[Gooney]

Well, go ahead and sign this petition to stop such forms of idiocy:

Allow file sharing sites in India - Petition Spot

Also in one of the article links about the Reliance media John Doe judgements, many people commented saying that they will altogether boycott Singham, which seems to be the root of the trouble.

[jalex77]

Originally Posted by vina

you mean mediafire works too? Which ISP do you have?

I have airtel and mediafire wasn't working last I checked - though all of the other half a dozen sites in the list I checked were working.

EDIT: it is working at my office - will see at home again.

I use a BSNL BB and still it works. Never got blocked even once.

[ShortShifter]

The Govt. of the Worlds Largest Democracy is at it again, All major Torrents and Video/File sharing websites sparing Youtube have again been blocked for a few weeks now, this time thanks to a John Doe order obtained by RK Productions from the Madras High Court on the 30th of March for the movie "3" to prevent pirated copys of the movie to be shared through the internet which suprisingly had attributed its promotion and success of its song "Kolaveri Di" to the viral phenomenon of the Internet.

The usually sleepy ISP's of the country have shown over-enthusiasm in this order, blocking off whole websites instead of specific links pertaining to the movie.

The Hactivist's part of the famous Anonymous group in the country launched Operation India and have retaliated by launching a massive DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks on major govt. and private websites of ISP's like Reliance. The Anonymous group had revealed that Reliance had allegedly censored several websites, many of them not mentioned in the Court order, which is an Illegal move by itself. The group has also shown how open and vulnerable the Indian cyberspace has become.

Although Piracy should be condemned, blocking of sites like Pastebin, Vimeo through which many aspiring filmmakers share their content is just unwarranted, recently a few ISP's have restored Vimeo after strong protests by the Netizens across the country and worldwide. Simple proxys or prefixing "https" to the url can be used to access blocked sites but the whole way of blocking off websites while piggy bagging on a court order is becoming a dangerous trend of sorts to the Govt. and also the Corporates.

The Anonymous group have been functioning under the Hash Tag #OpIndia on twitter, they are calling Netizens for launching a massive ground protests on the Coming 9th of June. Those concerned about your Internet Freedom can join the movement by following @OpIndia_back and @OpIndia_revenge on twitter.

Links to OpIndia's blog, and some of the News articles about the Incident;

Need For OpIndia - Anonymous Operation India

The Hindu : Cities / Chennai : Internet users enraged over blocking of file-sharing sites

Business Line : Industry & Economy / Marketing : Netizens in torment over torrent sites takedown

Internet Service Providers block torrent sites on HC order - Times Of India

'Hacktivist' group Anonymous calls for 'Occupy' India protest : North, News - India Today

http://www.whitec0de.com/reliance-in...onymous-india/

[landcruiser123]

Bumping into an old thread here. Can somebody explain this scenario to me:

When I search for a song/ tutorial on Google and I follow a youtube video link, I get this messge:

Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India. Please contact administrator for more information

But on searching for the video in Youtube, I can play it without any problem. Can anybody explain?

[Sherlocked]

3 years jail term for viewing Torrent websites in India.

If you visit a torrent website, a report suggests, you might be committing a crime, one that earns a 3 lakh fine and 3 years in jail.
The extent of this ban extends to looking at "a torrent file, or downloading a file from a host that may have been banned in India, or even for viewing an image on a file host like Imagebam."

SOURCE

Thoughts?

[Divya Sharan]

Originally Posted by Sherlocked

3 years jail term for viewing Torrent websites in India.

Thoughts?

If we talk about ethics, this is a legit move. After all, one is supposed to buy software/digital media. Piracy causes a lot of losses.
But there is no way torrent sites can be blocked/restricted for access. Mirrors would come out in no time.

[WorkingGuru]

With all the things wrong with the world (corruption, heavy taxation) blocking torrents feels like the establishment is pressurising public too far.

Who downloads movies? The educated non-rich. Most strong & agreeable theories will suggest that. The set of people who can't afford to dispose 1k per head every week to see movies (or maybe abit more, because theatre trips usually include dinner or shopping trips).

Not many regrets though, these media constructed personalities can definitely do with lesser attention from the public. We'll get used to much less of them & their (mostly crap) movies.

Even softwares, people will (& should) move to softwares like Ubuntu & learn to use the same. Anyway I guess 60% users mostly use computers for basic stuff like Browsing, Wordpad, PowerPoint & Excel.

Only thing is that many people won't get to use the plethora of other softwares available online. The keen ones would discover mirror links. Yet, many will definitely feel deprived.

For commercial use, even I would recommend paid applications. If you have a business that can't afford a few thousands for software, then I don't believe you're among the most likely to be raided !

[sgiitk]

As put very nicely on the TV, excellent idea with totally ham handed attempt to implement. The mess became bigger when Tata refused to be more specific in their blocking, and got a dispensation. Others picked it up from them. Someone mentioned on the box that attempting to get a URL cannot be prosecuted. The crime may occur only when you download. Now unless I see the content how do I know what I am getting!

[Thad E Ginathom]

Has anybody else followed the USA Prenda Law story?

USA lawyers will send threatening letters to those found downloading copyright material, and many will pay up rather than face possible action in court. Especially if the material is porn.

Prenda went a step further, and, through a related company, put the porn on a server and waited for takers. It seems they made a lot of money from this, until the judiciary clamped down on them.

The ongoing story of these scumbags makes a great read, and the whole USA 7th-cicuit appeal hearing, available on youtube is, amazingly, gripping drama. Watch, as the elderly panel member appears to waffle on for a while, and then, with perfect precision, goes for the jugular! The lady member of the panel does not say much, but when she speaks, again, it is the surgical knife, deep and precise. The other gentleman seems to be telling the Prenda advocate, you cannot be serious, and actually says, at one point, "Just when you thought you'd seen it all!"

[dark.knight]

The internet itself was born as a free, community driven, and crowd-sourced information aggregator, i.e after its original roots of being a military network.

In the early days of YouTube we had people recording shows off of their televisions/digitalizing cassettes and uploading so that people worldwide could see American shows, whether the latest or classics. They also did the same for music videos and user compiled mix-tapes. YouTube was grinning ear to ear in those days as their concept has become a hit. A couple of years later all the labels of Sony - VEVO, Universal, Columbia, Nashville, Kemosabe etc arrived and jumped onto the free songs/music video platform understanding fully well that this is the future and that they can monetize with YouTube directly. I still salute the YouTube community of people for setting a complete change of the entertainment landscape.

Two men with little direction founded a server based mail-sending platform which quickly became e-mail. Sabeer Bhatia is one of them. They only had freedom from ISP-driven mail ID's in mind, and wanted an easier, more sophisticated way to access mail from any computer. Today we have Gmail, Y!Mail and similar concepts of company-driven mail id's by the thousands, yet the roots were so simple and humble.

Torrents and file sharing software were made to share large files and documents with "e-mails" in those times not having much capacity for attachments. Torrenting IS LEGAL, and it always will be. There never was a cap or definition on what should be torrented, nor is there a law that clearly defines what can be banned just because until now, whilst 2 sites were banned, 20 were operational. The last resort of a coward and a totally frustrated opponent who is losing a fight is a below-the-belt shot and that's exactly what the current law is doing.. throttling the end of the pipe instead of fixing the leak.. oh wait I forgot, the leak can never be fixed because the people.. the people made the internet what it is and will always define the internet.

What about old American shows, Indian channel owners? What about them? Is it that I'm forced to watch the propaganda and garbage strewn across news channels (who incidentally poke the greatest fun at governments without repercussion), or the mindless localized "mass" entertainment programs only by default? What about the shows I want, if I miss them? What about Seinfeld? What about the latest season of Shark Tank which won't be shown in India for another millennium? What about masterpiece shows like Boston Legal, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Goldbergs etc which won't even make it to t.v nowadays and even if they do, with a billion and a half cuts or muted portions to make it India-friendly, and mind you all three shows are actually light comedies.

Welcome to the true Amish lifestyle, welcome to India. I accept the new law, the master has spoken.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Originally Posted by dark.knight

Two men with little direction founded a server based mail-sending platform which quickly became e-mail. Sabeer Bhatia is one of them. They only had freedom from ISP-driven mail ID's in mind, and wanted an easier, more sophisticated way to access mail from any computer. Today we have Gmail, Y!Mail and similar concepts of company-driven mail id's by the thousands, yet the roots were so simple and humble.

Hotmail? I don't think so. e-mail goes way back in the history of computing and networking: before there was even a web, let alone the idea of web-based mail.

Torrents and file sharing software were made to share large files and documents with "e-mails" in those times not having much capacity for attachments. Torrenting IS LEGAL, and it always will be.

Very much so. If I look to download the latest ISO of the Linux distro that I use, there are various mirrors, and there is also an option to use torrents. The last couple of times I have done this around-a-Gb download, I have used it. Much faster. Total legal.

[hserus]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

Hotmail? I don't think so. e-mail goes way back in the history of computing and networking: before there was even a web, let alone the idea of web-based mail.

Email is very very old and predates Bhatia by near on two decades.

http://emailhistory.org/ is a website put together by several people who were around from more or less the beginning of email as a technology (several of whom I'm privileged to have met, plus I was colleagues for a few years in IBM with Nat Borenstein, the guy who wrote the MIME spec)

[Samurai]

I think he wanted to say how email was liberated from being associated with the ISP. In the 90s, your email was always associated with your ISP, there was no escape unless you got your own email server, static IP and domain name.

Which meant when you changed home/city or changed providers, your email changed too. I had @AOL, @MSN and @Home emails in the 90s, which I kept losing whenever I moved. But the hotmail account I created in 1996 is still with me, still active.

Hotmail was the first company that let you keep your account wherever you went and it is free for life.

[hserus]

Yeah - but even back then AOL had a byoa (bring your own access) feature that would let you connect on say an old vsnl 33.6k dialup and then fire up the AOL client so you could get your AOL email and communities / news, and surf the internet through AOL's browser.

[Samurai]

33.6K? I don't think you are talking about 90s pre-hotmail days. The fastest modem then was 9600bps.

I didn't use AOL browser, because I was aware of Mosaic from my office use. I downloaded Mosaic with great difficulty, and then I would fire up Mosaic once the AOL dialup connection is established. Getting good speed was not easy, I had to dial many numbers before one of them gave the top speed of 9.6kbps.