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Nemo edited this page Nov 17, 2021 · 5 revisions

Welcome to the airtel-blocked-hosts wiki!

Fact Sheet

  1. What is this list?

It is a list of domains blocked by Airtel for Airtel Broadband users.

  1. Why is this important?

Court orders blocking websites in India are not public, and ISPs don't disclose what they're blocking. Hence, this is an important artifact for legal and cyber-security researchers.

  1. How was this list generated?

The list is based on a similar list by Karan Saini which was for ACT Fibernet, Bangalore. Both the lists are based on attempting to lookup these websites, and detecting the signs of blocking. We do this for a lot of popular domains, and compile the list.

  1. How can this list be used?
  • Some anti-censorship tools allow you to specify a list of sites where the tool should work. You could use this list to minimize the impact/need of such tools.
  • Legal research on internet censorship in India.
  • Checking for differences (both operational and technical) in how blocks are implemented across different ISPs in India.
  • Raising RTIs to the DoT validating whether all these blocks were legal. And a lot more.
  1. How should this work be cited?

Airtel Blocked Hosts list, Abhay Rana (Security Researcher)

  1. Isn't this just piracy and porn websites getting blocked?

The Supreme Court of India has held it as legal, but the Indian government keeps passing (and retracting) blocking orders. There are legal ways of taking down content (such as DMCA) without blocking entire websites. Blocking entire websites has led to cases where Telegram/Internet Archive was blocked in India.

Moreover, there are purely informational websites that are blocked. Airtel was also found to be blocking personal blogs recently.

If you have more questions, please reach out: https://captnemo.in/contact/

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