For a couple of days now a very reliable mobile internet device service operator in India has been playing Big Brother by censoring the world’s most resilient public torrent tracker – the Pirate Bay. Now speculation about this operator’s reliability to do things like these when a movie is about to be released by the parent company’s entertainment division has reached fever pitch, however there is no conclusive evidence connecting these two temporal facts together, and thus I am not in any position to comment on that.

Alright, enough with the euphemistic name calling; it seems Reliance have decided to go up and block The Pirate Bay, Vimeo and Pastebin. Not only did they block these sites, they also managed to put up a large and highly friendly “This site has been blocked as per instructions from the Department of Telecom (DoT)” sign which is rather odd because no other ISP in India has blocked The Pirate Bay – especially the state run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) on which I am currently writing this piece.

Speculation is ripe on the fact that Reliance Entertainment is the distributor of an upcoming big budget movie Dangerous Ishhq which might be possibly will definitely be pirated and put up on various public/private trackers. To check the rate of this astoundingly high loss of revenue, Reliance may have taken up this false censor. However, what imagined evils propagate through Vimeo or Pastebin, I will never know.

The easiest way to counter this would be to access the sites via a Proxy or a VPN. However, if the ISP decides to be rather silly and only remove a DNS entry for these sites from their DNS servers, you can easily get access back to the servers by using a different DNS service, such as Google’s free DNS: 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4