from Hacker News

DuckDuckGo coming back online in India following country-wide block

by chopraaa on 7/5/20, 4:34 PM with 32 comments

  • by chopraaa on 7/5/20, 7:56 PM

    DDG was blocked for the past several days. The issue came up on /r/duckduckgo and /r/india, following which the Internet Freedom Foundation wrote to the Department of Telecom [1]

    DDG is working for me again (it's my default search engine) so that's a relief. In the past, the government or the ISPs in India have nonchalantly blocked several websites and even NSFW sub-reddits. The IFF even has a dump of blocking orders issued by courts leaked by a whistleblower. [2]

    [1] https://internetfreedom.in/blocking-of-duckduckgo-needs-to-b...

    [2] https://internetfreedom.in/whistleblower-provides-website-bl...

  • by BelleOfTheBall on 7/5/20, 6:49 PM

    It's quite scary to think that some countries can just instantly axe access to important services like that. This time it was, supposedly, a mistake. What if next time they decide to block Wikipedia or something like that? I know they tried to block Telegram before the citizens pushed back.

  • by saagarjha on 7/5/20, 7:09 PM

    I'm curious how blocks happen in India. Does some random government agency just wake up one day and decide to block off part of the internet? Is there any sort of citizen involvement?

  • by occamschainsaw on 7/6/20, 6:05 AM

    Anecdatum of one. I didn’t notice this block. I am in India and use ddg on all my devices. I also use cloudflare dns so that could be the reason.

  • by pmoriarty on 7/5/20, 6:33 PM

    Somehow I find the unblock more troubling than the block, because it could mean that India has found a way to compromise DDG searches.

  • by raffraffraff on 7/5/20, 9:20 PM

    Now they can have awful search results again.

    I would love to be able to say "use ddg, they respect your privacy and they're almost as good as Google" but several times today I got mind-bogglingly bad results from it. Same search in Google... Yes, these are the results I was looking for.

    What's really odd is that i reran one of those searches just now and the results aren't actually as bad. Super confused.