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

No oil

[Gothmolly]

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.

They should host the site on high-profile domains

[mysidia]

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.

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.

Gret way to prove uncorrupt

[a_generic_name]

Oh yeah, hijack a site saying you're corrupt. What a great way to prove that you're not.

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.