In a surprise move by the Department of Telecom (Dot) of India, it has blocked access to the most popular file-sharing website, ThePirateBay (TPB). Visitors who try to access this site are greeted with a banner by the Dot, saying "This site has been blocked as per instructions from Department of Telecom (DOT)". While the reason behind the block is unclear, TPB is not the only site to be blocked, more torrent related sites like KickAssTorrents, BitSnoop have also been blocked.

Not only that the popular video sharing site, Vimeo, has also been blocked. Vimeo is a popular video sharing platform, a site mostly containing indie filmmakers.

While the reason behind the blockade has not yet been stated, all the major ISP's are following it under the order of Department of Telecom (Dot) & High Court.

Since the blockade is just at the ISP level, this can be easily bypassed by using proxy servers, among other methods.

So what is your reaction to this news? Should India follow in the footsteps of US and UK, and introduce a similar bill like SOPA and PIPA?


more on ::
http://scribidomagazine.com/torrent-website-the-pirate-bay-blocked-by-indian-isps/
http://www.thebloggieman.com/2012/05/pirate-bay-blocked-in-india.html

We Chinese people are in worse situation for about 10 years and unlike yours, our block list is always a state secret.

the Philippines is lucky because we will never ever have them block's. If we do then I'll use alternative proxies and IP's of torrent sites.

I'm from Italy, and I'm experiencing something similar in my country (TPB and KickAssTorrents at this time).
Here these operations are leaded by police, and this is (if possible) even more ridicolous, 'cause instructions don't come from a big national institution, but just from the small local departments of police.
It's hilarious, their cases usually concern street sellers and drug pushers, and now they fight against these big international websites. ahah.
I guess this happens just because of strong pressures from copyright organizations, anyway.
Anyway, i don't think Italy it's going to introduce bills like SOPA and PIPA.
Well, there are similar proposals but they don't usually go far, and anyway I don't think they are needed by copyright organizations, which seem to have enough power now.
I can't tell if this could apply also for India.

Have to second you.

We get lower speed to international servers, and what's worse if there are "some" keywords appearing in the URL the user will get a connection reset, not to mention blocking certain IP addresses or poisoning domains.

Where is that "We"?

he must be from china as well.

yep that's what i am doing while searching for torrents, i think sooner or later all countries gonna follow the footprints, it's like a virus which will infact the world. meanwhile Anonymous announced they will protest nationwide on 6th of june & the operation named as "OpIndia". here is the link http://opindia.posterous.com/need-of-opindia

I guess China, as yksoft1.
Chinese Internet censorship is anyway a really different beast... it has mainly political purposes, not economical ones like Italy and (I guess) India, and, as you can read, it has wider spectrum.
As a relatively free user of the Internet, I feel sincerely sorry for the guys who browse the web from China, like yksoft1 and Plyrstar93.
Censorship is [censored].

Does China allow users to use proxies? I also heard that North Korea also has similar restrictions (from what I've seen, it's even worse than China), to the point where it has been described as an Internet "black hole".

Fortunately, it's not nearly as bad in this part of the world (the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand).

I'm not so much concerned about such sites as The Pirate Bay, though, much of what they have is already quite questionable in legality, and besides, I'm sure there are many other (legitimately qualified as such) file sharing sites anyway, so as long as they don't go to the extremes of censorship, I'm fine.

China allows proxies though cannot bypass keyword filtering or DNS posioning, there are other methods to circumvent that with encrypted services; North Korea currently doesn't have Internet connection for its civilians at all, they use their Kwangmyong Net as their national Intranet which doesn't connect to Internet.

Well, from what I've read on Wikipedia, although they do indeed have Internet access, it is highly restricted, and is often taylored in favor of certain websites with anti-South Korean and anti-American propoganda.

The policy of Bingxing Fang's Firewall are never disclosed even for a bit. However they are actively researching every public way to circumvent the firewall and block those workarounds one by one using packet fingerprinting.
The difference between our wall and other country-level censorship is that ours is always in active development.

yup but the thing is in future they will be able to restrict access to whatever they want. Like FB perhaps a lot of people make cartoons & organizing protests through it, which politicians are openly challenging.

I can get tor running for you. Actually, I can't even get it working here in the us.

They are blocking Tor using three mechanisms.
1. Block the access to all known Tor node index servers.
2. Block the Tor entry bridges by either manually searching and blocking for bridge IPs or by searching for packet fingerprint in Tor's handshake request.
3. For newer Tor versions with packet obfuscation, the Firewall will try sending a fake Tor request to the target of suspicious connection open by the user. If the target replies correctly, the user's connection will be reset by the Firewall.
Through these mechanisms developed by Professor Fang's students, Tor is more or less useless in China now.

The US ISP's are heading towards this as well, some are reportedly thinking of blocking it while all major ones have acknowledged entering into a pack to respond more critically to customer piracy reports such that client account status will reflect piracy activity. So while us US internet users may be off the hook now, I wouldn't assume we will be for long now...