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German State Alters DNS To Censor Web Sites [updated]
Rabenwolf writes: "In the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the first ISP (ISIS Multimedia) has given in to pressure from the state government and has started to block foreign websites with supposedly "illegal content" by changing the corresponding DNS entries. ISIS customers trying to access these sites are redirected to the website of the local government. ISPs in North Rhine-Westphalia will have to pay a fine if they continue to provide access to sites with "illegal content" through their DNS servers. It's not as bad as China or Saudi-Arabia, but it makes you think... An article from the heise newsticker is here, and if you don't sprechen Deutsch, Google might help." Update: 11/22 15:23 GMT by T : As sqrt points out, this report is misleading: "A single technican altered the DNS Entries to demonstrate it is possible. His changes were already reversed. Heise already posted a new story about this today."
Can I censor decimal numbers? They are far more stupid and dangerous than anything else.
I've found that in many cases, using the nameserver your ISP hands you will result in a 1-2 second per lookup delay - most ISPs have horribly overloaded their DNS servers. Where I work, I was seeing 2-5 seconds per lookup. I brought this to the attention of our IT staff, and had them reconfigure our plant nameserver to do the lookup directly. Name lookups went from 2-5 seconds to <100 msec. Since we are a large shop with lots of clients, it makes sense.
Running your own caching nameserver will speed up your browsing, and if you use a real name server package, you can configure it to do the lookups itself rather than going through your ISP's servers. Thus, you can prevent them from screwing with your DNS, you can use alternate root servers if you so choose, and you get better response.
I'm somewhat shocked that Assimilation-XP doesn't have a caching nameserver....
www.eFax.com are spammers