Re:VLC media player banned in India
by pseudostem on Saturday August 13, 2022 @01:40AM
(#32447223)
I hold a Class B ISP license. We get letters (not emails, physical letters)from Department of Telecommunication asking us to block http://www.example.com
We don't bother with blocking http://example.com or its https cousin.
In this case we have not received any letter for VLC
Re:VLC media player banned in India
by OmarAssadi on Saturday August 13, 2022 @05:32AM
(#32448232)
Do they not also ever request blocks on particular IP addresses? A lot of collateral damage happened due to blocking whole ranges from AWS and such when Russia was trying to ban Telegram.
Re:VLC media player banned in India
by pseudostem on Sunday August 14, 2022 @11:26AM
(#32460016)
We haven't received request for blocking blocks of IPs till date. Maybe it happens with upstream ISPs or peering exchanges, I'm unsure.
In the past, we have received requests for single IP addresses
The video wasn't loading for me there, here is the YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6SwxXhZGv4
It wasn't loaded because the CDN that hosts it redirects from HTTPS to plain HTTP.
I was at FOSDEM that year but unfortunately missed your talk. Just watched the video of it and it was very well explained, taught me a thing or two about CDN's and SPOF's, thanks for that.
The most likely explanation is: the government does not want to block your website, it is collateral damage. They want to block something else, but there is no technical possibility to block that without also blocking your website. This also explains variation between ISPs: there is no centralized solution for blocking. Some of them are using IP-based blocking because they have no technology that would look deeper, some of them block on the DNS level, and some on the TLS SNI level.