DDG was blocked for the past several days. The issue came up on /r/duckduckgo and /r/india, following which the Internet Freedom Foundation wrote to the Department of Telecom [1]

DDG is working for me again (it's my default search engine) so that's a relief. In the past, the government or the ISPs in India have nonchalantly blocked several websites and even NSFW sub-reddits. The IFF even has a dump of blocking orders issued by courts leaked by a whistleblower. [2]

[1] https://internetfreedom.in/blocking-of-duckduckgo-needs-to-b...

[2] https://internetfreedom.in/whistleblower-provides-website-bl...

Those who are tired of government blocking, make a $5 droplet in Germany or Netherlands and set wireguard.

When I was in India, I was getting much better speed on vpn compared to direct connection. How can this be possible? Page loads appeared significantly faster through digital ocean server.

I was under impression, VPN adds overhead and reduces speed?.

I often do market research and blocking gets in way, I can decide what website is good for me what isn't. Government shouldn't have any say in that.

I've heard that many ISPs in India have bad routing, which probably explains what you experienced. That's why services with local servers in India (e.g. Cloudflare WARP+) can have the same effect.

I'm fairly annoyed that the list of websites blocked is not made available. Also, how do you block a specific subreddit!?

This sheet is being regularly updated I believe. Has entries from even the justice-for-sikhs websites that were banned few hours ago.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17VJKBTBnHDpLTXOrB58L...

By making request to reddit.

It's quite scary to think that some countries can just instantly axe access to important services like that. This time it was, supposedly, a mistake. What if next time they decide to block Wikipedia or something like that? I know they tried to block Telegram before the citizens pushed back.

Countries that block "Wikipedia or something like that" already exist. And citizens, corporations, and governments are fine with it.

Are citizens really fine with this? Most of the blocking countries have an active underground VPN scene.

This is true, but it's important to consider that most of the population is entirely oblivious. It's a little sad.

You're not wrong, but "doesn't notice the taste of lead" != "fine with being fed lead".

Edit: better analogy than arsenic.

>> can just instantly axe access to important services like that.

It isn't that simple. Just look at China. To enforce their internet censorship they have to spend billions on a massive technological complex. But the locals still know how to get around it when necessary. Once upon a time TOR was a complicated little tool requiring multiple layers of software to run properly. Now The Tor Browser is an app that any kid can download and use on any device. The days of governments turning off websites by removing their DNS entries are long gone.

Yeah, but the majority that actually get around it are those who are already not supporting the government. Millions of others are being brainwashed by the state limiting data. It's an awful implication, considering how vital the internet is to modern life.

I'm curious how blocks happen in India. Does some random government agency just wake up one day and decide to block off part of the internet? Is there any sort of citizen involvement?

Pretty much. In addition there is no real enforcement to see that only the sites requested are blocked. And ISPs (Jio especially) have started taking creative license with block orders. For a lot of ISPs this blocking is implemented at DNS resolution level, which is easy to bypass (just change your DNS resolver), but the most popular ISP (Jio) does not do it this way, and is pretty much impossible to get around.

How does Jio do it? Would encrypted SNI help in thwarting that?

I think it will on some supported sites. Enable the dns over https option in firefox.

Check the status here - https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni/

Your best bet would still be a vpn which will work on all the sites.

Jio uses DNS sniffing and SNI blocking.

They monitor all DNS requests(no matter who provides the DNS server). So the solution is DNS over HTTPS.

The SNI method is a bit tricky. ESNI does prevent the blocking, but currently it’s rarely implemented by websites. One other solution is TCP fragmentation. Split the packet containing SNI into two. This prevents them from catching the whole URL mentioned in the SNI. Thus, they are unable to block it.

One such tool: https://github.com/SadeghHayeri/GreenTunnel

Anecdatum of one. I didn’t notice this block. I am in India and use ddg on all my devices. I also use cloudflare dns so that could be the reason.

Somehow I find the unblock more troubling than the block, because it could mean that India has found a way to compromise DDG searches.

But… it was initially blocked when blocking several apps from China. Why would China being able to compromise it make it more likely to be unblocked by India?

Yes I have noticed that ddg is extremely inconsistent over time, sometimes for what I think are almost the same queries. It's also highly variable in its speed - Google is almost always instant, but ddg can vary from the same speed as Google one day, to taking many seconds to load a result the next.

I would like to recommend this to you: https://searx.space.

I have been getting great results across many instances! And while we're at it, also check out these projects:

https://github.com/omarroth/invidious

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

I would speculate that DDG caches its results and then fuzzy-matches them with other search queries (maybe fuzzier and fuzzier based on load). So if you enter a similar query, you may get a previously-cached list of hits, which may or may not be as relevant as if your query was actually run. This is just speculation though