India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin | Hacker News Reader

India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin

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Arvind Gupta, the head of IT Cell, BJP Tweeted: "The websites that have been blocked were based on an advisory by Anti Terrorism Squad, and were carrying Anti India content from ISIS. The sites that have removed objectionable content and/or cooperated with the on going investigations, are being unblocked."

This is bad. archive.org by default should have all sorts of offensive things on it. Pastebin and github should not be responsible for people hosting code they don't like. May as well block google too, I'm pretty sure you can find pro-ISIS sites on there as well.

I run https://snipt.net, one of the sites listed as being blocked, and I've never received any communication from anyone with the Indian government or ISPs. So they're not proactively doing anything to unblock these sites, as far as I can tell.

Why would they have any incentive to contact you? From their perspective the problem is solved -- the material offending statist is out of sight, out of mind. You're the one who wants a different situation to exist. Governments aren't in the customer service business.

I actually don't care at all, but sucks for developers in India who 1) want to use Snipt or 2) have already paid for it.

Edit: on item 2, I'll happily refund any Indian developers who've already paid for Snipt and want their money back, but my point is valid.

And of course, apathy is the other big problem with US attitudes about government.

You do realize that it's the Indian government at issue here, right?

I would argue that the indian government is doing this at the pressure from the united states government.

Zero evidence and sheer implausibility makes for a great conspiracy theory.

So why is India the only country to have taken this step?

"Governments aren't in the customer service business" - Errr actually that's exactly the business democratic governments are in. Not saying they don't fail regularly but when you are elected by the people for the people you'd better be prepared to provide customer service.

Except most people won't know about this or care. You get the government you deserve, which is to say, a shitty one.

Don't know why you're being downvoted. This is absolutely correct. Even more so for India than, say, the US (source: I'm Indian). Nobody but a tiny tiny fraction of the population cares that github is getting blocked. The opposition wouldn't even bother making it a big issue since the numbers are so insignificant. And even if they did, they don't really have a moral leg to stand on because all politicians and government officials, almost without exception (ok.. maybe with some rare exceptions) are eager to use censorship when it suites their purposes (usually under the pretext of national security... but even that figleaf is not always necessary).

Oh come on. Whenever the public actually demands something, the government's response is always batons, tear-gas and rubber bullets (and some torture thrown in for good measure, of course).

You call that customer service? Imagine McDonald's tasing you for complaining about not getting what you ordered.

-That's exactly how governments behave. As a recent example, China and HK declare that from now on, Hong Kong's electoral candidates will be chosen by the tyrants in Beijing. HK's citizens protest. HK's police forces brutalize the citizens.

Governments should be in the customer service business. Typically, they provide many services that, if they were provided by private companies, which they very well could be, would be customer service oriented. The concept that a government employees such as police are not working for the people is exactly what's wrong with the attitudes surrounding police in the United States. They are providing a service that we pay for as taxpayers, and theoretically, we are their employers, or customers.

You're not a customer because you're being forced to pay. You have no choice in the matter. If they provide really really bad service you still have to pay.

Sure, that's the situation in a monopoly. It's not that we're not in a customer role, just that we're poorly served customers of a monopoly where management doesn't seem to understand for whom they're working. If the whole system wasn't sondysfunctional, poor service would be addressed by our elected representatives, who are supposed to be properly planning government services for us.

Government services are by definition a monopoly because there is only one government in your country. It's a bit worse, though. If there's a monopoly on electricity I can just stop paying and get a generator. If there is a monopoly on air flights I could drive or take a boat. However, if I stop paying the government I go to prison.

"The websites were blocked for hosting content that is pro terrorist group ISIS and not cooperating with government investigations, officials said."

For some strange reason I'm inclined to believe you rather than India's government officials.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have no problem whatsoever with removing offending content from Snipt. I regularly remove and ban users who post illegal or otherwise inappropriate content on the site.

If they contact me, I'll happily remove anything even remotely "pro terrorist group ISIS", but as mentioned, I've received no such requests (and I don't proactively review private snippets for offensive content unless it's reported to me).

That may not be in your best interest, lefally. Pro-active moderation makes it very hard to argue safe harbor status.

How so?

With regards to DMCA, 512(m) seems applicable.

Applicable how?

"(m) Protection of Privacy.— Nothing in this section shall be construed to condition the applicability of subsections (a) through (d) on—

(1) a service provider monitoring its service or affirmatively seeking facts indicating infringing activity, except to the extent consistent with a standard technical measure complying with the provisions of subsection (i); or

(2) a service provider gaining access to, removing, or disabling access to material in cases in which such conduct is prohibited by law."

Dude, you desperately need a designated agent. You just aren't under safe harbor at the moment.

Not true. If you're alerted to offending material and you remove it, you haven't broken safe harbor status what-so-ever. Otherwise YouTube, DropBox, Instagram and countless other sites would be dead.

The only way you break safe harbor is if you know of offending material, eg by a filter or having been alerted to it, and leave that material in place. If you run content filters (such as at the point of upload), then you have to be more careful.

The difference being between after-the-fact moderation and pre-screening. If you pre-screen you take on a greater burden of risk, in terms of copyright holders being able to argue you knew about something and didn't remove it, or should have known.

Being alerted to offending material is not proactive screening.

It's not pro-active, it is reactive. He explicitly states he's not doing pro-active removals.

His contact info for copyright requests is not prominent on his website, at least not that I can see.

It absolutely does not.

The safe harbors provided by S512 and S230 are absolute and are not impeded by proactive (or reactive) administration. This is part of their reason for their existence.

Do you have a terms of service and/or privacy policy? I can't locate it.

We don't have one, no. Going to get one up tonight.

Speaking of safe harbour, have you registered yourself with the copyright office with a designated contact person to receive DMCA takedown requests? You don't seem to have a prominent link to that info on your mobile page.

I suspect that THAT will cause you issues.

I don't think the terrorists will care /jk

I'm sure everything is happening very fast right now, but I hope you arrive at a policy more carefully drawn than this.

All terrorists suck, and they haven't any right to use services like yours to coordinate hurting other people. Nor does anyone have the right to incite violence. But people do have a right to political opinions, and some such might be interpreted as "remotely pro terrorist", without actually being coordination or incitement.

Finding the right lines for these determinations is hard, and I don't envy anyone the task of drawing them. And again, things may be moving fast now, and I understand that if there are real concerns about safety that a broad brush might be the first starting point for you. Even so, I hope that whatever policy you adopt iterates over the fullness of time to something that respects people's rights to express their opinions.

I appreciate your comments. Snipt is a very low-traffic site so I doubt my decisions along these lines will ever have much impact on very many people in general, but I am filing for DMCA agent status and will adopt an official Terms of Use and all that jazz.

As a tiny (open-source) side project, this stuff is no fun, but I realize it's now a requirement if I want to continue leaving the site up.

> All terrorists suck

Being the descendant in a family that was host of several terrorists, I have to disagree with you. See once the war was over and nazi germany got booted out, all those terrorists in my family instantly turned into resistance heroes.

Turns out those terrorists in my family were just ordinary people who got into this for reason as simple as having a bike allowing them to move around and relay messages, sort of an internet over bike and some of them got caught and executed for that.

Terrorist can be a loaded word in a political context. We have terms like "freedom fighter", " revolutionary", and "rebel", but these don't quite have neural connotations either.

"Insurgent" is used by the media quite frequently, but pundits have twisted this word into little more than an alias for "terrorist". My brain subconsciously makes this mapping despite my knowledge of a contrary meaning; I think maybe language is too pliable in politics.

Maybe we need yet new language to escape the difficulty of communicating without biases inherent in the vocabulary (our minds already do enough to short-circuit logic already without the English language making the matter worse). "Terrorism" and "unrest" are at such a forefront in the global consciousness that the whole subject is deserving of the few extra mental bytes that would be needed to disambiguate the mess.

If I were in charge of such a task, I would try to borrow words associated with certain well-known historical anecdotes in a hope that the pundits wouldn't simply redefine the words from under us. Hopefully such vocabulary would have enough of a semantic anchor in our generation to dispel such attempts, conscious or not.

To press on the issue further, it seems like it would be wise to engineer our language in a way that leads to better thinking. I suppose that would be too artificial to ever be accepted though.

I doubt anyone resisting Nazi invasion killed any innocent people. What would be the point? The only innocents in their country would be their own countrymen, little point in killing them. Collaborators? Not innocent.

Terrorists _target_ innocent people to gain advantage through intimidation. That's wrong, everywhere and always.

>Collaborators? Not innocent.

Not muslim/chiite/sunnite ? Not innocent.

The parent used the word "Terrorist", but in that context, I think of it as a "Resistance Fighter". It would have been the people in charge, in this case the Nazis, who would have used the label "Terrorist".

Actually that tweet was not from government official. It was from ruling political party IT cell here. Government officials from DOT and IT ministry are still silent on this issue.

what is a "political party IT cell" is this some committee of MP's? or some Indian political slang?

The ruling party, BJP, has a group of IT professionals managing their online presence. This, they call their "IT cell".

The terms are a bit messed up, but the closest thing these are to a US organization is a presidential campaign policy working group. [1] These are the guys who basically act as advisors to the government's top politicians on issues that relate to technology.

Edit: They don't only manage the online presence of the political party. They are more detailed, coming up with policies and papers (presumably - none of these ever show up in public, oddly) [2]

[1] As an example, here's Obama's - http://change.gov/learn/policy_working_groups

[2] The head of the IT cell's LI profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/argupta26

Ah like SPAD's (Special Advisors) are they considered temporary civil servants it seems odd that an unelected "advisor" is making policy and being quoted in the media though.

cell == division

Nice, here is my chance to get in touch with you again. A few weeks ago I tweeted out something along the lines of you hosting a lot of credit card dumps on your service, have you done anything about this?

I don't care to check once again, but your site did have a lot of users offering stolen credit cards for sale. Are you aware of this?

As the owner of https://cryptbin.com, also on the list, I've never received any such communication either.

Can you send out a tweet from the Cryptbin or your personal Twitter account stating that you haven't received any communication? Retweets should help raise awareness on this.

Thanks!

Done!

https://twitter.com/cryptbin/status/550455122091077632

As far as I can tell, the ban has not yet been enforced. I can access both https://cryptbin.com/ and https://snipt.net/, though my ISP is limited only to Bangalore area.

Edit: Well, it looks like pastebin & dailymotion are banned, but cryptbin and snipt aren't

cryptbin and snipt are blocked here (Vodafone network). I presume all the major ISPs have implemented the bans.

I think you should not have commented if you knew that your ISP doesn't care to enforce government ordered bans (I know some small ISPs can't afford the hardware to implement URL blocking.).

All 4 seemed to be blocked from my office in Kerala. Github is up so they probably have resolved the issue. A week back Github became mysteriously unavailable (with github status showing no downtime). I guess now we know what happened.

I can access both https://cryptbin.com/ and https://snipt.net/ from MTNL Mumbai.

I can access cryptbin from mumbai so I dont think the ban has been enforced.

Sorry for your troubles.

If you don't mind me asking, I'm interested in how much traffic has dropped since the blocking?

Are you seeing people come in around the block, possibly?

Don't expect the people from India to contact you. They are just too dumb to do this.

People who makes such decision have no knowledge of internet and what are good and bad sites.

PS - I am an Indian

agree.

I'm the developer of phorkie, and I also have not been contacted by anyone official about the block.

This is what happens when you let people take any action if they scream 'terrorist'.

As crazy as it sounds some HN users defend ISIS.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8808630

Saying that ISIS isn't a terrorist organization doesn't mean that user is defending the organization. Terrorist has become a catch-all term that is used way too broadly (seems to cover any armed force motivated by Islam for many people). ISIS can be an awful organization without consisting of terrorists.

They are terrorizing local populations for a political goal. They are not just fighting battles they are slaughtering civilians into compliance. How is that not terrorism?

Edit: He also claimed that it would be better if ISIS was in charge of the area. That is quite ridiculous.

Would you define US drone strikes as attempts at terrorizing the target populations?

Drone strikes explicitly try not to hit non-combatants. ISIS slaughter wantonly. Some people have a world view that needs to see the US and ISIS as equivalently evil.

> Drone strikes explicitly try not to hit non-combatants.

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militants_media_propaganda/

"Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."

ISIS seems to have a similarly broad definition. No, they're not morally equivalent, but we have serious issues with how we prosecute the War on Terror.

Wow, that's exactly what Judith Butler is talking about when she talks about which lives are grievable and which are not[1].

[1] https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_16/review...

> Drone strikes explicitly try not to hit non-combatants.

How do you know? What downsides are there to targeting non-combatants? And how do you define non-combatants. Person in the field with a stick in their hand, is that a combatant? A wedding, is it a combatant gathering.

If anything it actaully helps to target civilians because it promotes creating and perpetuating more resentment, which in turn provides more opportunities to do drone strikes, make more drones, repair more drones, get promotions based on drone operations, etc.

> Drone strikes explicitly try not to hit non-combatants.

IIRC Laura Poitros's talk at the CCC a few days alluded to the fact that targets on drone "kill lists" have values assigned to them -- denoting specifically the acceptable threshold of non-combatant collateral damage.

By that definition, ANY fighting would be terrorism. Was the Vietnam war terrorism? We definitely terrified some members of the local population. Were the actions by Japan or Germany in WWII terrorism?

By some definitions of terrorism, all of the above would count as terrorism. At that point, the term seems to be pretty useless.

Germany, Japan, the UK and the US (among others) all did things in WWII that count as terrorism, and no, the term isn't useless. The textbook definition, "the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims" is exactly what was happening in the war, although I would add the caveat that it's violence and intimidation against civilians. Using violence and intimidation against enemy troops is just regular warfare.

So beheading Lee Rigby on the streets of the UK was regular warfare?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lee_Rigby

I think the attackers used that exact defense during legal proceedings.

I agree with them tbh. but that means they should have been shot on the spot instead of arrested.

I don't mean I agree with their cause but I am surprised attacks on service men & women don't happen more on their home soil which, from one perspective, is behind enemy lines.

When most people say "terrorism", they are referring to a very specific thing, not "warfare and violence in general". You've made the word useless, just so that you can use it's connotations where they don't belong. Connotations which wouldn't exist if it was really defined that way.

I don't know where you got that textbook definition, but it sounds useless to me. What violence and intimidation is not done in the pursuit of political aims, aside from low-level street crime? Even adding the qualifier against civilians doesn't seem to help much, as civilians not being deliberately targeted is very much the exception in warfare historically.

My definition is "Violence and intimidation, conducted by an organization not directly under the control of a national government, targeted deliberately at civilians, for a political purpose". Much of what is popularly referred to as terrorism is closer to guerrilla warfare.

I don't entirely agree with the linked post above, but I would also not call ISIS a terrorist organization. They may be major-league assholes who need to be dealt with somehow, but they're more of a statelet attempting to practice regular warfare, including controlling a specific territory, establishing their own political system, etc.

> Violence and intimidation, conducted by an organization not directly under the control of a national government, targeted deliberately at civilians, for a political purpose

I kinda like this as this separates attacks by these militants on military bases as "guerrilla warfare".

But what do you call when the attack is "targeted" at an armed force but with complete disregard to high number of civilian casualties? Examples: 1) Bombing a marketplace or mosque or any public place just because their might be SOME people or the opposing force there (apparently a lot of suicide bombings use this justification) 2) Missile strike on a UN school just because u suspect there are some members of the opposing forces hiding there (israel vs Hammas) 3) Drone strikes on villages to eradicate militants (with considerably high civilian casualties). (we all know who does this)

I think that the name of the tactic is dependant on the intent of the attack, rather than the results. This does admittedly get dicey at times.

If the intent of the attack is direct attrition against an enemy force and supporting infrastructure, then it's guerilla warfare, even if most of the victims are civilians due to poor planning, bad information, etc. This may get particularly tricky in the case of suicide bombings in Israel - since virtually the entire country is part of the reserves, you could make the argument that any attack is an attack against the military infrastructure. I'd say that for it to be legitimate guerilla warfare, there must be at least a vaguely plausible plan for success. In the case of suicide bombings in Israel, they would then have to have a plan of killing the entire population of the country as a way of ending the fight, and their tactics would have to be a plausible way to carry that out. I don't think it fits that definition, so that would make it terrorism.

2 and 3 are ordinary warfare IMO, because they are both done by states and have the intent of attacking enemy forces. They may or may not be done with flimsy information, and the state in question and the militant group they are fighting against may both be in violation of assorted laws of war under various legal systems, but it's still conventional warfare.

The only difference between your definition and that of the parent is that you explicitly deny the existence of state terrorism, and I don't think that is an improvement.

I think we would all be better off separating terrorism (a tactic) from identity (organization/state). Then we could categorize militant groups as whatever you want: state, statelet, militia, guerrilla force, freedom fighters, caliphate, NGO or whatever and separately discuss their tactics with respect to whether they commit acts of terrorism.

By my definition, violence carried out by the state is not terrorism because it's a different tactic.

The message sent by terrorist actions is that your state is illegitimate because it cannot protect you from our tiny little group. It makes no sense for the state to send this message to its own citizens - it's goal is the opposite, by definition. If a state is directly trying to send the message to citizens of a foreign state that their state can't protect them from you, that's ordinary warfare.

I've never heard anyone describe Hitler as a terrorist. Not the Soviets either. Even the US during the cold war terrorized their own population (only the communist part of it, but I'm sure IS is fine with the local population as long as it adheres to the IS ideology)

I think in order to be a terrorist, terror has to be your main political tool.

History, my brother, check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives

If "terrorism" is to retain some specificity, I don't think you can include very old-fashioned war crimes in it. Slaughtering civilians during an attack or pillaging cities after a victory are millennia old types of atrocities, and I'm not sure they need to be recategorized under a neologism.

Aren't you making a mistake in assuming that those who fall under this neologism are different? Isis for example wants to be a nation, not just terrorize people. Haven't there been religious crusades of terror for that purpose in the past?

Terrorism is the use of mass terror against a civilian population you don't control to reach a political goal. Terrorizing a population is simply oppression and governments have been doing this for as long as there has been governments (Nazis, Soviets, Chinese Communists, etc. are all modern examples of this.)

Like the threat of a nuclear bomb? Not just NK but Fat Man too.

By that definition Russia is a giant terrorist organization, seeing as they're pointing nuclear missiles at a lot of cities in North America and Europe.

Well I won't rule on the general statement about Russia but their nuclear arsenal isn't being used to change any of our stated policies. They're not saying "stop doing X or we will use nuclear weapons". What most or all current nuclear armed nations have done is basically used their nukes to maintain the status quo -- a Nash equilibrium of non-usage.

Russia invaded Crimea some months ago. Only a nuclear power could have done that without retaliation.

Yes. That's my point. Most of us live under terrorist regimes. Black people are terrorized by the police. The middle east is terrorized by the US. We're terrorized by Russia.

To isolate a few and to give them the label of "terrorist" for being a bit more terrifying is a form of brainwashing.

Irrelevant to the question at hand. ISIS may or may not be a terrorist organization depending on how you define it, but arguing the "may not" side is not "defend[ing] ISIS."

Let me chime in here as I am the original commenter.

I did not say that it would be better if ISIS was in charge of the area.

I did say that a three state solution would be an improvement to the way that state boundaries are drawn in the Middle East - they were drawn the way they are now specifically to keep the area unstable by the British as a result of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. This is a sentiment also expressed by many nations in the UN and by scholars who study stability in the Middle East.

Regarding their 'slaughter of civilians into compliance' I would point out that as this is war, in fact the most violent geographic location today, that the cost of innocent civilians is a historical certainty (completely 'typical' even in its horrendousness) and that there is no side that is innocent of such things including the United States and our contractors, allies and the militant extremist (anti-ISIS) factions that we fund, support and arm there - and that also our lauded drone program institutionalizes compliance with slaughter of innocents. Again this is not to say "Go ISIS!" or "Boo America" - it's to say "Boo war!".

If you'd like to ask for more details, supporting media coverage, or clarification about any of my comments including this one please feel free to ask(/challenge).

He has a point, you know. His claims are:

1) IS is not a terrorist organization, it is an army.

2) IS is better, or at least not worse, than existing middle east governments.

1 seems pretty obvious to me. Sure, they are terrorizing the local population, but lots of governments do that without being labeled terrorists. 2 is more difficult to swallow. Many ME governments are pure garbage, but IS looks a lot worse.

Exactly. His point is well stated too, and ironically the grandparent in this thread fell victim to the mode of thought the author of the linked comment cautions against.

Armies do not melt into the civilian population at the first sign of trouble.

Presumably because tanks are hard to hide, not because they don't want to. Guerrilla warfare warfare is not a middle eastern thing; a strategic manual we were encouraged to read in the Norwegian army told us we should source food and supplies from the local population and fill sugar on the gas tanks of the enemy. Assuming you've lost tanks and airspace first, of course.

From what I've heard IS has all kinds of heavy weaponry and hold territory. Seems like hiding would be hard.

They most certainly do.

> Sure, they are terrorizing the local population, but lots of governments do that without being labeled terrorists.

...including the US government, let's not forget.

Drone strikes aren't "local" to the US, but they are conducted against US citizens in countries that the US is not at war with[0]. Moreover, if any middle eastern country did to the US what the US does in Pakistan, you'd bet the US would call it "terrorism"!

The word "terrorism" is inherently subjective; there is no way to define it consistently in a way that doesn't hinge either on race or on political affiliation[1].

I won't defend ISIS, but calling them "terrorists" doesn't mean anything. The word "terrorist" has basically become the government equivalent of playground name-calling. It's a way of saying "we don't agree with the way that that group is using violence, so we're going to use a different word to de-legitimize it"[2]

To borrow an example from another thread, look at the way the label "communist" was used during the McCarthy era. Oftentimes it was just used as a general term for "subversive actor", and in fact the targets were actually being accused of completely different ideologies altogether, many of them completely incompatible with Communism! But the literal meaning of the word itself doesn't matter; what it really represented was a rhetorical way to other a group of people considered dangerous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

[1] Notice that many media outlets were hesitant to label the Boston bombings "terrorism" until after the culprits had been identified (with some even going so far as to say things like, "It's unknown if this was an act of terrorism or not"!)

[2] Whether or not they are correct to delegitimize it is a separate issue; the point is simply that the word "terrorist" is itself a political statement.

The Oklahoma City bombing was considered terrorism.

A terrorist, I seem to remember, is someone whose main political tool is the spread of terror. A bombing is not terrorism unless used in the pursuit of political gain.

> A terrorist, I seem to remember, is someone whose main political tool is the spread of terror.

The definition has shifted, especially after 9/11, but for the sake of discussion let's use the one you've proposed.

> A bombing is not terrorism unless used in the pursuit of political gain.

The point is that only certain political goals (the ones that the US wants to de-legitimize) can qualify an act of violence as terrorism. If Pakistan were to conduct drone strikes against the US, you'd bet they would be considered "a terrorist state" by the US, even if they never hit a single civilian (which is more than the US can say for its drone strike program[0]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_strikes_in_Pakistan#Civi...

That's not true at all. Hypothetically if the government of Pakistan were to conduct drone strikes against the US and hit only military targets then the US government would certainly not label that as terrorism. Countries are labeled as state sponsors of terrorism when they — or non-state organizations that they support — use violence for political reasons against international civilian targets.

http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/crt/2010/170260.htm

Reports from experts in the region indicate that, as crazy as it sounds, (2) is correct.

ISIS has built up an excellent reputation for stamping out corruption and running efficient social services and police forces within poor communities. Their horrifying acts of murder and collective punishment are often unrelated to the simple business of day-to-day-life.

Think about living in a poor town with ongoing struggles with organized crime and local tribal warlords. Assume you're already Muslim like everyone else you know. A new military comes in, swiftly takes power, and cleans out the criminals, ousts the corrupt autocracy, efficiently runs services and healthcare, vaccinates your kids... suddenly life gets better for everyone you know and care about.

Sure, if you look under the carpet you find all the dead bodies, but if you plug your ears and look at the modest improvement in your crappy life? ISIS looks pretty good.

Hitler probably seemed better at first than the group he replaced. I worry that with ISIS we have the same situation.

My grandmother used to say the streets were safer under the ww2 occupation.

... and cleans out the criminals, ousts the corrupt autocracy, efficiently runs services and healthcare, vaccinates your kids...

Yeah, it might be good for a while. Not sure.

In the long run, I don't think they're going to be any more effective than what they replaced.

When the body politic (i.e. nearly everyone) supports the rule of law with a transparent governing process (which includes publishing budgets, new laws, etc. and may also include relatively free and fair elections), that will reduce corruption in the long term.

Otherwise, I think it is inevitable that those currently in power will A) try hard to stay in power, and B) use the perks of office to benefit themselves.

Not that I expect many people in ISIS territory to be having these kinds of discussions... they're all concerned about shorter term issues (like not getting killed).

Yeah, and some HN users are hired shills for Russia and China.

Strange that they're blocking software rather than websites. E.g. the github block says "gist-it" next to it, which implies they maybe wanted to block https://github.com/robertkrimen/gist-it ? There's also http://atnsoft.com/atnsoft.com/textpaster/ blocked and http://sourceforge.net/projects/phorkie/ which is described as "Self-hosted pastebin software written in PHP. Pastes are editable, may have multiple files and are stored in git repositories." Which is really strange because it says there were only 4 downloads of this software in the last week -- doesn't that make it easier to track?

likely gist.github.com

That's on the list separately (#23).

Either they are deliberately going after the software, or they have failed to understand the difference between hosting a websites source repo and actually hosting that website.

I m not sure if github is blocked, i m pulling repos right now from Bangalore.

Can you see gists?

https://gist.github.com/

I can from hyderabad, India

Same here, works from Hyd, India. No VPN whatsoever used.

Even I can. GitHub and Gists are all accessible from where I am.

Here in Kerala github.com is up and running but gists.github.com returns "Connection interrupted"

Github works in reliance broadband from kerala

i tried to push some code and was getting DNS resolution errors so i started using google DNS, now everything works.

Same here. Tried accessing github and sourceforge didn't work, switched to google DNS, works like a charm now. Not sure how they are blocking the sites.

Remember, "offensive" is transitive: to whom is something offensive?

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/22/54679... : India had its own idea of what is unacceptable. ISTR there may be no map which is legal in both India and Pakistan.

Well they only need to remove the offensive stuff from the Indian version of those websites. This is something I know google can not sure about pastebin and github.

I run Cryptbin.com, one of the sites on the banned list. As a result of the ban we have seen our traffic surge, with roughly a 1000% increase in traffic from India today alone.

Interesting to note is that we also own the domain cryptb.in (a TLD from India) and that has not been banned. However, it is merely a redirect so it does not provide an alternative entrance to the site. We use it only for short URL's on public pastes.

Perhaps you can use this thread to recruit an India-centric team and create a separate site at cryptb.in (not saying you have to but to quote Pirates: "if you were looking for the perfect moment... that was it")

Wouldn't even need a separate site - just update the redirect to point at the same load balancer as the main site instead, and then add a virtual host entry.

I love Indian government statements, they are always so transparently incompetent, inane and corrupt, as are the accompanying actions, like blocking a random PHP project on sourceforge.

I guess we'll just never know why they do these stupid things. By the time some bureaucrat has to give a statement all they can get out is terror, ISIS and anti India.

Well, it's not exactly random. If you follow the link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phorkie/

You can see it's the source code for the same sort of paste text online site they are banning all over the place in the other bans. It seems kind of nuts to ban all source code hosting and clipboard type hosting sites, but clearly they are trying. Wonder what's next, blogs that allow posting comments or signing guestbooks?

That pro-ISIS guy that was recently id'd from Bengaluru was posting on Twitter. Is Twitter banned? Major oversight or perhaps it is random.

This impacts the average person more than any terrorist - such a delusional policy.

Post the offending content as a comment somewhere on the Indian government's own web site. They'll block themselves. Problem solved.

Being an Indian, I wish that this was true.

Would it be better if India was broken up into much smaller states, possibly more or less along the current internal borders? Is India really seen as a country by the Indians or is it seen more like a bunch of unwanted outside overlords ruling over your local part of India, whichever that might be?

I'm asking partly because I live in the EU where we are explicitly trying to create a big, state-like construction for most of our continent. In most cases I feel mostly like a "Dane" or "Scandinavian" or "Northern European" but in some cases I am actually starting to feel like an EU citizen, like we are all in it together, for example regarding Russia's behaviour in the Ukraine and elsewhere.

It is probably not correct to call the EU a country or a state yet but we are getting closer. On the other hand, if the Republic of India is actually a country then the European Union is too, isn't it?

India is number of ethnic nations lumped together. But there is hardly any autonomy left.

We have a national identity that is very strong. And devolving into different nation states won't solve anything - it will lead to wars and violence and a broken economy. We would also be easy pickings for China and Islamic states like Pakistan. All our eastern states would be annexed by China in a couple of years. Kashmir and Punjab would be annexed by Pakistan. It is the Indian military and the fact that we have nuclear weapons that gives them pause.

What country reasons its existence on paranoia and fear factor. True India shall happen when federal states get functional and financial autonomy and decisions are not shoved down their throats through an imperial mechanism.

Now I really wish there was a place you could comment on the Indian government's most incompetent decisions.

Obviously, they would have to proceed to ban PHP (since it allows to write such software), Apache (allows to host sites), Linux (the same), any OS supporting TCP/IP and finally conclude by going the North Korea way and disconnect themselves from the internet. That or people of India wake up and give those cretins long overdue kick in the ass and get some bureaucrats that are not completely insane.

Calling everything "terrorism" reminds me of McCarthy and "communism" in the 50s.

I assume we'll grow out of it soon enough.

I doubt we'll ever grow out of it. They'll just find a new word.

They look so, but they are competent in maintaining the status quo, while doing whatever they fancy.

-- From Russia with love, huh. We have exactly the same kind of stuff here.

Ah that explains it! Haven't been able to push to Github ever since stepping off the plane in Mumbai. Strange thing is that the website works off-and-on. Pushing results in connection refused though. There's also been ZERO information/news provided by the ISP (MTNL) in this regard.

Absolute shame that a blanket ban like this is applied. It has a profound effect on everyday activities unrelated to the original reason for banning. Even if there is content of a questionable nature, it's absolutely crazy to not expose this. Let people make up their own minds about what is right or wrong. A simple ban on these websites isn't going to stop those who mean harm from getting to their goal.

All I can see that this results in is collateral damage, e.g., me not being able to push the latest commits for a research tool I'm building. I might be small fish, but that's the exact point; a ban like this necessary works like a cluster bomb.

I also started having problems with github which reminded me to update my DNS settings setting to Google's, now everything works.

Didn't even know till a few hours ago that thses sites were being blocked since they display a blank page.

It's crazy. They're substantially impacting their competitiveness in an important industry, just so they can make a futile attempt to silence something that hardly matters. You're small fish, but add up the impact on millions of similar small fish in India and it's a big problem.

I'm sure you've already thought of this, but you can use a VPS as a proxy to circumvent the ban – I've had a great experience with DigitalOcean.

Furthermore at the shell you can set environment variables such as "http_proxy" which many tools will observe. Search "http_proxy" with your favorite search engine for more info. It's pretty useful.

> A Government source said the decision to block the 32 websites were taken after thorough “filtration process based on a strict regimen”, and there is a proper committee in the Department of Information Technology in place to whet complaints. [1]

This is unbelievably ridiculous, if not downright stupid. Even as our Prime Minister speaks of bringing about a new digital revolution, decisions such as these show how badly equipped the lawmakers are in dealing with issues relating to technology.

Blanket bans like these are not only a form of internet censorship which flies in the face of the establishing principles of the largest democracy in the world, the lack of any details or explanation before issuing an outright ban on several important software hosting websites and content providers just evokes an image of a myopic government with incredibly poor understanding of technology.

[1] http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/now-modi-govt-blocks-3...

>>Blanket bans like these are not only a form of internet censorship which flies in the face of the establishing principles of the largest democracy in the world, the lack of any details or explanation before issuing an outright ban on several important software hosting websites and content providers just evokes an image of a myopic government with incredibly poor understanding of technology.

Spot on!

Wow, I'm the autor of 0bin.net (it's an encrypted pastebin written in python). Kinda feel weird to see your (really) small pastebin get caught in that. It's insane.

Well, it's open source and easy to install, anybody can duplicate it if needed so I guess it's ok.

Maybe we should add some way to replicate one instance content to other trusted instances to avoid this problem.

It is open source on another website that is ... blocked. Funny. For the curious: https://github.com/sametmax/0bin

Replication would be cool feature.

Yeah. And our blog is usually blocked too, actually even in France. Some entreprise firewalls block our blog, some antivirus firewall too cause we mix NSFW content with programming in our articles. Well, I guess when the big guys start blocking you, you are probably doing something right :)

I'm not a India software industry expert, so excuse me if this sounds like a dumb question.

Isn't it a terrible economic idea for India to block access to Github? I thought India was really big into software engineering?

Ofcourse it's a terrible idea. There will be an uproar. And then someone from the govt. would actually take the time to carefully look into the decision and then the govt will have to take an embarrassing U-turn.

I am an Indian citizen so I can offer some perspective. Atleast 50% of those in software engineering don't vote. Going to voting station, standing in queue and voting is a painful process and most of us don't take the trouble. Hence, their concerns are not really heard in the govt. These people will not go to concerned authorities and explain them how it will affect the economy. They will just whine for a few days and then find a workaround. Most of those affected by these blockades are mom and pop shops aka startups. Govt doesn't listen to people in startups. It only listens to big guys like Infosys and TCS. These big guys don't use github to host their code.

In India, the moment you say security, all logic and reason stop. And police is always looking for quick fixes. That is why google street view is still not available in India.

Also, one more point.. if you watch any local news item in US, the dominant theme in it is "How much money will it pump into economy". In India, The dominant question is..."How much safety and security will this cause". Unfortunately, There is never a discussion of the benefits vs costs of this security.

"Going to voting station, standing in queue and voting is a painful process and most of us don't take the trouble."

Not exactly cupcakes and candy in America either. But I suspect the voting process is easier here. But our numbers are also very low. In 2014 I think 36% of the voting population voted? Which means, the current government doesn't represent the American people.

But whose fault is that? Well ours (Americans), of course. Most don't take the time (or care too) too vote. But man, when it comes time to bitch about issues everyone steps to the front.

This is news to me. I didn't know voting percentage in US was so bad. In India, its actually much better. About 50-60% most of the time but thats because candidates pay $20 per vote!

Yes, it is a terrible idea. But you are assuming that the people running the country and the ones electing them are competent individuals who have the best interests of the country in mind.

If Github is truly blocked, that could be devastating for outsourced work, on both sides of the equation.

That's my initial reaction. At the very least this is destabilizing, until they can refine how courts may/may not order such blockages in such surprising ways.

They'll find a way to bypass that quite easily, however with the amount of outsourcing based in India it will be an inconvenience for some time. Probably not as much as it would've been if it wasn't NY.

VPN outside India. Really easy to get around.

Would circumventing the ban be considered a serious offence? Not that it would be easy to determine who is doing so, or that they care enough to try.

Those who use Github knows how to bypass the ban.

I don't think it's helpful to consider this ban a non-issue because it's easy to bypass. It's easy to bypass this time, next time it may be a bit harder, depending on what the government orders ISP's. And there probably will be "next time", depending on the effects of all this.

Also, someone else here asked about legality of bypassing the ban, that is a good question I'd like to see answered, even though I think we all know the answer to that one.

This slippery slope is exactly what happened in China.

- First, they block a few websites: no big deal, I'll just use a VPN.

- Then they block OpenVPN default port: no big deal, I'll just use another port or IPSec.

- Then international connections slow down to a crawl: no big deal, maybe they're not throttling but just having capacity issues, let's wait a bit see if it gets better.

Then one day your realize that what was at first a minor inconvenience is now wasting hours of your life and killing your productivity.

Yes, but we are powerless to change anything. It is not like that we can vote or have any voice in the governing of ourselves.

And even China doesn't block GitHub. It tried once, but backed down soon for unknown reasons.

It's less easy to put workarounds in place for, say, a configuration-managed CI system pulling from github than for your own dev workstation. In theory it's simple, but in practice there's a lot of boilerplate and testing.

I use github, and off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you how to bypass it.

Is it dns based? I guess you could manually set up the correct IP addresses locally for the host names. Other than that, I'd have to read.

VPN pipe most likely. At least, that's what I would do.

My guess is someone will set up a proxy service specifically for this.

So all of a sudden work being outsourced to India needs to go through a VPN located somewhere else in the world. Whoever is doing the work will need to jump through at least a couple of hoops to set that up and keep working through it. Additional costs will be introduced. It's not a show-stopper, but it seems as though it could easily have a material impact.

This just in: Indian Government is taking kickbacks from Bitbucket. /s

The sites are blocked only at the DNS level. If you switch your DNS from your ISP to either OPenDNS or Google DNS, then all these sites should work.

This probably partially explains the inconsistent reports on this thread ("it's blocked here" / "it's not blocked here")

I am using google dns, but still many of the websites such as vimeo are returning a page with contents "HTTP Error 404 - File or Directory not found"

(Not an actual HTTP Protocol 404 reply)

Seems like very bad and inconsistent banning. Gosh...

I live in Southern part of India, I can access archive.org or github or pastebin from here. I don't think its a complete ban. May be some ISP providers blocking these sites. (Checked in some code to github few minutes back :D ) I hope they will revoke this move in upcoming days.

I think nowadays blocking Github is almost dumber than blocking coursera.org. It's an invaluable resource for all CS students.

This one is interesting: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phorkie/

According to the list it has been specifically blocked. It appears to be a pastebin clone written in PHP.

Almost all of them are pastebin-like sites.

http://atnsoft.com/atnsoft.com/textpaster/ seems very unrelated.

My assumption would have been that a government crawler stumbled upon some messages it didn't like and the sites they were on ended up on the list, but the two sites above would unlikely be affected by this.

Archive.org was probably affected because they mirrored some content of any of them.

It is actually related, this software allows you to fill out webforms automatically. Now these bans are mostly around websites that allow you to host text online and this tool helps easily getting your text on tons of websites. So I see why this is related.

In that way it is related, but it is not in the same category as the other sites listed. It is a tool that can be used to spread spam, propaganda, and possibly automate entry of data into inflexible systems.

If governments can justify censoring access to a program like this for those reasons, then I am worried.

I am trying to find out if archive.org is still being blocked or not, as we are hearing conflicting reports from users.

I queried the Indian DNS servers on this list that are marked 'valid' or 'new': http://public-dns.tk/nameserver/in.html

Only one of them (182.59.1.235, operated by MTNL ISP) returned the fake IP being used for blocked sites (59.185.3.14). The other 1843 servers returned the correct IP.

I am trying to figure out if that means archive.org has been removed from the block list, or if the DNS servers listed on that page haven't yet been updated with the blocked sites.

If anyone can help us figure out if archive.org is still blocked, it would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks! -raj at archive.org

Well here's another data point, BSNL in Punjab still not loading archive.org.

Yes, archive.org is still being blocked by BSNL's default DNS server in Maharashtra as of Thu Jan 1 20:40:11 IST 2015.

  $ dig +nocmd +nostats +nocomments @218.248.255.211 archive.org
  ;archive.org.			IN	A
  archive.org.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400

Thanks!

Oh-ho! Security is evidently high on the Indian government's priority list... the Joint Secretary for the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, a Mr Shri P. Kalyanasundaram, has an email address at Yahoo for official correspondence! [1]

I'm wondering how long it will be though before the Wikipedia article gets updated:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India

1. http://pgportal.gov.in/pgo.aspx

The Wikipedia article is already up-to-date.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India#3...

Someone has made a huge mistake and should be fired over this.

Utterly ludicrous.

A lot of these sites, almost all of them, are pastebin-esque, including sourceforge.net/projects/phorkie/ which is a "PHP and Git based pastebin."

I noticed Pastebin getting a fair number of mentions in the news in connection with the Sony attack as a place for hackers to dump sensitive information publicly and easily.

My guess is this blacklist was assembled to mitigate such hacking damage on Indian targets, but it was assembled with some haste; and github and vimeo, I doubt, will remain blocked for too long.

The goal of blocking the ability for someone to post text documents online is so far removed from reality. It makes no sense at all. The only thing it accomplishes is to make India appear even more incompetent.

"Blocking websites" is a degree-of-freedom national governments simply should not have.

They could, but I strongly hope for a few things:

1. The technical side of things would prevent anyone from blocking easily, making it costly to censor.

2. The sites won't bend much, understanding the full consequences of their actions, that with every demand complied there will be another one. It starts with evil terrorists and pedophiles but never ends with those, going after political activists, whistleblowers and just random things someone in power thought they don't like.

3. Eventually, we'll have less fragile societies, that won't have issues with anyone speaking anything. Governments will adapt and instead of censorship develop educational programs that encourage rational thinking, fact verification and other goodness, so any ill propaganda will be pointless.

Come on, stop acting that shitty. I'm a proud Indian, and this is the second time I'm condemning the state of the Internet in India in the same month[Earlier, due to Airtel's proposal to violate net neutrality].

If you believe you're doing so as these websites contain "anti-India" stuff, well, then screw yourself. Code that is used to run apps worldwide, API's, and what not have been cut off access to due to your little problem. On one hand, the guys promote the IT industry but on the other hand, they purposefully demote the industry. Get your goals right, people.

Moreover, I don't think the telecommunications department even knows how to cut off access to a website. I'm from Delhi, and here, both Github and Pastebin are accessible.

Yes, this move is an over reaction. Especially, banning archive.org... India was just hit with a terrorist attack in Bangalore very recently. The techdirt article should mention this part.

http://www.ndtv.com/article/cheat-sheet/bangalore-bomb-blast...

And the response there is just as lame:

"The Home Minister today asked the state government to install CCTVs in all key places in the city."

And they're going to ask restaurants to close at 1am on New Year's... As if that'd accomplish anything.

They might have specific intel on something. Just as possibility...

As an Indian citizen who lived in bangalore. I can tell you there are couple of more plausible reasons why police/politicians don't want late night hotels. 1) They can charge bribes from such clubs/hotels. This is single biggest reason. 2) Politicians can tell to conservatives that they are protecting Indian culture and get votes from them. Conservatives are more likely to vote than these club going crowd.

Specific intelligence might have been a reason but 1am drama happens very year in every South Indian city, so I am less likely to believe it.

And... wouldn't publicly asking all restaurants to close before 1AM reveal the nature of their intel to those they're trying to counteract?

specific intel which would require city-wide CCTV? that's some pretty non-specific specific intel.

Hey I know! IT is the backbone of our economy, so lets block a bunch of sites that programmers like.

--The Indian Gov.

Maybe it's partially incentive to develop domestic equivalents?

Probably not, probably just stupidity, but then again...maybe. ("Never assign to stupidity what can be adequately explained by malice or greed" ... or something like that)

You got the stupidity/malice-greed quote entirely backwards :). You aren't supposed to attribute to malice anything that can be explained by stupidity.

Yes, I know what the original quote says. I'm not stupid:)

I believe when big well funded parties do things that appear simply stupid, sometimes there is more at play than stupidity. Quite often it involves money.

Isn't "backbone" hyperbole?

Looks like India is using a cannon to kill a mosquito. Regardless of what we think about terrorism, disabling access to entire sites companies rely on for their daily operation is simply careless.

As noted by other commented they didn't even try to resolve the situation but rather went the route of blindly blocking access.

This is a huge red flag, in my opinion, that the Internet as we know is has reached a big fork in the road and where we go from here will do are if our future will look like Biff's world in Back to the Future II or not...

The ominous part is that they blocked sites where you can easily share information in bulk.

Is the intention to prohibit such sharing in general? Such efforts are doomed to fail, but that doesn't mean it won't be a hell of a ride.

This is remedied with a simple VPN, correct?

only justification in that article:

" Arvind Gupta, the head of IT Cell, BJP Tweeted: 'The websites that have been blocked were based on an advisory by Anti Terrorism Squad, and were carrying Anti India content from ISIS. The sites that have removed objectionable content and/or cooperated with the on going investigations, are being unblocked.' "

It is, but only if you have access to a machine outside the ban. So outsourced employees and established companies are going to be fine, but if you're a 15 year old just getting into hacking spending $5 a month on a VPN service or a private server out of the country is going to be a problem. I can't imagine becoming the programmer I am today without the huge resource that is Github.

Does Tor work in India?

How will you get Tor binaries if they block Tor project website in the next wave of bans?

Here's what the Tor project recommends: https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#GetTor but sadly it's a cat-and-mouse game

How I wish the Indian top brass gets to read this thread! The new government came with promises of getting rid of bureaucratic hurdles... and now this.

The guy who made this list ofcourse didn't have the guts to put Facebook, Twitter on it because the Prime Minister / PM Office actively uses those tools to reach out to the people.

Isn't this setting a dangerous precedent, I am sure such tendency of issuing blanket bans could be misused. Perhaps the cheapest way to attack/bring down a big website or even quell competition, just post some offensive content on a website and let the government issue blanket bans.

Why stop at the domain level? India should block all *.com traffic until Verisign takes down all objectionable content.

You joke now, but e.g. https://pracops.com/wiki/index.php/Jon_Postel#DNS_Root_Autho...

That cert is expired...

Thanks Narendra Modi.

I assume this is a play on the "Thanks Obama!" meme/joke in the US?

I can't seem to remember if sarcasm was invented in the US sometime around 2008 or not.

Snarky warky!

Yes. Modi is coming into office with the same enthusiasm behind him that Obama had. 6 months in and Modi is already disappointing.

But isn't a win to Modi precisely what is needed to get the Congress Party to behave better?

Based on the schools Mr. Arvind Gupta, the head of IT Cell, BJP is following in Linkedin[1], it seems like he studied in IIT Benaras Hindu University, Varanasi. Assuming he didn't get in using political connections/kickbacks, he is clearly not an idiot. I'm genuinely puzzled by this dumb decision. He is a freaking engineer from a top technical university of India and the guy doesn't know what github is for?!

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/argupta26

Not unusual in India. The IT Laws here are outdated, no ID protection and Privacy Laws have come to effect which are still lying to be approved. The problem is with the people in power who are just arrogant in their will to exercise it without knowing the intricacies or the impact. Certain sections of the IT act (Sec 66 for example) are still being abused. The way to improve it is actually involing institutes like IIT and people from technology as their core field to get laws drafted and processes.

can access github, archive.org, and pastebin through BSNL, Indian State owned telecommunications company. EDIT: Major news paper in India reports it was b/c of contents related to ISIS and the ban was removed later http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/smartbuy/tech-n...

Are you using non-ISP provided DNS?

No, Hindu online states the ban was removed later so that may be the reason i can access it now.

Ah, I see - thanks!

"However, the key nature of many of the sites affected, and the fact that entire sites, rather than just some of their pages, were blocked, is bound to lead to calls for this blunt instrument to be refined before it is used again."

It would be more worrying if ISPs could block individual pages on https sites like GitHub.

I can confirm that many of these websites are still working on my university connection in India.

And I promise, if they don't revert their decision, I will launch a proxy site for all these websites.

Don't block stackoverflow. The economy will crash.

Github... Narendra Modi is a total fucking idiot. There goes billions of $$$s of lost income for indian developers with out of date skills.

Is this just a DNS block or do they control all of the ISPs in India? Sorry I'm ignorant about the state of the Internet in India.

From what I have seen, this is a DNS block. Anyone not using their ISP's DNS or the DNS of an ISP that has not yet implemented the block will not see them blocked.

Wouldn't a DNS block also require controlling all the ISPs?

Depends on if the DNS is state-run or not. Again, I'm not sure what the situation in India is.

All ISP's in India need to be licensed by the government [1]. Non-compliance with this directive puts their license at risk.

[1] http://www.dot.gov.in/data-services/internet-services

If it is a DNS block it wouldn't make much sense to write the full URLs.

The full URLs provide the source of the problem causing the block. It doesn't mean they won't crudely cut the entire domain.

For sites that work only over HTTPS, like Github, they'd need to block the entire domain, right? This is what happened in Russia recently:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/05/to-get-off-russias-blacklis...

Correct! The domain and protocol are unencrypted, but the path is encrypted.

I guess they could MITM the connections. Yes you would get certificate errors, but your choice would be to accept the MITM certificate or not visit github at all.

Most of them are too general for this. I just suspect they were being inconsistent. Look at the trailing `/` in the URLs. Probably they copy-pasted without much thought.

What exactly are the consequences of banning github on a fallacious, minuscule and largely anti-technological terrorist organization?

So, you're requested to change your DNS setting to "8.8.8.8" & "8.8.4.4" - Google's public DNS. I guess most of the ISPs just blocked the domain names and not the IPs those domains resolve to. It worked for me in two networks.

I can access Github, archive.org, pastebin from state owned BSNL with ISP provided DNS (from western part of India). Have confirmed from few other parts too and it seems to be working. Have been checking since last 6 hours and it hasn't been down yet.

Here's the change.org petition: https://www.change.org/p/ministry-of-communication-and-it-go...

FYI, if the ban on Github is hampering your collaboration during day to day development, you can also self host Gitlab https://about.gitlab.com which is working great for us.

Indian bureaucracy at its whimsical best and ridiculous as always - do not expect anything sane from them. Internet freedom in India is nonexistent.

They don't even remotely know what is the effect on business if services like github are blocked!!

Have offshored some dev in India, in the past. We depend on Github. VPNs aside, idiotic IT policy by India nudges us towards South America. Same goes (I think) for China in blocking Google Apps.

As a Chinese, I thought (really) India has freedom of speech and this kind of things should never happen there, I can imagine what you might feel, my India fellows.

Oddly I happen to be in India right now. Can still access every site listed. Not sure if it has not rolled out or perhaps foreign internet has less restrictions.

India blocks github for subversion </rimshot>

I'm on Airtel Broadband, and all the 32 websites are working fine (atlease for now). May be because I'm using Google Public DNS.

It seems airtel hasn't yet enforced the block. I am using Google DNS and yet most of the websites mentioned are blocked

The Indian government is being utterly stupid. This is tantamount to saying: "Terrorists breathe Oxygen? Neat! Ban Oxygen."

Well, all they have done is just DNS blocking. Change your DNS to 8.8.8.8 and you can continue to access these sites.

Can confirm. Github and archive.org are not accessible. (From South India)

Does anyone have an example of ISIS supplied anti-India content?

This is bad!!!! what are they thinking?? github is blocked???

This is bad!! what are they thinking!!! github is blocked??

In USA, anyone can quickly write DMCA request and after a few hours the requested website will be offline. So, don't bother with USA. India is much more better for internet startups.

Weebly (www.weebly.com) is currently blocked too.

Github? seriously?

Seems like a good time for bitbucket.

Everything is blocked from BSNL ISP.

well, is this problem solved (?) because I can access each and every website on the list.

They should also block gov.in too

Why block sites like gihub instead of issuing DMCA takedown notices? doesn't make sense.

DMCA is about copyright, there's no copyright violations here. Furthermore, DMCA is an American law, and does not apply to India. Finally, even if it was American law, it's not a law for the government to use, but rather the citizens.

from kolkata most of the sites are accessible .

BSNL's DNS server replying with "SOA localhost. root.localhost." to all of the blocked domains (except sourceforge.net and atnsoft.com).

  # 218.248.255.211 is the default DNS server for BSNL DSL customers in Maharashtra, India
  $ date
  Thu Jan  1 20:21:02 IST 2015
  $ dig +nocmd +nostats +nocomments @218.248.255.211 -f blocked.txt
  ;justpaste.it.			IN	A
  justpaste.it.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;hastebin.com.			IN	A
  hastebin.com.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;codepad.org.			IN	A
  codepad.org.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;pastie.org.			IN	A
  pastie.org.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;pastee.org.			IN	A
  pastee.org.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;paste2.org.			IN	A
  paste2.org.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;slexy.org.			IN	A
  slexy.org.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;paste4btc.com.			IN	A
  paste4btc.com.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;0bin.net.			IN	A
  0bin.net.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;www.heypasteit.com.		IN	A
  heypasteit.com.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;sourceforge.net.		IN	A
  sourceforge.net.	154	IN	A	216.34.181.60
  sourceforge.net.	85923	IN	NS	ns4.p03.dynect.net.
  sourceforge.net.	85923	IN	NS	ns3.p03.dynect.net.
  sourceforge.net.	85923	IN	NS	ns1.p03.dynect.net.
  sourceforge.net.	85923	IN	NS	ns2.p03.dynect.net.
  ns1.p03.dynect.net.	85918	IN	A	208.78.70.3
  ns2.p03.dynect.net.	172323	IN	A	204.13.250.3
  ns3.p03.dynect.net.	85918	IN	A	208.78.71.3
  ns4.p03.dynect.net.	172323	IN	A	204.13.251.3
  ;atnsoft.com.			IN	A
  atnsoft.com.		14135	IN	A	192.185.225.228
  atnsoft.com.		86135	IN	NS	ns6616.hostgator.com.
  atnsoft.com.		86135	IN	NS	ns6615.hostgator.com.
  ns6615.hostgator.com.	172452	IN	A	192.185.225.220
  ns6616.hostgator.com.	172452	IN	A	192.185.225.221
  ;archive.org.			IN	A
  archive.org.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;www.hpage.com.			IN	A
  hpage.com.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;www.ipage.com.			IN	A
  ipage.com.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;www.webs.com.			IN	A
  webs.com.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;www.weebly.com.			IN	A
  weebly.com.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;www.000webhost.com.		IN	A
  000webhost.com.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;www.freehosting.com.		IN	A
  freehosting.com.	86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;vimeo.com.			IN	A
  vimeo.com.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;www.dailymotion.com.		IN	A
  dailymotion.com.	86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;pastebin.com.			IN	A
  pastebin.com.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;gist.github.com.		IN	A
  gist.github.com.	86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;www.ipaste.eu.			IN	A
  ipaste.eu.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;thesnippetapp.com.		IN	A
  thesnippetapp.com.	86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;snipt.net.			IN	A
  snipt.net.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;tny.cz.				IN	A
  tny.cz.			86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;github.com.			IN	A
  github.com.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;snipplr.com.			IN	A
  snipplr.com.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;termbin.com.			IN	A
  termbin.com.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;www.snippetsource.net.		IN	A
  snippetsource.net.	86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400
  ;cryptbin.com.			IN	A
  cryptbin.com.		86400	IN	SOA	localhost. root.localhost. 1997022700 28800 14400 3600000 86400

holy fucking shit is this actually happening. has it happened before? how long do these last?

By the way, I'm not in India, but still, surely this is not going to last? I mean, why have they not blocked youtube and stackoverflow, do they not have integrity? So like is everyone in india going to use gitlab and ptpb.pw now?

Edit:

May as fucking well block google right? Do they not understand the importance of github.com and all the wealth of software that it contains? I mean yeah, centralization of lots of important stuff is bad for this exact reason, but at this stage, blocking github has got to really backfire here...

India has software developers right, this has to royally fuck a lot of them and their development environments am I wrong?

You have to realize that some countries don't have internet. Like China, China does not have internet. They probably don't even know what Internet is. They think if they can order something from Taobao then this is Internet. Regarding communication (phone, internet, postal mail) China is not even a third world country since third world countries actually have internet.

Now the Indian government tries to compete with China who has the most fucked up communications. Good luck!

http://hide-ip-by-fly.appspot.com/ is handy

A terrorist is a freedom fighter who isn't on your side.

There is a case to be made for the idea that America-hosted, America-doctrine birthed, websites, do not jive with everybody on the planet. The idea that Github is beyond reproach and blocking it makes no sense is superficially tempting, until you realise that the vast, vast majority of projects on it are America-led. Why is it so surprising to block a culture which is permeating the planet, to the detriment of other cultures? And of course many non-Americans will object to this idea, but that is because they tend to me the top of their local game and looking to be hired into (or otherwise benefit from) the America-led capital-driven, individual first at the expense of the community, ideology.

There is a tendency to knee-jerk condemn these blockages, including those in China, or indeed in Europe. It is not obvious to me that some kind of barrier to the Americanisation of the planet, including via its dominant websites, is such a bad thing.

I hear if you close your eyes, the whole world stops existing. Try that.

quite the contrary - it is by opening my eyes that I question the hegemony of the current internet culture. It is not 100% obvious that a global information free-for-all has only upsides. And you will hopefully recognise that this kind of post will be a magnet for downvotes, but so be it. I wish to assess all angles, no matter how unpalatable they may be to the majority thinking.

>>kind of barrier to the Americanisation of the planet, including via its dominant websites, is such a bad thing

India is a democracy, if they want to block it for 'cultural' reasons they should get the people's approval to block it for 'cultural' reasons. Right now they are acting on the wrong mandate. We are most likely looking at a case of gross detachment from the constituents they serve.

That is true, but you must also realise the ability of the world's greatest power to influence thinking across the planet via the dominance of its corporations, institutions, and yes, dominant sites. In this situation, democracy is maleable by capital.

And I am not saying these blockages are good. Only that we should always question who is served by all this openness.

I'd understand the argument if GitHub was an opinion news site of some kind, but the fact is that it's a place where code is shared, code used to create software.

GitHub is a US company but so are many others. To say github is "pushing" to Americanize the world and trump local communities is either foolish or a complete misunderstanding of what github does.

I don't mean to be a jerk but you're really missing the point here and barking up the wrong tree.

yes of course the choice to block Github is unfortunate, but I am making a wider point about the overwhelming dominance of the US in all things online, and that, clumsy as the execution may be, one might want to try to understand the underlying issues behind these actions, even if they appear misguided.

Good ridden to those in India. Bye bye!!!

Maybe we can finally get Java off of GitHub.

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