I work as a researcher at the The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), where we've been actively studying internet censorship in India over the last year.
We've built CensorWatch, an android app which crowdsources measurements of internet censorship. This allows us to study censorship from different vantage points, which would otherwise be impossible to do at our scale.
If you live in India, please consider running it! It's completely anonymous, does not store any personal information, does not require any app permissions, and can be deleted after running (takes roughly 30 minutes). More information here -- https://cis-india.github.io/censorwatch/
I'm one of the authors of the paper in the post, we're trying to extend this work by crowdsourcing censorship measurements from different vantage points in India.
You never know. Could be a mistake where they were trying to block a certain path due to some search result of copyright infringement, but ended up banning the domain itself. One can only guess.
Reddit and Github have previously been temporarily banned in India due to similar "mistakes"
Using the TTL, we figured out that the censor kicks in at the kth hop. This kth box belonged to Airtel.
If a box was censoring after Airtel, we would have received a clean response (ICMP timeout) at hop k as well. Of course, the TTL itself can change during the run, but that wouldn't happen for so many cases :)
We've built CensorWatch, an android app which crowdsources measurements of internet censorship. This allows us to study censorship from different vantage points, which would otherwise be impossible to do at our scale.
If you live in India, please consider running it! It's completely anonymous, does not store any personal information, does not require any app permissions, and can be deleted after running (takes roughly 30 minutes). More information here -- https://cis-india.github.io/censorwatch/