Blocking Communication - A perspective from India : The Beginning

Update: If you want to know how to circumvent this kind of blocking. head over to my second part of the blog post.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

When Alexander Graham Bell invented in 1876, it literally changed how we communicate with each other. Then in 1971 we saw the first email being sent, closely followed by the development of what we would know as the Internet today. And since 2001 we have steadily invested in how we communicate with each other using telecommunication and internet. Both include landline, mobile, and internet connectivity. Today this shapes how we communicate with each other in our society and the ISP and Telecom Companies are the backbones which provide the service. Which also makes them a single choking point if somebody wants to regulate the communication.

Governments across the world are increasingly resorting to Internet shutdowns (also referred to as Internet blackouts) for a wide range of reasons, all with the objective of controlling the exchange of information online. The frequent resort to Internet shutdowns by the State as a mitigation and prevention strategy, mostly in the developing countries is a cause of concern. Between January 2012 and May 1, 2018, India has experienced 174 Internet shutdowns for various reasons and durations across 19 of the 29 states in the country. Most of these shutdowns are invoked using Section 144 which essentially states “temporary measures to maintain public tranquility” and gives State Governments the “power to issue orders for immediate remedy in urgent cases of nuisance or apprehended danger”.

If we start charting out the shutdown in India, we will see a disturbing trend.

This clearly shows that the number of internet shutdowns have only increased since 2012 in India. If we look at what kind of services were affected

Once we take into account this disturbing trend it becomes clear that censorship and legal avenues are being used to curb freedom of speech. We will take about a potential solution to this in our next post.

If you want to see all the Internet shutdowns till 2018, look at the following document collected by SFLC, where most of the data for this post is collected from. We will talk about our primary motivation and a potential solution in our follow-up blog post

Comments

Curious case of Cisco AnyConnect and WSL2

One thing Covid has taught me is the importance of VPN. Also one other thing COVID has taught me while I work from home is that your Windows Machine can be brilliant as long as you have WSL2 configured in it. So imagine my dismay when I realized I cannot access my University resources while being inside the University provided VPN client. Both of the institutions I have affiliation with, requires me to use VPN software which messes up WSL2 configuration (which of course I realized at 1:30 AM). Don't get me wrong, I have faced this multiple times last two years (when I was stuck in India), and mostly I have been lazy and bypassed the actual problem by side-stepping with my not-so-noble alternatives, which mostly include one of the following: Connect to a physical machine exposed to the internet and do an ssh tunnel from there (not so reliable since this is my actual box sitting at lab desk, also not secure enough) Create a poor man's socks proxy in that same box to have my ow

Immersive Payment: Second Update

This is the second update to the Immersive Payment project update under the Grant For Web Fellowship. You can read the last report here: https://blog.rabimba.com/2021/05/immersive-payment-first-update.html Background Technically, WebXR is a device API that makes it possible to distribute VR/AR experiences over a web browser. It is broadly used to describe web based VR/AR experiences. The web is the biggest platform, able to reach almost every device and balance the power with app stores through permissionless innovation. However, there’s a major issue holding the ecosystem back from growing: monetization. There’s a reason why 99% of WebXR apps look like prototypes, it’s because indie creators struggle with finding ways to capture value. More polished experiences like Mozilla Hubs and Frame usually have the backing of a large entity, so they can survive. While many of the apps on the front page of Oculus Store net millions in sales, apps on the startpage for Oculus browser (#1 app) c

FirefoxOS, A keyboard and prediction: Story of my first contribution

Returning to my cubical holding a hot cup of coffee and with a head loaded with frustration and panic over a system codebase that I managed to break with no sufficient time to fix it before the next morning. This was at IBM, New York where I was interning and working on the TJ Watson project. I returned back to my desk, turned on my dual monitors, started reading some blogs and engaging on Mozilla IRC (a new found and pretty short lived hobby). Just a few days before that, FirefoxOS was launched in India in the form of an Intex phone with a $35 price tag. It was making waves all around, because of its hefty price and poor performance . The OS struggle was showing up in the super low cost hardware. I was personally furious about some of the shortcomings, primarily the keyboard which at that time didn’t support prediction in any language other than English and also did not learn new words. Coincidentally, I came upon Dietrich Ayala in the FirefoxOS IRC channel, who at

RK's Rambling

Search This Blog