Hacktivists take down Trai website

A group of `hacktivists' hacked the website of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Monday. The group Anonymous India took responsibility for the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and bringing the site down. The www.trai.gov.in site has since been restored.

However, the issue over which the site was taken down, displaying the email IDs of over 1 lakh netizens who had responded to Trai over its net neutrality consultation paper, had not been resolved. Users can still visit the comments page and check out the personal email IDs that are still intact. According to commentators, it was somewhat strange to see that Trai removed the personal email IDs.

Twitter users have been tweeting to Anonymous to keep on the pressure.

Meanwhile, Anonymous India has tweeted out an IRC link for netizens interested in talking to them. Netizens could download mIRC and then follow instructions to connect to chat room.

Earlier on Monday, Trai released the list of email IDs from which it received responses regarding Net Neutrality. This move was severely slammed by the public and at the same time saying the move had threatened the privacy of millions of internet users in the country.

The regulator had earlier asked for responses from service providers, their associations and general public for their views on regulation of OTT or over-the-top applications and services which can be accessed over the internet. The regulator's draft consultation paper also addressed issues around security and net neutrality. The regulator received over a million responses.

Trai has categorised the responses under three heads namely, ''Comments from Service Providers,'' ''Comments from Service Provider Associations'' and ''Comments from other stakeholders.'' The responses from ''other stakeholders'', namely the general public had been sorted datewise for ''easy access.'' A search for a name or an Email ID can be done with the Ctrl+F command.

Comments in the third category are being updated as and when the comments for a particular date has been compiled.

While this could be a standard procedure for all of Trai's consultation papers in the name of transparency, it had raised the hackles of the general public, with some calling it ''a blatant violation of privacy''. Several had also expressed their concerns over marketeers and spammers for whom the million plus emails were a goldmine.