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Re:How India Censors the Web by hackpert on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @06:59PM (#24634054)
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.
Re:How India Censors the Web by kranner on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @09:35PM (#24634952)
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.
Re:How India Censors the Web by milankragujevic on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @02:29AM (#24636193)
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.

Re:How India Censors the Web by kranner on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @04:06AM (#24636595)
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)

Re:How India Censors the Web by milankragujevic on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @04:21AM (#24636661)
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).

Re:How India Censors the Web by ksec on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @05:06AM (#24636848)
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.

Re:How India Censors the Web by milankragujevic on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @05:13AM (#24636874)
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.

Re:How India Censors the Web by ksec on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @05:22AM (#24636905)
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.
Re:How India Censors the Web by milankragujevic on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @05:28AM (#24636936)
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.

Re:How India Censors the Web by srean on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @07:11PM (#24634129)
Please don't give me nightmares now. There is enough totalitarianism going on in this country already.
Re:How India Censors the Web by d3nj4l on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @09:55PM (#24635043)
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.
Re:How India Censors the Web by cvrjk on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @12:28AM (#24635706)
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'..
Re:How India Censors the Web by rishav_sharan on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @12:54AM (#24635798)
Waiting for Mozilla to come to India
Re:How India Censors the Web by 411111111111111 on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @01:28AM (#24635948)
Why? You can just use mullvad directly with a wireguard or openvpn client. It's the same service mozilla packages for the us market....
Re:How India Censors the Web by salmaanp on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @07:29PM (#24634270)
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)
Re:How India Censors the Web by d3nj4l on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @09:56PM (#24635048)
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.
Re:How India Censors the Web by piyushpr134 on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @10:45PM (#24635228)
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
Re:How India Censors the Web by ignoramous on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @11:38PM (#24635461)
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.

Re:How India Censors the Web by salmaanp on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @01:05PM (#24640975)
I just see encrypted DNS on the website. Is there more information somewhere else on how it avoids SNI blocks?
Re:How India Censors the Web by ignoramous on Sunday October 04, 2020 @08:28PM (#24683431)
Re:How India Censors the Web by httgp on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @09:56AM (#24638732)
I just wish there was an iOS client for Intra.
Re:How India Censors the Web by salmaanp on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @01:03PM (#24640953)
true, but don't underestimate them. They blocked entire twitch just because one streamer was streaming IPL (Cricket) on it.
Re:How India Censors the Web by captn3m0 on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @09:06PM (#24634828)
There will always be BSNL the state owned telco) with a 10-yr old solution ;)