Pirate Bay, IsoHunt Blocked In India

New submitter unmole writes "It seems that India's Department of Telecom has instructed ISPs to block popular torrent trackers like the Pirate Bay and IsoHunt. Visitors now see a page (Screenshot) informing them that 'This site has been blocked as per instructions from Department of Telecom (DOT),' with no additional details. The Department of Telecom has not made any public announcement to this effect. This comes months after an Indian court gave the green signal for prosecuting social networking sites."

Comments

Not Blocked

[alphabetsoup]

Tried it just now, both sites works perfectly fine. Probably a problem with the ISP.

Re:Not Blocked

[Anonymous Coward]

Works fine here in India as of now.

Re:Not Blocked

[monzie]

I have a Reliance 3G data card. Pirate Bay, IsoHunt and a few other sites ( including pastebin ) are blocked.. On a different ISP, (AirTel ) it isn't. (yet).This anecdotal evidence suggests that either the directive is optional for ISP's or some have chosen to ignore it. Moral of the story - Just choose a good ISP.

Re:Not Blocked

[Anonymous Coward]

Postsing as AC obvious reasons:

This order has been passed on only some ISP's without getting any direct order from court. List of ISP's Blocked/Unblocked info.

- Reliance Communications Data Card: Yes, both blocked
- Reliance Wireline, Mumbai/Gujarat: Yes, both blocked
- MTNL Delhi/Mumbai: No
- Airtel Delhi/Bangalore/Mumbai/Pune/Chennai: No
- BSNL Bangalore/Pune/Andhra Pradesh/Gurgaon: No
- Tata Pune: No
- Sify Pune: No
- Hathway Mumbai: No
- Syscon Infoway: Yes, both blocked
- Zylog Wi5: Yes, both blocked
- Aircel Ahmedabad: Yes
- Vodafone 3G, Ahmedabad/Maharashtra: Yes, both blocked.
- Tikona, Mumbai: Yes, both blocked.
- You Broadband: No
- 24Online Kolkatta: Yes
- Connect, Punjab : Yes, only torrents.

I will be more worried, if two biggest ISP Airtel and Tata communincation started to block site. Every other small isp goes through either TATA or Airtel In India.

The solution is simple switch DNS (a list of free dns provider is here http://theos.in/windows-xp/free-fast-public-dns-server-list/ ) and use VPN / proxy site. More info is posted at http://torrentfreak.com/india-orders-blackout-of-vimeo-the-pirate-bay-and-more-120504/

Re:Not Blocked

[hihihihi]

Moral of the story - Just choose a good ISP.

i agree overall with this sentiment, but fact remains its not so easy specially if you live outside centers of town...
most of the places the only choice is BSNL (the "Big Setup, No Link" (almost) govt. monopoly) or Reliance datacard. BSNL Service is unreliable as hell (i had connection for 3 months, out of them for 2 it never worked!) and if Reliance dumps you, there is no options for most of the rest people!

Re:US pressure

[fredprado]

After WWII US had taken minimum damage and had a good industrial base. On the other hand, Europe was devastated but its countries held most of the profitable patents. US solved the problem by voiding any non-US patent and allowing its companies to produce whatever they wished regardless of any European claim to their products (not unlike what China does today). That is what in good part made US the greatest economical superpower in the world. US was not the first and won't be the last to realize that ignoring external patents is the way to go if you really want to develop your country.

Re:DNS?

[santosh.k83]

IP address of thepiratebay.se is 194.71.107.15 IP address of thepiratebay.org is 194.71.107.50 IP address of isohunt.com is 208.95.173.130

Not true

[jalfreize]

This is not true, or at least wildly inaccurate. The main Indian Government-owned ISP, BSNL, has not blocked any of these websites. Many of the private ISP's haven't either. There is one private ISP -- Reliance Infocomm -- which is owned by the Reliance ADA Group, which happens to also have considerable interests in content generation (they produce bollywood movies, and also are major financial backers to Spielberg's Dreamworks SKG). They are known to block torrent/video sharing sites during prominent movie releases.