NEW DELHI | BENGALURU: Following angry protests by Internet users over blocking of over 60 websites and weblinks in India, including those belonging to popular online tools like GitHub and SourceForge, the government said it has initiated steps to unblock some of the websites after consulting with them.As per information provided by the secretary in the department of electronics and information technology, officials from anti-terrorism squad in Mumbai in November had requested blocking of 32 websites/pages. The letter from ATS Mumbai also said anti-national groups were using social media for mentoring Indian youth to join Jihadi activities.According to government sources, these websites work on page hosting concept. Many of these websites do not require any authentication, while others upload articles, videos or photos to download the contents which help to hide identities. These websites were being used frequently for pasting, communicating such content by just changing page name, even blocking the earlier one. Arvind Gupta, the head of BJP’s IT cell, tweeted: “The websites that have been blocked were based on an advisory by Anti-Terrorism Squad, and were carrying anti-India content from ISIS.”“The sites that have removed objectionable content and/or cooperated with the ongoing investigations, are being unblocked,” Gupta added.The websites that will be unblocked are web hosting service Weebly, videosharing websites Vimeo and Dailymotion, and gist.github.com. Based on an order issued by the country’s telecom department, in a letter dated December 17 and a subsequent letter on December 19, over 60 websites were asked to be blocked by various internet service providers in the country. While some internet service providers are yet to block these websites, many users have been reporting frequent outages in these web services over the last two weeks.Websites like Pastebin don’t host any content but are a platform for users to paste text. “Thee are providing very dangerous kind of cut-and-paste services. You can take a code, cut it, paste it, remove it or delete it,” said one government official, who requested anonymity.The government invoked section 69A of the Information technology Act (2000) and Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking for Access of Information by Public) Rules (“Blocking Rules”) to ban these websites.Many websites have been blocked in India from time to time on various grounds. In September, following the Muzaffarnagar riots, over 80 websites and weblinks on social media were blocked.The inclusion of services like GitHub and SourceForge that host code for open source software caused much anger among the developer community. “Sometimes they might need to block specific URLs, but blocking the entire website is wrong or they haven’t thought through it,” said Thejesh GN, co-founder of Datameet and an open source developer.“There is also a lack of transparency where people don’t get to know why their sites were blocked,” he added. “We’re aware of reports of connectivity issues in India. We’re looking into it and will update with more information when we have it,” a GitHub spokesperson said.In June 2014, the Delhi High Court ordered blocking of 472 file-sharing websites including Google Docs and Pirate Bay following a complaint filed by Sony Entertainment. The entertainment company was hacked and contents from its servers were shared by hackers on various file-sharing websites.In earlier instances, many websites have been blocked for copyright infringement as well.“Courts unfortunately are not exercising restraint and are indulging ignorant copyright lawyers,” said Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at the Centre for Internet and Society. Prakash said that most of the sites on the list don’t host copyrighted material themselves and a case can not be made against them.