More websites including ghs.google.com blocked in Sri Lanka?

ICTs in general 1 Minute

Reports online and which I received through email indicate that more sites are being deliberately or inadvertently blocked in Sri Lanka, with most of the disruptions occurring on Sri Lanka Telecom ADSL broadband connections.

Some reports claim that domains hosted on blogger.com are being blocked, and other reports indicate that this is now a matter that is resolved. Other reports confirm that sites resolving to ghs.google.com were blocked and that ISPs have now removed the block. It is not clear why ghs.google.com was blocked.

Several organisations with their emails hosted on Google Apps reported severe problems with logging into their web mail, though POP / IMAP access worked fine.

Lanka News Web, itself blocked in Sri Lanka, now reports that another news website, Sri Lanka Guardian, is also blocked.

Coming soon after the IGP’s directive to all ISPs to “suspend licenses” of porn websites in Sri Lanka, it is worrying whether these are the first stabs at a more pervasive web filtering system in Sri Lanka.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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5 thoughts on “More websites including ghs.google.com blocked in Sri Lanka?”

  1. Restrictions on the “Freedom of Information” would not lead to good governance.

  2. Yes. I checked with SLT and TRC. If there is a porn site hosted in an IP address, the IP address is blocked resulting all the sites using that IP address being banned. SLT says its beyond their control as its what the circular from TRC says 😦

  3. SLT and other ISPs have blocked the IP ghs.google.com (72.14.203.121) because a porn website is hosted in the same IP. This is a poor technical decision made by coutry’s no 1 ISP. Dialog , as usual proves its strength in technology by blocking the porn site URL only ( Not IP based blocking)

  4. What is the role of the Colombo University School of Computing (UCSC) in all this? There have been media reports and official announcements that they are technical advisers to the TRC/SLT on this porn-blocking exercise. If they can’t handle the technicalities without disrupting services or wholesale blocking out a global service provider like Google, they must acknowledge incompetence and hand it over to someone else. There is no bigger danger than a over-zealous monkey given a razor to cut, cut, cut. (And remember what happened to the king in that story whose loyal monkey tried to kill a fly lying on the king when monarch was asleep?)

    If UCSC is indeed involved in this level of technical interference of people’s access to the web, it also raises other issues. It’s one thing for lackey officials of a statutory body to make ill-advised decisions, but quite another for academics and technical staff at a supposedly autonomous university to implement those measures…and throw the baby out with the bathwater in that process.

    Will Ruwan Weerasinghe and team please speak up?

  5. Pingback: Twitter’s down and Facebook is slow, not just for Sri Lanka « ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

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