because some boy died in a over speeding accident. From what I hear, there is a strike planned to counter this.
Coming to Piracy, its ridiculous to think that they are going to stop piracy by banning torrent and video sites. In a country where pirated CD's are available on the footpath for the price of peanuts, Piracy isn't going to be that easy to solve. In fact of bulk of the piracy business happens, through those means. Very few people apart from the computer savvy ones know how to use torrents, or even know what torrents are.
Though I am frankly amazed that pastebin was blocked. I know what its used for... everything. It is about as nefarious as a chalk board. When are those getting banned?
The thing is Radio, TV and Papers are already bought by the government. Its paid media, and media that is isn't paid is generally killed.
Internet is a dangerous beast. No centralized control, amazingly rich content can be shared seamlessly. This is dangerous to the government. That is why there is so much commotion.
But lets not call it "getting ridiculous by the day" yet. These orders were passed by court and not laws that parliament tried to make to achieve a totalitarian state and as such these orders are open for challenge by anyone. For example, it is likely that Madras High Court judgement was rushed through and there weren't anyone[probably] challenging it and hence it is now being enforced by ISPs.
These are not unrelated issues. The common thing among these issues is the knee jerk reaction by authorities to fix social problems with artificial and infeasible patches to social living conditions of a country.
Do you think piracy can be solved in India by just blocking torrents. Piracy has been existing from long back. Even before all this you could buy pirated audio and video cassettes from foot paths. By restricting sites like pastebin they are actually showing how clueless they are about the root cause of the issues.
You will see a similar pattern in all these bans.
1. Some one commits a crime.
2. Investigation reveals a tool used to commit crime.
3. Courts/Authorities think banning the tool prevents the crime from happening again.
Yes, Roads and foot paths are meant to drive and walk on. If you sleep on the road you shouldn't look too surprised if people drive over you.
The solution to this problem is to provide affordable housing to people so that they can sleep in their homes, instead of putting the speed limitation.
As I said, we don't look at the root cause.
"heavy vehicles like lorries ... get speed regulators ... a over speeding accident" Studies have shown and statistics in India have shown that most accidents are caused by excess speeds.
Apparently you just don't laws. Careful, people like you end up in jail someday. Just because piracy is a difficult problem, doesn't mean that you don't put pirates out of business. Stop buying stuff on the footpath.
I have 2011 and it comes out just fine.
ssh -D 8080 -i your_amazon_key.pem username@ec2-instance
# Followed by changing your browser/system settings to use localhost:8080 as socks v5 proxy
"Some movie is coming out, we are afraid we will lose revenue if people pirate it. I know what to do. Let's get a court order asking ISPs to ban sites which are infringing upon the movie(the good old ISP, takes the safer route and blocks whole sites since it doesn't know or doesn't want to stop just the movie). Hey look, people are still able to get through to the movie. Let's get another court order asking the ISPs to stop service altogether for 6 months."
"Rape cases on a rise and most rapes happen at night. Let's stop people from going out at night. Still not working. Let's stop people from going out altogether."
I can understand the concerns about loss of revenue over piracy, but these dystopian measures aren't worth whatever hypothetical losses you might be suffering.
There are OpenVPN clients available for most platforms, configuration is easy and using it is trivial ("install and forget").
tl;dr: sites are being blocked. wtf?
Access to this site has been blocked as per Court Orders
IANAL, but as far as the court order goes there are no specific sites mentioned to be blocked. This implies, service providers like Airtel have perceived the aforementioned sites to be liable for copyright infringement. It is curious as to how they decided Pastebin and not Youtube could be used for "copyright infringement".
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
On the other hand whenever a movie from Reliance entertainment comes out they want to avoid the cams to spread for the first few weeks so they block these sites. Once the first couple of weeks have passed they undo the blocks.
I guess the ISPs are only sniffing port 80?
Having said that, this is hardly surprising.
The Pirate Bay works on https (I love that they have legit certs)
For those outside India who are wondering, only Airtel (private) seems to have blocked sites. I have a BSNL (state owned) broadband connection and everything still loads fine for me.
However, I strongly support shutting Pirate sites and illegal file downloads. There is a good reason why Bollywood is so much smaller than Hollywood - rampant Piracy in India. Remember you are doing India a great disservice by pirating - India loses jobs and creative people suffer.
Except this isn't shutting down pirate sites, this is making sure that 90% of people can't access them by ordering major ISPs to interfere with communications between their customers and the websites in question (some might call this "censorship" or "protectionism"). I agree that TPB-style piracy is usually a bad thing, but do the ends really justify the means here? The blocking of Vimeo and Dailymotion suggest that this is a very, very slippery slope.
curl -v -H "Host: thepiratebay.se" http://www.google.com/It's not surprising, because a year or so ago Airtel was using deep packet inspection to throttle torrents and file sharing sites. They already have the necessary equipment in place, they can use it when and as they please.
This is from our leased line via Airtel, so it seems that corporates are exempt from the ban.
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/i-will-vote-against-the-c...
..and we can announce that we're a vote bank that can hurt them.
I think the rest of the world should consider this good news and encourage them to find more creative ways to 'protect' against imaginary criminal activity.
Access to this site has been blocked as per Court Orders
How foolish is the Indian Government !! Seriously !!!