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Paraguay Telco Hijacks DNS Before Elections
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Apr 12, 2008 01:54 PM
from the can't-say-that-here dept.
from the can't-say-that-here dept.
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."
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No oil (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No oil (Score:4, Interesting)
So, I think we will side with the ruling party in this one.
Parent
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I suspect they are there to assist with anti-terrorism activities in the the remote tri-border area in southern Brazil.
http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/pdf-files/TerrOrgCrime_TBA.pdf [loc.gov]
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PBZ/is_5_84/ai_n7069238 [findarticles.com]
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They should host the site on high-profile domains (Score:5, Informative)
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:They should host the site on high-profile domai (Score:2)
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Re:They should host the site on high-profile domai (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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 e
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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.
Down with goverment censorship (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Down with goverment censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Down with goverment censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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You don't have to worry only about the government censorship - corporate media censors items when it fits their interests too. While the article is about Paraguay, even in the US "land of the free" we have censorship and outright lies broadcast as news every day. Fox news had reporters fired [youtube.com] when they refused to lie in one of their reporting pieces. They sued under the whistleblower laws but lost.
Here's the chilling verdict [wikipedia.org]: There is no law in the US that news cannot lie to you. Or for better wording -
TOR (Score:4, Interesting)
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Hm.. yes.. but is there much to stop them from putting up "phony" exit nodes that also hijack the site?
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Yes. We first have to stop electing corporatist authoritarians who believe they have a God-given right to meddle in the affairs of other sovereign countries.
You can look at almost every single right-wing dictatorship and tin-pot tyrant in the world and find the fingerprints of the Nixon, Reagan, Bush I or Bush II administrations. Iran-Contra, Noriega, Saddam, Osama, Musharraf, Co
Augh? (Score:2)
The "Ironic Party"?
Links to English Versions (Score:2)
There are other languages available at those links (hay otros idiomas disponibles en los enlaces).
Census of cyberspace censoring (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [schneier.com].
I disagree - Gilmore's statement is accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
So would it be any better if ... (Score:4, Funny)
... I put up site that supports the corruption of the party in control?
so what can we do? (Score:2, Interesting)
b. What can those of us outside Paraguay do to help? Mirror sites, etc?
JG
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B - Get this on CNN.
put it everywhere (Score:2, Interesting)
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 spa
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The issue is that lots of people just don't care and they don't think anything can be done against them.
Activism is seen as worthless. Maybe that can change things a bit.
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Try standing for the opposition in north korea some time.
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Of course, they _could_ kill you (they have the ability, but it's not their m.o.), but they don't need to. Think of it as a conservative government that is friends with all the media. They don't need to actively censor a lot of people.
The internet is an issue, because it doesn't respond that much to corporate interests. That's why they are censoring this. That, and because they just don't know how the internet works, and don't know about the Streissand effect.
Dig output (Score:4, Interesting)
http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/5845/extenso2rk7.png [imageshack.us]
Venezuela (Score:4, Insightful)
Gret way to prove uncorrupt (Score:5, Funny)
OpenDNS (Score:3, Interesting)
Plus, a lot of folks are using http://cache.opendns.com/ [opendns.com] to start checking the records of their personal site from around the world.
I assume it's a "trademark" excuse (Score:2)
Had a city named after a dictator (Score:2, Flamebait)
After being ousted that man lived in Brazil until his last days.
That sucker was a friend with the militars in Brazil and other right-wing dictatorships in South America during the 60s 70s 80s. And those dictatorships had direct support from the USA.
Funny how often bad things around the world had the US involved.
OpenDNS is neither open or a dns (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
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It's an alternate root, not a proxy server. Most DNS queries are cached downstream anyway so they wouldn't get a lot of useful data if the tried.
Last I heard it was run by volunteers but according to the site now it looks like they've got some funding. Good for them.
OT: OpenDNS (Score:3, Informative)
Adverts? Spyware?
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 ad
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I gather from the Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] their major concern is monopolization of the DNS root by the U.S. Government.
Their site has instructions on switching to their roots [orsn.net], if you run your own DNS server, and a list of publicly-acce
Re:Hard to fight if Bush is behind this. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Mod Parent Up (Score:2)
Is there anybody who doesn't think that our current President and Vice-President aren't making plans for their retirement, given that it's looking more and more like they're going to be charged with war crimes? Oh, they'll never face trial, but it's unlikely they're going to be having any European vacations after they leave office.
How humiliating for our great nation that such low men could have attained such high office, no matter that they did so in an il
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