How India Censors the Web(iamkush.me)
iamkush.me
How India Censors the Web
http://iamkush.me/how-india-censors-the-web/
55 comments
What’s worse is that legislators themselves don’t know or care much about these freedoms or are easily misled by vested interests in the bureaucracy.
Oh, they definitely know and care about it. Except what they care about is to roll out the censorship and monitoring. They are openly anti-privacy and pro-censorship. This is especially obvious in the UK and the EU.
Oh, they definitely know and care about it. Except what they care about is to roll out the censorship and monitoring. They are openly anti-privacy and pro-censorship. This is especially obvious in the UK and the EU.
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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.
We've compiled these tests into an android app, please consider running it if you live in India and would like to contribute to the research :) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.censorwatc...
It's completely anonymous, doesn't require any permissions, and does not store any user related information.
We've compiled these tests into an android app, please consider running it if you live in India and would like to contribute to the research :) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.censorwatc...
It's completely anonymous, doesn't require any permissions, and does not store any user related information.
In the interest of openness, would it be possible to open-source the app and host it on F-Droid[1]?
[1]https://f-droid.org/
[1]https://f-droid.org/
Do you have any plans of releasing an iOS app anytime soon? I’m going to recommend the Android app to people I know, but it would be good to have something for the iOS users too.
Unfortunately we don't have the expertise or bandwidth to make that :/
Thanks! This is interesting/useful/worrying. I note that there's an emphasis on web censorship, but do you have a feel for how other protocols are affected? I know that if the "plug" is pulled, everything would be affected, but what about file transfers using SFTP or FTP?
The sites/domains that the app checks while running the probe are listed anywhere?
We released a subset of the data along with the paper (~5K hostnames), can be accessed at https://github.com/kush789/How-India-Censors-The-Web-Data
The app uses a more updated list (roughly 10K hostnames)
The app uses a more updated list (roughly 10K hostnames)
I have always suspected that this "whimsical" attitude stems from technical inability on the ISP's end in India. Most ISPs seem to run off the shelf equipment and few people have an adequate understanding of networking beyond the very basics, which leads to such easy-to-circumvent censorship. What terrifies me is that they might just end up learning at some point in the near future.
Every couple of weeks one of my internet connections (here in India) slows down dramatically. I used to call and complain, and my ISP would say they would "reset my account" which always brought things back to normal. For months I tried to persuade them to find and fix the underlying problem. Now I just call and ask if they can reset my account, please.
In Eastern Europe I use 4G home internet when visiting my parents' village house.
Every week like clockwork, the quality will drastically decrease from the usual 100 Mbps, on Saturday to 40 Mbps (minimum for the package) and Sunday to 10 Mbps. This will remain forever on 10 Mbps, even on Monday at 4am.
The only fix was to call the support line on Sunday and ask for a "network reset". Since this is a home internet, it is bound to the cell tower and it is drastically deprioritized elsewhere. The reset deletes and re-adds the device to my tower and sets the tower as the SIM card's home cell.
This was annoying but bearable, I got good at quickly calling and getting it done.
Except starting two weeks ago they refuse to do it, saying they're "not allowed to" anymore. No amount of persuasion helped.
They will report a technical problem and the support people will close it as resolved with a braindead blah response "maybe your signal is bad" or "maybe the tower is busy with traffic". Very sad.
These days I just change the IMEI if the modem and that seems to fix it... For a while.
Every week like clockwork, the quality will drastically decrease from the usual 100 Mbps, on Saturday to 40 Mbps (minimum for the package) and Sunday to 10 Mbps. This will remain forever on 10 Mbps, even on Monday at 4am.
The only fix was to call the support line on Sunday and ask for a "network reset". Since this is a home internet, it is bound to the cell tower and it is drastically deprioritized elsewhere. The reset deletes and re-adds the device to my tower and sets the tower as the SIM card's home cell.
This was annoying but bearable, I got good at quickly calling and getting it done.
Except starting two weeks ago they refuse to do it, saying they're "not allowed to" anymore. No amount of persuasion helped.
They will report a technical problem and the support people will close it as resolved with a braindead blah response "maybe your signal is bad" or "maybe the tower is busy with traffic". Very sad.
These days I just change the IMEI if the modem and that seems to fix it... For a while.
Very amusing except for your connection troubles.
I also had intermittent disconnection issues with the same ISP that they fobbed off with "maybe your WiFI is bad/has interference" or "you may be running other processes that are saturating the network connection". I had no devices with ethernet ports so I bought a USB ethernet adapter, booted up a barebones linux dist, ran a script that tried to connect to an upstream server, plotted a graph (which showed a disconnection every 20 minutes) and presented that to them. To their credit they admitted there was a problem and moved my microwave antenna to another tower. (For all I know the former tower still has that issue)
I also had intermittent disconnection issues with the same ISP that they fobbed off with "maybe your WiFI is bad/has interference" or "you may be running other processes that are saturating the network connection". I had no devices with ethernet ports so I bought a USB ethernet adapter, booted up a barebones linux dist, ran a script that tried to connect to an upstream server, plotted a graph (which showed a disconnection every 20 minutes) and presented that to them. To their credit they admitted there was a problem and moved my microwave antenna to another tower. (For all I know the former tower still has that issue)
At least you reached someone who can interpret the graph, or even if they could, are even allowed to and able to (and willing to) forward the issue upstream.
Usually ISPs here optimize for lowest possible maintenance cost (right away), which means leaving things in a degraded state forever, and fix it when it finally breaks (which can cost more than fixing it right away).
So in general nobody wants to do a costly fix for one user in a small semi-rural area, especially if nobody else complains (and they don't, they don't know or suffer through it, or have a 10 Mbps package anyway so they don't notice anything unusual).
Usually ISPs here optimize for lowest possible maintenance cost (right away), which means leaving things in a degraded state forever, and fix it when it finally breaks (which can cost more than fixing it right away).
So in general nobody wants to do a costly fix for one user in a small semi-rural area, especially if nobody else complains (and they don't, they don't know or suffer through it, or have a 10 Mbps package anyway so they don't notice anything unusual).
Are you sure that is not part of their QoS programme? Normally there are some Fair Use policy known ( or not ) within the network where top 1% ( i.e those who are using the most Data ) would be slowed down. Especially on 4G Mobile Network where capacity are limited.
And it would reset every month.
And it would reset every month.
Yes, because the FUP is 2 Mb/s and after 200 GB.
I don't use that much in a month as this Internet is used only when I visit my parents' house and stay for a week or so (though I'm staying now much longer because of COVID, less than 1000 people live here so it's safer and also easier to stay locked down).
My use a DSL connection because my mom streams TV shows and that would eat all of the data allowance quickly. She doesn't need speed though, and DSL is fast enough for HD streaming.
This is most likely a technical issue with this base station, since when I had relocated the service to a different city I had no issue with the same SIM card and modem.
Other people too experience it here, but aren't impacted enough to continuously complain.
I don't use that much in a month as this Internet is used only when I visit my parents' house and stay for a week or so (though I'm staying now much longer because of COVID, less than 1000 people live here so it's safer and also easier to stay locked down).
My use a DSL connection because my mom streams TV shows and that would eat all of the data allowance quickly. She doesn't need speed though, and DSL is fast enough for HD streaming.
This is most likely a technical issue with this base station, since when I had relocated the service to a different city I had no issue with the same SIM card and modem.
Other people too experience it here, but aren't impacted enough to continuously complain.
Interesting, so they know there is an issue, they know it is not FUP, and decide not to investigate. Sounds like pretty much all Mobile Network around the world are the same LOL.
It's cheaper to ignore it, as I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636661
And yes, that's how most mobile network operators work. There are exceptions, but it's not a "standard" thing even in the EU with the strict consumer protection laws.
And yes, that's how most mobile network operators work. There are exceptions, but it's not a "standard" thing even in the EU with the strict consumer protection laws.
Please don't give me nightmares now. There is enough totalitarianism going on in this country already.
Get a VPN. It's not a perfect solution, and I sure hope we don't expect everyone to have to use a VPN to be private, but it's good enough - for now.
This. I've given up trying to figure out new ways to get around all the censorship. Not to mention, the current govt. has proven that it's ready to use any excuse to take punitive action against any citizen it disagrees with. Seen enough of journalists getting jailed and raided, people sharing comics criticizing the govt. getting charged with sedition and in some cases getting beaten up by the local 'gundas'..
Waiting for Mozilla to come to India
Why? You can just use mullvad directly with a wireguard or openvpn client. It's the same service mozilla packages for the us market....
with SNI based blocked, its almost there. The solution to that will be TLS1.3 ESNI or VPN. (but they can block VPN as well from SNI)
You can bypass SNI-based VPN blocks by getting a cheap DO box and running wireguard on it. They sure as heck can't block all of DO.
One day they will start blocking all traffic from outside which is not "registered" with the. We are close to that happening actually with people accepting Chinese app ban
Not really. https://getintra.org/ and its forks work just fine in bypassing SNI based censorship in India and do not require a VPN.
Disclaimer: I work on one such fork.
Disclaimer: I work on one such fork.
I just see encrypted DNS on the website. Is there more information somewhere else on how it avoids SNI blocks?
I just wish there was an iOS client for Intra.
true, but don't underestimate them. They blocked entire twitch just because one streamer was streaming IPL (Cricket) on it.
There will always be BSNL the state owned telco) with a 10-yr old solution ;)
Also see OONI’s post on the same topic (the same author was involved in the study): https://ooni.org/post/2020-tls-blocking-india/
References in the post above to CIS also detail some past research.
References in the post above to CIS also detail some past research.
Can anyone shed light on why the author writes the '@' sign on his email as "at-thing" and not "at"?
Maybe e-mail harvesting bots have figured out how to reverse a foo (at) bar (dot) com address, but are thoroughly defeated by (at-thing). For now.
SOTA neural networks can summarise entire articles or books down to a few paragraphs accurately.
Thinking that replacing @ with 'at' or anything else in an email address that a human can infer to be an email address, and assuming that a modern bot can't make the same inference, that's just silly in 2020.
Thinking that replacing @ with 'at' or anything else in an email address that a human can infer to be an email address, and assuming that a modern bot can't make the same inference, that's just silly in 2020.
Harvest bots are almost certainly along the lines of Perl and Python scripts armed with regexes.
All they want is to thwart a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_kiddie
GP's comment was about the probable capability of currently performed bots, not the SOTA performance of bots that may be deployed in theory.
Court orders have been mentioned in the article. So, if a Sessions Court orders blocking of a website, will the site be blocked across the country?
[deleted]
I was expecting a rant or an ill-informed position. It's nice to see a data-driven article for a change.
piyushpr134(4)
(11th April 2020)
I have to say, the whimsical attitude towards all kinds of censorship (not just the Internet) and to control people’s behavior is pervasive. Mass media does not focus on issues that have ramifications for the future generations, and the masses have been drugged into believing high pitch and nuance-less broadcasts as the truth. What’s worse is that legislators themselves don’t know or care much about these freedoms or are easily misled by vested interests in the bureaucracy.
Edit: As to why such problems not only exist but also thrive, I have to add the patronizing attitude that the governments (central and state) have towards citizens, residents, critics, dissenters and protestors. This is accepted and nurtured by many people who don’t understand the impact. It’s a long standing phenomenon that could almost be classified as core culture, IMO.