Paraguay Telco Hijacks DNS Before Elections

MrJones writes "In Paraguay we are at T-9 days to national elections. The ruling party has been in power for nearly 61 years (including more than 30 years of dictatorship). Now the state-run ADSL company is hijacking the DNS nationwide of a site that denounces the corruption in the party."

Comments

Census of cyberspace censoring

[KillerCow]

In 1993, Internet pioneer John Gilmore said "the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", and we believed him. In 1996, cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow issued his 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace' at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, and online. He told governments: "You have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement that we have true reason to fear."

At the time, many shared Barlow's sentiments. The Internet empowered people. It gave them access to information and couldn't be stopped, blocked or filtered. Give someone access to the Internet, and they have access to everything. Governments that relied on censorship to control their citizens were doomed.

Today, things are very different. Internet censorship is flourishing.

Read more at: Internet Censorship.

Re:Down with goverment censorship

[orasio]

In fatc, the issue now at Paraguay is different.
China is a communist country, where manipulating the media is justified by their ideology.

Paraguay is a country ruled by a conservative coalition. Their means of manipulating the media are much more occidental, and ruled by market news.

In other words, what happens now in Paraguay is just an expanded version of what happens in most occidental countries. Big interests control everything, corrupt government people follow those interests, and use the weight of government + corporations to keep in power.

In South America, we call that "la rosca". In the US it would be "coporate lobbysts".

What I mean is that you shouldn't look at what happens in Paraguay as a third world thing. To me, it's a risk we all have.

Venezuela

[Gocho]

Same thing happened in Venezuela last year during the last referendum (which Chavez lost, BTW). The newly nationalized CANTV (the main Telco) hijacked all of its customers DNS to block access to the two biggest anti-chavez websites (NoticieroDigital and Noticias24). Nothing new here but good, old fascist techniques....

I disagree - Gilmore's statement is accurate

[arete]

I'm not trying to pretend I know what Gilmore MEANT by his statement, but the way the first statement reads to me I certainly think is true. (I'm not saying there aren't bad things going on we should fight against - only that the statement is only false for a very idealist and broad interpretation.)

First let's strip away youthful idealism - routing around it doesn't mean it NEVER works or magically disappears - it just means it's much less likely to work, easier to fix, etc.

Second, let's be clear that "the Internet" includes all of us. When someone involved with that site posts it to /., that's part of routing around, and so is when we blog about it. This includes us doing hard work to keep it that way.

Finally, while it's obviously possible to keep information _out_ (away from some people), it's very hard to keep information _in_ on the internet. If you're going to (for the purposes of this discussion) strictly interpret the word censorship until it was only one of these things, it would definitely be the attempt to keep information in.

Traditionally censorship is keeping you from printing a newspaper (or killing you if you do) - that's different than going around town and taking away all the newspapers you can find, which is what's really going on here. The second technique only completely silences the _author_ if the newspaper only circulates inside that town.

Again, I'm not saying this isn't bad... but in pre-Internet censorship we wouldn't even HEAR about this story. Wikileaks is a great example of the Internet being positive in this regard. The world knows about Tibet. The Great Firewall doesn't even really keep people from viewing outside content - you just need a little technical savvy - and a lot of bravery! - to view outside content.

Re:Down with goverment censorship

[hey!]

Paraguay is a country ruled by a conservative coalition.

Which only goes to show what my old bolshie Uncle Ivan used to say. "Kid," he'd say, "nobody believes in capitalism. Nobody believes in socialism. It's socialism for me, and capitalism for you!" Ivan may have been a red, but he was a cynic first and foremost, and that keeps you honest.

In the end, there is only one thing that really matters in any system: transparency. At least if the system is supposed to be run for the benefit of the people who live under it. You can be all for the proletariat, or all for the free market, but if you're pulling the wool of the peoples' eyes, you aren't any different from anybody else running a con behind high sounding priciples.