indiablock
Joined 6 years ago
Karma
18
Submissions
4
Member since
Sep 28
Recent submissions
Comment · 6 years ago
About a month ago there was a good thread about India's internet censorship system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24611180
Comment · 6 years ago
I'm not in India, but as far as I know, at least alexa.com and behance.net were blocked for long periods of time. I think NYTimes got unblocked fairly quickly.
Somewhat recent report of Alexa.com being blocked (July 2020): https://twitter.com/anandakrsn/status/1284763939427905536?s=...
Report of Behance being blocked on Aug, 2020: https://twitter.com/prabhjotjolly/status/1295623006358650880...
As the article explains, the blocking is very inconsistent.
The article also links to a github repo with some of the blocked hostnames they recently detected: https://github.com/kush789/How-India-Censors-The-Web-Data/bl...
You can see that the list includes alexa.com and behance. It also includes lots of others like craigslist.co.in, ABC.net.au, bleacherreport.com. From personal experience, I know that these are just a tiny subset of legitimate websites that have been blocked (and perhaps later unblocked) for seemingly no reason and have no clear recourse.
Comment · 6 years ago
I run a tech company that got randomly blocked in India. There's no way it wasn't some kind of mistake. It's been months and there's no way to find out why and there's no documented method to resolve the problem.
While looking into this, it turns out it happens all the time and many websites have been blocked for years. If you're big enough then maybe you can get unblocked. Or you might just be SOL.
Some examples:
https://www.alexa.com/ has been blocked for over 1 year (https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/b084so/why_alexacom_...) (wtf?)
Trinet.com, an HR tech+services company is blocked in India (wtf?)
Adobe-owned behance.net is blocked in India. (why?)
reddit.com or parts of it are frequently blocked/unblocked https://thenextweb.com/apps/2019/03/14/isps-are-reportedly-b...
9gag and collegehumor have been blocked for over 5 years (https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/comedy-websites-colleghumor...). At least there's some reason here.
Three environmentalist websites were blocked (and eventually unblocked): https://scroll.in/latest/967589/centre-run-agency-blocks-web...
The NYTimes was blocked for a while: https://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/new-york-times-access...
In 2014, India blocked Github for a while: https://qz.com/india/319866/a-threat-from-isis-prompts-india...
India is known for filtering websites belonging to NGOs, feminist groups, and others https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-tops-list-of-w...
As far as I can tell, if there's some random bureaucrat that doesn't like you, your website is going to get blocked. Equally likely, the process is so poor that you might get blocked for no reason at all.