Internet Service Providers in India are blocking torrent, file sharing and some video sharing websites due to court orders. Movie distribution and production house Reliance Entertainment has obtained John Doe orders that were upheld by the courts and ISPs are filtering these websites. Close on the heels of discussions on Internet censorship, this move is being seen as a move against freedom of speech, in my opinion, that's too dramatic.

Anyhow, Reliance Communications, sister company of production house Reliance Entertainment, is among the first to block websites like Vimeo. In a statement the company said going forward, they will filter and block websites without court orders and other ISPs are free to join.

Hacktivist group Anonymous decided to retaliate and started attacking government websites. Harmless Distributed Denial of Service attacks only made the websites inaccessible. Now they've done something that many technology enthusiasts will appreciate but condone. Anonymous hacked into the filtering server used by Reliance Communications and filtered a lot of websites, like Twitter.

As reported by Naveen Thakur writing for Whitec0de, visitors to Twitter web were seeing the following message from Anonymous:

Anonymous REVENGE / WE OWN YOU Told you not to mess with free speech and lesser with Anonymous [...] Dear People People We for 1 entire week attacked government websites, run by your money and no one in your government cared, then we decided to hit the Rich guys in the entertainment and IPL and Reliance and your government sprang into action. Shame on this government. It is time you people realized that this government don’t care about you. If we had attacked what belong to you they wont have minded. But if at all the smallest scratch appears on the rich and elite they are up and ready to act. Time you throw away these puppets of the rich and replace it with a new system that respect the constitution.Here is a list of all sites block by the governement and reliances Injustice !!

Here's a screenshot shared by Naveen:

The "official" twitter account for Anonymous India says they have blocked 35 sites for Reliance users:

Note: I've held back on this story for several hours speaking to @opindia_back and some other friends. @AnupamSaxena from Medianama confirmed that he is seeing the error as well.