> The whimsical attitude towards web censorship from both ISPs and the Government necessitates the development of a crowdsourced tool to monitor and measure such censorship from different vantage points in the country.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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'..
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
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.
I know this is an “in” opinion to have among urban, middle class or liberal circles, but I disagree. Life for me has been just fine. I can’t speak for the majority, only for myself.
I am not an "Indian liberal" or "urban". But India is dogs under current leadership and that's obvious if you observe. The media is very pro-govt and doesn't tell anything that remotely harms the government, while hyping about the current government. Thus lot of people live under the illusion.
One wrong decision at a time. Starting with demonetization.
The economy has tanked and our minister attributes that to an act of god rather than take responsibility of the ill-conceived partisan measures.
Mishandling Covid.
Giving a fee pass to cow-urine-prevents-Covid bandwagon while planting stories about Jamaat being a conspiracy to spread Covid in India. This plays to their political base but has been recently called out by the court. Court has declared these to be cases of politically motivated misreporting.
Filling WhatsApp groups by fakenews and fake incidents of Muslims killing/burning/human-sacrificing Hindus to incite more communal violence which plays to the ruling parties narrative and a polarized society, the latter earns them more votes. Close ties with BJP cell and WA comes convenient.
Doing nothing to give protection to medical staff against violence (Covid related) other than platitudes. The perpetrators of such violence gets bail immediately, whereas university professors get jailed under made up charges of terrorism that conveniently do not require a proof in court and is nonbailable. Essentially throwing the medical staff under the bus for their own political gains.
Incarcerating sources of credible criticism by abuse of laws that do not require allegations to be proved in court.
Looking the other way while hate crime against Muslims and other beef eaters increases. Stopping the record of hate crime by government order, so that one cannot point to statistics.
Moving towards a "papers please" society.
I don't maintain the urls of the news I read so I don't have the links immediately available. However with a few hours on google, one should be able to get to the primary sources of the examples I have called out.
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.