What reason could they have for blocking DDG? Is it easier to find pirated content there than on Google or something? That's my best guess. I can't imagine they'd block on behalf of a competitor or something.
You never know. Could be a mistake where they were trying to block a certain path due to some search result of copyright infringement, but ended up banning the domain itself. One can only guess.
Reddit and Github have previously been temporarily banned in India due to similar "mistakes"
Unless the site uses certificate pinning its possible to do a downgrade attack that forces browser off of HTTPS. The extension HTTPS Everywhere is a stopgap against this
things that do stuff like this can't, they try whatever tricks are possible to push javascript or redirects to send the client browser to something non https, on port 80
Heads up, that site was injected with a ton of malware/adware and redirects. Possibly their ad network got hosed, but that site doesn't seem safe unless you are locked down.
This is not about the block a month ago. This is a new block.
When it was blocked a month ago, there was no notice. Now, there is a notice that it is a TRAI order. usually seen on sites that the govt themselves ask to block (piratebay, torrentz.eu, etc)
I guess its only limited to some regions. I'm using Airtel for my home connection as well mobile and get redirected to https everytime I visit the http version of ddg on both connections.
Airtel is so big they use roaming for their customers. If you have a SIM from Bengaluru and go to Delhi you'll see the little R indicator. That suggests the Airtel business in each state manages at least parts of their network independently. And so the MitMs could be deployed non-uniformly.
India used to be and still is split into several telecom regions with different spectrum leasing, operations and governance.
Until around 2009-10, when you are traveling out of state, you had to pay roaming charges. Worse used to be metro cities within their own states as they used to be different telecom circles. I used to pay roaming charges when going to Chennai from rest of Tamil Nadu. Even the operators were different sometimes. E.g. there was no Hutch (now Vodafone) originally in rest of Tamil Nadu and they operated only in Chennai. Similarly RPG (later Aircel which went bankrupt couple of years back) had 2 networks - RPG in Chennai and Aircel in rest of Tamil Nadu. It used to be a mess.
No operator had pan-India operation as every small operator had their own fiefdoms and the big operators like Airtel used to pay roaming charges to those operators for their subscribers to get signal.
But Airtel really, really wants to run scripts and show ads on blocked pages.
Duckduckgo - https://i.postimg.cc/SqkRhpRC/Mozilla-Firefox-29-09-20-w-PA....
Pirate Bay - https://i.postimg.cc/qMmwMXVY/t-29-09-20-9-Dv.png