Indian Government Censors Us

Several Internet news sites are reporting that the Indian government has sent notices to ISPs to ask them to block several websites, including all blogs on BlogSpot/Blogger.

I can confirm that I cannot access these websites, including DynamiX notes, through my ISP, Airtel Broadband. I contacted technical support, and was told that it was a technical problem, that the Airtel server had blocked blogger.com, and that the problem would be resolved by 1300 on July 18th. I must confess that I fail to see how blocking an entire domain can be a "technical problem." DNS queries for the concerned websites work, and return correct IP addresses, but actually connecting to those IPs fails because no ACK packets are received from the remote site in response to the SYN packet.

Several bloggers have started a Google group in order to discuss this censorship and find ways around it. A wiki wiki is available to share information. Predictably, there is nothing on any of the mainstream news channels about this.

Now on to the important stuff: bypassing this blockage. The simplest solution is to use www.pkblogs.com to read the blog, though this doesn't allow you to post to it. However, I have heard that some ISPs are blocking this website too, though I cannot confirm. Another suggestion in the same vein is to use the Coral Content Distribution Network to access the blog, by appending .nyud.net:8080 to the end of the hostname of the website. For example, this blog can be accessed at http://dynamixnotes.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8080/.

The best solution I can come up with to post on the blog is to use Tor, the onion router. This is how I'm posting this message now, having determined to not sleep until I had done so.

If you are using Ubuntu, or have an Ubuntu Live CD handy, it's as easy as installing the "tor" package (sudo apt-get install tor) and setting Firefox to use localhost:9050 as a SOCKS proxy server. If you are using Windows, your easiest option probably is to use Torpark, a "variant of Portable Firefox with Tor built in" according to Wikipedia. It's as simple as downloading a file and running it.

Keep in mind that the above Tor instructions may not guarantee your privacy, but will at least allow you to access the blocked websites, albeit a bit slowly. I don't really care, as I see nothing immoral in accessing Blogger that I may want to hide from the authorities. In fact, let it serve as a lesson to the government that "the Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it." The only way that they can censor the Internet is to block all access to it. Meanwhile, they are inconveniencing honest users while accomplishing absolutely nothing against those who would put the Internet to nefarious ends.

Update: Posting to blogs is not blocked, only reading them. You can still access the blogger.com site, just not individual blogs, at least on Airtel.

posted by Roshan Shariff @ 2:16 PM