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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."
Do you have oil? If you do, then this corruption is a worldwide tragedy which must be stopped, we'll send troops^Wobservers right away.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I.E. Google pages
And put the site in many places so it isn't as easy to silence.
While hijacking DNS of a small domain may go unnoticed
Hijacking say Google's or Yahoo's DNS could possibly be highly noticed by the citizens.
It's amazing how easily entire countries of people can be manipulated. China is in the spotlight now but it is nothing compared to countries like North Korea who will get thrown in jail if they have a cell phone for fear that people will actually figure out that nothing they are told is true.
Get the word out about tor. Vidalia is an easy to use controller. This is the exact sort of time when a network and protocol like onion routing is extremely valuable.
I got a catholic block.
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.
... I put up site that supports the corruption of the party in control?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
a. What is known about this in Paraguay? Are people aware that this is going on?
b. What can those of us outside Paraguay do to help? Mirror sites, etc?
JG
-- "...I'm a bad guy because I, well, I sing some rock-and-roll songs." M. Manson
If I were Paraguayan right now I would be spamming every forum I knew of with the argument of corruption, regardless of what the forum was about, so anyone using the net in Paraguay/the world is likely to see part of the message at least once.. If they couldn't post the whole idea at once, I would do it in parts, on a stay tuned kind of basis, and just keep the coverage of your spamming campaign as diverse as possible so no single entity can silence it...Think anonymous.
Seriously, Paraguayans should be spamming this news story..right now.
http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/5845/extenso2rk7.png
might also catch googles attention, who happens to have a market cap 400% greater the gdp of paraguay...
yeah trade one broken DNS for another except opendns shows adverts, resolves everything (breaking apps) and tracks every DNS request just like spyware except the t&c does mention this if you read it
to be honest you have to be ignorant and stupid if you think opendns is a solution to anything (except the owners pocket books)
They are hosting some of them at googlepages now.
Anyhow, they are not small domains the ones that were hijacked. One of them is the official page of the party.
This is not something that could ever go unnoticed.
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....
The only people they have to prevent noticing it are a majority of the population of their country.
And they probably have control of the media there, so this probably will go unnoticied by most people, until some time long after the elections, if ever.
They might not care if a few dozen technically-inclined people in their country happen to notice, or if people in other countries notice.
Govt' can explain away the "hijacking" as a technical problem, and people may buy the government's technical explanations over anything "some Americans" or some DNS nerds have to say about it. The gov't can just throw in jail or use ad-hominem attacks to marginalize the folks that claim they did something bad.
After all, the government is known by most to be a more "trustworthy" and "valid" source for that type of information.
Billy Bob just accusing the gov't folks of wrongdonig because he's a protestor, extremist, seditionist, has a beef with the gov't, etc.
They will either convince their people to believe it or intimidate their people into believing it, and either approach works all the same.
Oh yeah, hijack a site saying you're corrupt. What a great way to prove that you're not.
There are quite a few dubious claims in that article, but the most unbelievable is the implication that Bush knows that a country called Paraguay exists.
They are using our OpenDNS servers as the control group. We've been noticing that a lot lately.
Plus, a lot of folks are using http://cache.opendns.com/ to start checking the records of their personal site from around the world.
# Hack the planet, it's important.
It's an alternate root, not a proxy server. I don't have the hate-on for OpenDNS that the GP does, but it does have several weaknesses as a service which caused me to stop using it.
The biggest problem, and one that the GP alluded to, is that OpenDNS resolves *everything* to a sort of 'parking' page. If you're using OpenDNS and you type in a bogus URL, rather than just not resolving, you'll get a redirect to an OpenDNS page. This is, IMO, misbehavior. However, there's no incentive for OpenDNS to stop, because it's on these pages that they place advertising and pay for themselves.
This behavior is particularly obnoxious when you combine it with an additional level of caching DNS. Let's say you have a DNS server on your LAN (like most home gateway/routers) and you point it to OpenDNS. If you're working with a site that may or may not exist -- say one that you're trying to configure -- OpenDNS will give you the parking page if it can't be found. But your local DNS server will cache the redirect, and it can take a while to purge. (I'm not sure what TTL they're set to, but it's evidently longer than it should be.) The upshot of this is that a site can look 'down' even though it ought to be up, because intermediate DNS servers cache the bogus OpenDNS result, rather than just failing to resolve.
I think it's great that there's an alternate root, and I really like that OpenDNS exists. It's a great concept. I just think their execution deviates from accepted practice and standards, and that's no way to run a DNS server. Too much rides on it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.)
/., 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.
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
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.
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Actually they don't have control over the media
Most news papers are in the hands of rich people.
They are more in favor of the blue party here.
This incident was on television here last night.
There are no stupid questions, Just a lot of inquisitive idiots. (from a good friend)