"The websites were blocked for hosting content that is pro terrorist group ISIS and not cooperating with government investigations, officials said."

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

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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).

I'm sure everything is happening very fast right now, but I hope you arrive at a policy more carefully drawn than this.

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.

> All terrorists suck

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.

I doubt anyone resisting Nazi invasion killed any innocent people. What would be the point? The only innocents in their country would be their own countrymen, little point in killing them. Collaborators? Not innocent.

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

The parent used the word "Terrorist", but in that context, I think of it as a "Resistance Fighter". It would have been the people in charge, in this case the Nazis, who would have used the label "Terrorist".

>Collaborators? Not innocent.

Not muslim/chiite/sunnite ? Not innocent.

Terrorist can be a loaded word in a political context. We have terms like "freedom fighter", " revolutionary", and "rebel", but these don't quite have neural connotations either.

"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.

I appreciate your comments. Snipt is a very low-traffic site so I doubt my decisions along these lines will ever have much impact on very many people in general, but I am filing for DMCA agent status and will adopt an official Terms of Use and all that jazz.

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.

Do you have a terms of service and/or privacy policy? I can't locate it.

We don't have one, no. Going to get one up tonight.

Speaking of safe harbour, have you registered yourself with the copyright office with a designated contact person to receive DMCA takedown requests? You don't seem to have a prominent link to that info on your mobile page.

I suspect that THAT will cause you issues.

I don't think the terrorists will care /jk

:P

That may not be in your best interest, lefally. Pro-active moderation makes it very hard to argue safe harbor status.

Not true. If you're alerted to offending material and you remove it, you haven't broken safe harbor status what-so-ever. Otherwise YouTube, DropBox, Instagram and countless other sites would be dead.

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.

Being alerted to offending material is not proactive screening.

It's not pro-active, it is reactive. He explicitly states he's not doing pro-active removals.

His contact info for copyright requests is not prominent on his website, at least not that I can see.

It absolutely does not.

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.

With regards to DMCA, 512(m) seems applicable.

Applicable how?

"(m) Protection of Privacy.— Nothing in this section shall be construed to condition the applicability of subsections (a) through (d) on—

(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.

How so?

Actually that tweet was not from government official. It was from ruling political party IT cell here. Government officials from DOT and IT ministry are still silent on this issue.

what is a "political party IT cell" is this some committee of MP's? or some Indian political slang?

The terms are a bit messed up, but the closest thing these are to a US organization is a presidential campaign policy working group. [1] These are the guys who basically act as advisors to the government's top politicians on issues that relate to technology.

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

Ah like SPAD's (Special Advisors) are they considered temporary civil servants it seems odd that an unelected "advisor" is making policy and being quoted in the media though.

The ruling party, BJP, has a group of IT professionals managing their online presence. This, they call their "IT cell".

cell == division

As the owner of https://cryptbin.com, also on the list, I've never received any such communication either.

Can you send out a tweet from the Cryptbin or your personal Twitter account stating that you haven't received any communication? Retweets should help raise awareness on this.

Thanks!

Done!

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

As far as I can tell, the ban has not yet been enforced. I can access both https://cryptbin.com/ and https://snipt.net/, though my ISP is limited only to Bangalore area.

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

All 4 seemed to be blocked from my office in Kerala. Github is up so they probably have resolved the issue. A week back Github became mysteriously unavailable (with github status showing no downtime). I guess now we know what happened.

I can access both https://cryptbin.com/ and https://snipt.net/ from MTNL Mumbai.

cryptbin and snipt are blocked here (Vodafone network). I presume all the major ISPs have implemented the bans.

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.).

I can access cryptbin from mumbai so I dont think the ban has been enforced.

Don't expect the people from India to contact you. They are just too dumb to do this.

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

PS - I am an Indian

agree.

Why would they have any incentive to contact you? From their perspective the problem is solved -- the material offending statist is out of sight, out of mind. You're the one who wants a different situation to exist. Governments aren't in the customer service business.

"Governments aren't in the customer service business" - Errr actually that's exactly the business democratic governments are in. Not saying they don't fail regularly but when you are elected by the people for the people you'd better be prepared to provide customer service.

Except most people won't know about this or care. You get the government you deserve, which is to say, a shitty one.

Don't know why you're being downvoted. This is absolutely correct. Even more so for India than, say, the US (source: I'm Indian). Nobody but a tiny tiny fraction of the population cares that github is getting blocked. The opposition wouldn't even bother making it a big issue since the numbers are so insignificant. And even if they did, they don't really have a moral leg to stand on because all politicians and government officials, almost without exception (ok.. maybe with some rare exceptions) are eager to use censorship when it suites their purposes (usually under the pretext of national security... but even that figleaf is not always necessary).

Oh come on. Whenever the public actually demands something, the government's response is always batons, tear-gas and rubber bullets (and some torture thrown in for good measure, of course).

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.

I actually don't care at all, but sucks for developers in India who 1) want to use Snipt or 2) have already paid for it.

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.

And of course, apathy is the other big problem with US attitudes about government.

You do realize that it's the Indian government at issue here, right?

I would argue that the indian government is doing this at the pressure from the united states government.

Zero evidence and sheer implausibility makes for a great conspiracy theory.

So why is India the only country to have taken this step?

Governments should be in the customer service business. Typically, they provide many services that, if they were provided by private companies, which they very well could be, would be customer service oriented. The concept that a government employees such as police are not working for the people is exactly what's wrong with the attitudes surrounding police in the United States. They are providing a service that we pay for as taxpayers, and theoretically, we are their employers, or customers.

You're not a customer because you're being forced to pay. You have no choice in the matter. If they provide really really bad service you still have to pay.

Sure, that's the situation in a monopoly. It's not that we're not in a customer role, just that we're poorly served customers of a monopoly where management doesn't seem to understand for whom they're working. If the whole system wasn't sondysfunctional, poor service would be addressed by our elected representatives, who are supposed to be properly planning government services for us.

Government services are by definition a monopoly because there is only one government in your country. It's a bit worse, though. If there's a monopoly on electricity I can just stop paying and get a generator. If there is a monopoly on air flights I could drive or take a boat. However, if I stop paying the government I go to prison.

Nice, here is my chance to get in touch with you again. A few weeks ago I tweeted out something along the lines of you hosting a lot of credit card dumps on your service, have you done anything about this?

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?

Sorry for your troubles.

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?

I'm the developer of phorkie, and I also have not been contacted by anyone official about the block.