Slashdot Mirror
Argentina Censors Over a Million Blogs
In his first accepted submission, bs0d3 writes "A judge in Argentina ordered ISPs to block two websites — leakymails.com and leakymails.blogspot.com. According to Google, many ISPs have simply blocked the IP 216.239.32.2 instead of using a targeted DNS filter. Over a million blogs are hosted by Blogger at this IP. Freedom of speech advocate Jillian York wrote, 'IP blocking is a blunt method of filtering content that can erase from view large swaths of innocuous sites by virtue of the fact that they are hosted on the same IP address as the site that was intended to be censored. One such example of overblocking by IP address can be found in India, where the IP blocking of a Hindu Unity website (blocked by an order from Mumbai police) resulted in the blocking of several other, unrelated sites."
Wrong headline: a judge ordered two websites blocked, not "over a million blogs".
I'm from argentina. I've lived here all my life and I'm in Buenos Aires as I write this.
If the state is guilty of something regarding internet and new technology here, is barely knowing of its existance. This is not the result of "censorship" as this dumb summary claims.
This is a fuckup, nothing more.
Of course, emos and other trash from Taringa will blow it out of proportion claiming it's wide-spread censorship, and try to politicize the hell out of it.
I can't believe I found out first on Slashdot.
I'd like to thank my very smart representatives, courts, lawyers and public prosecutors who made this happen. Apparently Google will be investing in solving the situation, otherwise those of us technologically not challenged will be doing what we can.
This is probably a screw-up more than censorship. Given the popularity of Blogspot, I suspect the people who did this just simply entered in a website, got an IP address, and added an iptables rule or equivalent, without looking or realizing what they were blocking. Hell, that could even be scripted, and I could easily see an intern or low-level staff having just entered "leakymails.blogspot.com" into a script without knowing what happened behind the scenes. I know ISPs hate net neutrality, but it's really not in their best interests to completely cut off access to blogspot.com; even if they have a monopoly they're just going to get flooded with complaints, with real competitive advantage in return to justify the added cost.
Barring a simple but stupid mistake like this from someone routing traffic, IANAL but it should not be the ISP's responsibility to not only screw with people's internet access at the request of the government, but go the extra mile and cut off access to the entire service provider. If we allow that kind of action, then we'll see a whole array of other sites getting blocked at a national level. Then, in an effort to keep themselves accessible around the world, we'll see hosting providers around the world bend over backwards to censor themselves and their users just because somebody, somewhere in the world, might object to some kind of political content one of their users posted.
A fake DNS record, or a NX domain for leakymails.blogspot.com would be easily circumvented simply by using opendns, the google dns, or any other DNS server out there.
Firewalling the IP is much more secure.
Sure, one could use a proxy, tor or an SSH tunnel to some box outside of the firewall, but that's much more work.
Not that I think that censoring sites is a good idea, just discussing the technical details.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
"Well, we could talk a calm rational look at the issues, and seek ways to hide the truly awful stuff. This would generally allow us to be praised rather than condemned, as our strikes iwll be surgically precise with a minimum of casualties and dissent..."
"...F*** it. Just close your eyes and start firing. That will show us for the strong leaders we are." ...Seriously thats about the kindest way i could possibly imagine the meeting to plan this policy went.
No Streisand effect? Come on I want to know what was it they wanted to block!
But... the future refused to change.
"...IP blocking of a Hindu Unity website ..."
I can understand the judge's reasons for trying to prevent a flash mob of Hindu fanatics wielding axes and swords.
This makes a good case for IPV6 so every site/device will have their own IP instead of sharing one IP for a million blogs.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Perhaps you should stop watching Fox News.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
They must have screwed up. Argentina is a shitty 3rd world country where justice doesn't exist. Nobody goes to jail. Maybe in an extreme case like multiple homicides, but they do they get a slap on the wrist and get released in a couple of years time. So, even if the blogs had illegal content there is no way they have been blocked intentionally.
Leakymails was posting bullshit about peoplel and that was the reason it gets closed. Its a looooooooot different from wikileaks, this site invents the material that post.
A judge in Argentina ordered ISPs to block two websites -- leakymails.com and leakymails.blogspot.com. According to Google, many ISPs have simply blocked the IP 216.239.32.2 instead of using a targeted DNS filter.
"Argentina" didn't do anything. The government didn't pass a law. A judge ordered two URLs to be blocked.
Idiot ISPs blocked an IP address that led to a million blogs.
The title should read: Inept Argentinian ISPs Block a Million Blogs Rather Than Blocking Two URLs to Satisfy Court Ruling
It probably was the internet + American TV series & other culture that modified it's grammar and writing style just like it did to me.
Never attribute to malice, what you can attribute to stupidity.
Someone must've honestly thought that one IP = one site. One can only wonder how someone that stupid can work on ISP networking.
... that modified it's grammar and writing style just like it did to me.
Um, no. bmuon's grammar is correct.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
banning entire blocks of addresses is ridiculously overzealous, injust, and indicates laziness and ignorance on the part of the administrator.
that didnt make me any friends in the irc ops.
I'm sure there are a few others on here who have Blogger-hosted blogs that had their own host and FTP, and had to go through the 'switch', where Blogger hosts the blog (and you have to re-point your DNS/folder/etc), and no longer allowing blogs to be posted via FTP.
This makes it that much more of a pain, if something as simple as this can block so many Blogger-hosted blogs, including many that might have been self-hosted previously.
I have Arnet as ISP, I can ping the mentioned address without problems.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/argentina-isps-ip-overblocking
... that modified it's grammar and writing style just like it did to me.
Um, no. bmuon's grammar is correct.
"modified" != "incorrect".
In other words, the grammar is technically correct, but the syntax and grammatical structure is not congruent with typical American usage.
More's the pity... most Americans have such a poor grasp of the only language they speak that they couldn't debate their way out of a paper bag if their opponent were a wet sock. I wish it weren't so, and I am quite concerned about my country's future. Don't think I'm just bashing Americans. We're already well on our way to overthrowing ourselves, thank you very much.
Bread and circuses, indeed.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
There are a lot of talk from a couple of you saying this is because the ISPs are being stupid, but how would you recommend they implement the order?
THEY CANNOT JUST RETURN A NXDOMAIN. If they did, all someone would have to do is enter the domain name into their hosts file, or use an out-of-country server.
I suppose they could use DPI, but it is expensive and normally ineffective for encrypted traffic (I suppose someone could still VPN to another country, but that's another layer of difficulty). An IP block is the only reasonable action they could take to fulfill the order.
The ISP is taking the only reasonable technical measure they can. The judge should send an order to blogspot to shut down the sites, if they do, blogger is in compliance with Argentinean law, if they don't they are violating Argentinian law (making it not unreasonable to block the entire illegal site). When a server is found to have kiddy-porn in the US, we seize the whole server, without regard to if it is a shared server. While I may find the laws of Argentina offensive, ordering aggressive responses to violations of the law is not outside the purview of ANY judge.
I see many (way too many) kirchneristas here. You're doomed. I don't care if your mother got 50%, I WILL KILL HER AND ANYONE IN BETWEEN.
Idiot ISPs blocked an IP address that led to a million blogs.
It's apparently hard to understand without much facts of network protocols that ISP did not have much to choose from. Most ISP's don't even have capability filtering URL's. Filtering URL's requires devices (firewalls with IDS/IPS capability) which can examine HTTP traffic in TCP/IP. Routers which is the bread and butter of ISP's will not do because those operate on bare IP level. All you can do with routers ACL's is allow/block IP addresses, ports and protocols -- that's all.
And if you ever have bought a firewalls for redundant, fat pipes (many 10GE, 40GE, ...) and fast firewall with IDS/IPS you certainly know that it doesn't come cheap. I have some clue as I do run bunch of those among other big irons. You simply cannot just pop in the BestBuy to pick one either, it takes some time to order, get delivered, test and then deploy as if you f*ck-up with that kind of environment you get some feedback from your not so kind customers.
That is exactly the reason some countries site blocks are done with DNS and which is dead easy to circumvent. It's cheaper for ISP's and government usually doesn't have a clue so it's good enough for them.
So the ISP's did not have DNS redirecting (blocking), no big iron firewalls to block URL's and they did what they had to do with the existing infrastructure capabilties they have. The other option would have been not complying and possibly facing consequences they thought would be wise to avoid.
You may call them idiots. However I would have done exactly the same thing what they did. It may even be that the judge now finds hard way the facts and leaves ISP's in the future some time to comply as it takes some time to get the gear which can do these things nicely and not spilling the beans all over in hurry.
If they did use DNS filtering, we'd be laughing at them because it is ridiculously ineffective.
(So is this, of course. Using a proxy is no more difficult than switching your DNS server, if not less.)
I just set up this hidden host in TOR with a mirror of leakymails documents. It includes a way to search the documents.
If you are using tor:
http://7dtvr7xyzew6hokj.onion/
If you are not using tor:
https://7dtvr7xyzew6hokj.tor2web.org/
According to the above story, not a judge, just the police in Mumbai. Of course, despite all the bombings & terror attacks in the last 20 years in Bombay, er Mumbai to date being done by Muslims, Hindus are the problem here. Makes total sense.
I've seen that site: it's a political site advocating that Hindus unite against pro-Muslim parties in India turning a blind eye to Muslim extremism in India. In other words, that's about as true censorship as one can get, unlike, say cops in the US trying to monitor myspace.com for its usage by schoolkids plotting school shootings. In short, it's not a law enforcement issue that they face there: it's a political issue. And a stupid one, since that site hasn't been updated in ages (last I looked), and so people visit it weren't likely to go back after a few days.
I have no idea about the Argentine site, but I do think that if it was like the Facebook pages in the UK inciting violence, I'd only blame the ISPs for not doing it right, but certainly not the judge. But if it was something like what's been indicated - some sort of a wikileaks site for Argentina - I certainly don't support the ban, but the ISPs in question don't exactly have the prerogative of disobeying a court order.
Not's the beginning, not's the end. Same's than the the Chavez's way.
This makes a good case for IPV6 so every site/device will have their own IP instead of sharing one IP for a million blogs.
If a website is being hosted by a web hosting service, how does that solve this problem? Was the original problem that the Blogger sites that ended up being banned were behind a NAT - in other words, were each of the hosts on a separate web server on a LAN, or were each blogspot server hosting a bunch of their publishers? I'll bet it was a combination of both - the leakyemail account may have been sharing it w/ several other blogs, but there may have been a bunch of servers alongside it sharing 216.239.32.2. So an IPv6 arrangement would have seen to it that all the other servers that didn't host this blogger account wouldn't have been blocked, but at the same time, all the other accounts that did share the same server would have the same problem.
/. anarchist, scream 'censorship' whenever any such move happens in any country. If the reason for a ban is something like trying to conceal a corrupt deal, or curb political freedoms, like say, Tibet, of course I'm against it, and IPv4 or IPv6 is irrelevant. But if the reason is that law enforcement has seen that certain websites are being used to plan riots or other criminal activity, I'm fully for it! I certainly don't want al-Qaeda, or Hamas, or Lashkar-e-Toiba, or Hizbullah to be able to plot attacks online and their contents to be left open for their agents in the US, or Israel, or India, or any other country, to see and execute to. If stopping a terrorist act from being plotted successfully online is censorship, give me more of it: I don't care what the online Che fans think!!!
The IPv6 is a solution when any organization - say a web hosting company - has several servers, and needs a unique IP for each. But if a single IPv6 is shared, that solution goes away. Also, while in this case the target was Blogger, if a country decides to target an organization, say the BBC, for blocking, then they'd simply block the BBC's network interface part of the address i.e. the first 64 bits of the address, and so any of the potential 18 quintillion addresses that the BBC could use would automatically be blocked as well. That would be the closest thing to blocking a NATed IPv4 address.
On the other issue, however, I do not oppose such a ban until I know the reasons: I'm not going to, like the average
headline says nothing about a judge blocking anything - but that a million blogs gets censored, which appears to be the truth.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
There are a MILLION blogs on this one pair of websites? How many readers could they possibly have?
"No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." -- Lily Tomlin
The past 8 years on Argentina have been strange, to put it mildly. I've never seen people so polarized about the current administration (and the previous one, which was the current Presidents' husband) in my life. Roughly 50% will approve anything the government does, while the rest will not hesitate to note that we have a very poorly managed economy, the second highest inflation rate in the world, weakened institutions and a new case of official corruption coming to light every other week.
This blockade was due to a court ruling regarding a site called LeakyMails, which supposedly posted hacked mails between government officials. These weren't exactly flattering, to put it mildly. I honestly don't know about the legality of such mails going public (i beleive that all communications between public employees regarding their work should be available to the citizenship), but this is another misstep on an long list of poor decisions. Very poor ones.
For example, the official crusade against "opposing" media is way worse than this - one of Argentinas' main media conglomerates had, over the course of two years:
- One of its main distribution plants for newspaper blocked by trucks affiliated with the transport union (CGT),
- One of its main directives harassed for several years under accusations of having its sons being illegally adopted during the last military dictatorship in the 70s. Not a single shred of evidence was ever presented for this, other than suspicious timings- Recent DNA analysis has proven this to be false.
- An official ruling which impossibilited the sale of one of their newspapers in the Central Market of Buenos Aires,
- Revoked its contract to televise soccer matches, which is now handled directly by the government which pays an astronomic cost each year with taxpayers money.
- A new media law passed with shady articles, tailored specifically to hurt this conglomerate. Several of them are currently in hold after being declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
We're living some crazy times down here. The Leakymails fiasco is yet another item in a very long list of poor decisions taken by a government which i feel it will remembered as one of the worse we ever had in a couple of years.
Hjf's account is, obviously, partial and exaggerated. He has taken a side and from that PoV takes thing out of proportion: this is by no accounts the "reality" (if such a thing exists) within our country. The anti-government faction is pulling this spin in every story about the political climate or the government actions: that is becoming a dictatorship, there's no freedom of press, etcetera etcetera.
This is simply and bluntly not true. For starters, "Cristina was president but Nestor ruled" is merely misoginy in disguise: why would you think she's the puppet, and not viceversa or none at all? Later, the blocking of the press was not a blockade at all (they had ANOTHER ENTIRE DOOR to exit the plant, but they didn't use it in order to get this censorship idea out there) and it was due to a worker's true demand (the group is known, in the journalism milieu, for having lousy respect for their workers rights...) And what he calls "technicalities" are actually the effective action under anti-monopolic laws that are finally being set in our country, and of course fought by this (monopolic) press group.
But of course, that's another opinion (mine, and that of 50% of the country according to the last elections); and i'm not writing here to convince you either way. I just chime in so outsiders don't take propaganda as fact.
Just what the subject says...
We in Argentina have presidential elections in October.
If you are an Argentinean, think about this censorship, think about the fines they issued at anyone doing private (and real) inflation indexes, think about the current government war agains one of the mayor TV, radio, newspapers and magazines producer.
Think about all that and then decide who you are going to vote.
used to, you could see the ban lists for irc channels (sometimes servers). they regularly did stuff like ban *.il or whatever.