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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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

Not muslim/chiite/sunnite ? Not innocent.

"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.

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.

I suspect that THAT will cause you issues.

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.

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.

(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.

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

Thanks!

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

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

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.).

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

PS - I am an Indian

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

https://gist.github.com/

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

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.

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.

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 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)

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

...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 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...

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

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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...

Spot on!

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.

Replication would be cool feature.

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

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.

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.

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.

- 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.

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

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.

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

(Not an actual HTTP Protocol 404 reply)

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.

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

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

  $ 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

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

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

Utterly ludicrous.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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.

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.

--The Indian Gov.

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.

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...

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.

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.' "

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.

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

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

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

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

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