The block was first reported by Pastebin, a website where you can store text online for a set period of time has reported by its social media account on December 19 that it has been blocked. In the follow-up post on December 26, the site posted that it was still blocked in India on the directions of Indian government.
So, a number of Indian users reported that while accessing internet through providers such as BSNL and Vodafone they cannot access websites such as Pastebin, Dailymotion and Github. To confirm that the sites have been blocked by BSNL, Vodafone and Hathway, a number of users also posted about the block on Reddit threads.
http://t.co/e3zRKnJJQO seems to have been blocked in India. If you are from India and unable to visit Pastebin, please email us.
— Pastebin.com (@pastebin) December 19, 2014
Now it seems to appear that the blocks are being carries out on the instructions of DoT (Department of Telecom). Regarding the same, the Telecom body reportedly issued a notification on December 17. Pranesh Prakash posted a screenshot of the circular on Twitter.
Insane! Govt orders blocking of 32 websites including @internetarchive @vimeo @github @pastebin #censorship #FoEx pic.twitter.com/F75ngSGohJ
— Pranesh Prakash (@pranesh_prakash) December 31, 2014
The notification mentions that 32 URLs including Pastebin, video sharing sites Vimeo and DailyMotion, Internet archive site archive.org and Github.com (a web-based software code repository), have been blocked under Section 69A of the Information technology Act, 2000. DoT has also asked ISPs to submit compliance reports. We tried to access these Pastebin, DailyMotion and Github on Vodafone 3G it didn’t displayed any errors but is simply blocking access.
But when we used Airtel 3G, we could access all the websites easily without any blocking. However a number of users report that they’re getting an error that says ‘the site is blocked as per the instructions of Competent Authority’. We couldn’t find any issues using Airtel 3G.
Pastebin, DailyMotion, Github and more sites blocked in India as per DoT order original content from TechnoDify. Read Our Copyright Policy & Terms of Use.
