Following the idea of Secure The News, I wanted to verify if the Indian news websites have proper certificates or can they be viewed over Tor network.

The major problem was to get the list of urls, and I managed to create that from the Wikipedia list of Indian news organizations. Next, I had to write a straightforward Python script to verify the sites over Tor.

I have 181 site URLs and out of those, 5 are down. Among the rest 176 sites, surprisingly all but 3 sites could not be open from Tor network. The following 3 sites are blocking the users from Tor, thus, compromising the privacy and security Tor Browser provides to their readers.

• http://www.dnaindia.com/
• http://www.financialexpress.com/
• http://www.jagran.com/

On the other hand, when it comes to enabling HTTPS by default and redirecting people to that, most of these sites failed miserably.

117 sites do not provide their sites over HTTPS. If you do not know why it is important to provide the same, please read this. If you don’t know how to enable HTTPS on your website, you can read this guide.

This is the list of the URLs who are only on HTTP.