Update: our readers are suggesting that the block is on other ISPs as well. Additionally, MediaNama has also confirmed that the block was instituted because the Delhi High Court passed a John Doe order, allowing Reliance Big Pictures to prevent piracy of its movie Singham. Reliance Big Pictures then told ISPs to prevent the sharing of the film Singham online, because of which ISPs blocked access to filesharing sites. Details here. Earlier today: It appears that Bharti Airtel has started blocking selected file sharing sites for its customers on both Internet and Mobile, or is at least testing such blocking. This was first reported by Sushubh of India Broadband Forum, late evening, yesterday, when Airtel started blocking file sharing sites including Mediafire.com, Megaupload.com, Rapidshare.com, Sendspace.com, Megavideo.com, VideoBB.com, Novamov.com, Movshare.com, Putlocker.com, Hotfile.com, Fileserve.com, Filesonic.com, Filesonic.in, Depositfiles.com, Wupload.com, Uploaded.to, and Uploadstation.com. We tried accessing all the above sites and found that all except Mediafire, Sendspace and Rapidshare were working on an Airtel broadband connection. The pages were redirecting to a landing page which mentions that "The site has been blocked as per instructions from the Department of Telecom." Update: Mediafire works some times. We tried accessing the same sites through a Vodafone 3G, and both MTNL broadband and MTNL 3G connection and found that they had not been blocked. Here is a trace route path to Sendspace, one of the blocked sites. As a user on the India Broadband Forum pointed out, the requests go through flagtel servers in all cases of…
