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."

No oil

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.

Re:No oil

Actually, the US is about to open a military base in Paraguay, to have a tight leash on Bolivian oil fields, I guess.

So, I think we will side with the ruling party in this one.

Re:

never heard of Tarija, Bolivia, right?

They should host the site on high-profile domains

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

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.

Re:

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.

Down with goverment censorship

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.

Re:Down with goverment censorship

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.

Re:Down with goverment censorship

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.

Re:

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 ev

TOR

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.

Re:

Unfortunately, for most computer users, "Clicking the blue E" is the most they know about getting on the internet. Someone out there needs to create a really handy Active-X plugin that does TOR and put it out there for people to click on. I know, it'd pr

Re:

perhaps someone else has a better idea on how to get some of these fundamental technologies out there to the unwashed masses?

Yes. We first have to stop electing corporatist authoritarians who believe they have a God-given right to meddle in the affairs

Census of cyberspace censoring

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 [schneier.com].

I disagree - Gilmore's statement is accurate

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.

So would it be any better if ...

... I put up site that supports the corruption of the party in control?

Dig output

http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/5845/extenso2rk7.png [imageshack.us]

Venezuela

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....

Gret way to prove uncorrupt

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

OpenDNS

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/ [opendns.com] to start checking the records of their personal site from around the world.

Re:

Adverts? Spyware?

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 go

OT: OpenDNS

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

Re:

I don't know much about them, but I think the "Open Root Server Network" might be a possible candidate. It's an alternate root system, independent from but currently mirroring ICANN's, located mostly in Europe. (The sole non-Europe rootserver seems to be

Re:Hard to fight if Bush is behind this.

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.

Re:

This is not that kind of government.
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