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."

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:They should host the site on high-profile domai

[orasio]

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.

OT: OpenDNS

[Kadin2048]

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 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.

Re:I assume it's a "trademark" excuse

[Anonymous Coward]

They haven't claimed anything. The DNS was hijacked in the state-owned incumbent telco, and today, a manager from the company denied that they have had any responsibility concerning it, and said that they were looking for the responsibles.

Pure bullshit.

Re:Down with goverment censorship

[witherstaff]

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 - Because the FCC's news distortion policy is not a "law, rule, or regulation"

While any government outright censoring is bad, any media company that passes itself off as a news source that is able to lie is even more insidious. While most news sources have a political bias, you shouldn't expect to have to decipher lies!

Re:OT: OpenDNS

[Kadin2048]

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 run by Paul Vixie, actually.)

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-accessible DNS servers that use their roots, if you just want to re-point your workstation or router.

If they're not your style, WP has a list of other alt roots [wikipedia.org]; most of them seem to revolve around the idea of having more or different TLDs than ICANN. The ones I'd probably consider first would be OpenNIC [wikipedia.org] and the Open Root Server Confederation [open-rsc.org]. The latter's website doesn't seem to indicate, at least to a quick reading, their root server addresses or any publicly-accessible DNS servers.