At last it seems like India is following China's footsteps in restricting her citizens' access to the Internet. Wikileaks.org - a well known site that "publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors" (description from wikipedia entry ) has been apparently blocked by the Sarkari ISP- BSNL. Tonight, while trying to lookup a "confidential" (alas! no longer confidential) working paper (wikileaks link) about India's proposed "Multipurpose National Identity Card" (link), I was unable to reach Wikileaks.org from my BSNL Broadband connection directly, although the site could be opened through most public proxy servers. Just to verify that it is indeed the Sarkari BSNL who is trying to act smart, I connected through Airtel Mobile Office EDGE connection and I could easily view the page. What a shame for a "Democratic Republic". It seems India is really trying to join the "elite" league of countries like China and Iran. (Others kindly check if your ISP allows access to Wikileaks.org , if not try this mirror at a different IP address - wikileaks.se .)
Enforcing an application, for example a torrent client like Transmission , to always use the VPN interface or any particular network interface for that matter, is trivially simple using iptables on Debian, Ubuntu or any other GNU/Linux distro. Personally, I am running Debian Sid on the Raspberry Pi . Occasionally I use it for downloading files ( legal stuff, seriously, believe me :D ) using Transmission Bittorrent client over a VPN connection. Sometimes it happens that the VPN connection fails and doesn't reconnect for whatever reason and Transmission continues pulling stuff directly over my internet connection, which I would like to avoid. Fortunately it is very straightforward to enforce rules based on application owner UID. Transmission runs under the owner debian-transmission in Debian (use htop to check this) and the following two lines of iptables ensures that any process with owner having UID, debian-transmission , will not use any other network interface apart from the...
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