India Blocks Youtu.be and Airtel does Keyword Filtering

Update [22/08/2012 15:09] Some three hours after this article was published, Airtel has unblocked the youtu.be domain and also removed the keyword filters. That was quick but does it mean that they were blocking the domains without getting any court order?

India has recently requested websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to remove pages that contain “inflammatory and hateful content” as these may have been used for spreading rumors in the country that resulted in the exodus of thousands of people from Bangalore and other Indian cities.

India has also placed a temporary ban on sending of bulk text messages (you cannot send more than 5 SMS per day) to contain the spread of rumors in the country.

Visitors to the YouTu.ce website in India are greeted with this page.

Youtu.be Blocked in India

It is not exactly known which pages have been blocked in India following the recent events but at least one website that has been completely blocked in the country is youtu.be which is the short domain for YouTube.com. The main YouTube website isn’t blocked but the Indian court has ordered ISPs to block all youtu.be/* URLs possibly because these short URLs were used for sharing “inflammatory” videos on Twitter and Facebook.

Such a ban can however be easily circumvented by replacing youtu.be in the URL with youtube.com/watch?v= as shown below:

http://youtu.be/videoID [Blocked]
http://youtube.com/watch?v=videoID [Accessible]

Airtel Implements Keyword Based Filtering

Indian ISP Airtel has taken an extreme step to comply with the court order.

They have implemented keyword based URL filtering and are blocking all web pages that contain youtu.be anywhere in the URL. For instance, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtu.be is blocked and so is labnol.org/what-is-youtu.be (a non-existent page).

In fact, I could not publish this article to my blog because the HTTP POST request had the string “youtu.be” and Airtel filters would block it everytime I hit the publish button. As a workaround, I replaced all youtu.be instances in the story with youtu.xe before publishing and then used MySQL queries to directly update the database.

Indian ISPs are famous for reading too much into these court orders around blocking. When India asked ISPs to block a couple of Blogspot blogs in 2006, they blacklisted the *.blogspot.com domain itself thus blocking access to all blogs in India.

What it takes to be a Facebook India Ambassador

Facebook has introduced a new Ambassador program in India to promote the usage of Facebook on mobile phones in the country.

The requirements are simple and everyone can participate. You are supposed to convince your friends to install the Facebook app on their mobile phones. Once the app is installed, your friend will also have to associate his or her mobile phone number with Facebook.

You can then pass on this list of phone numbers to Facebook India and users who bring the maximum number of conversions will be rewarded with the Facebook Ambassador status.

There’s no compensation involved and going forward, you may be required to promote Facebook in your school as stated in the TOS document.

If instructed by Facebook, you will engage in activities to promote Facebook.

Such activities may include working with your school administration to setup the authentic page for your school on Facebook, creating you college Yearbook on Facebook, uploading pictures of each class and tagged students in the pictures, organizing a Facebook Day on Campus that focuses on educating the audience about using Facebook on mobile devices, etc.

It also possible to use Facebook in India without a data plan but am not too sure if that will count as a valid entry for the Ambassadors program.