If this is allowed to continue, it is the beginning of the end for us. According to various reports, it seems that the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission has stepped out of its bounds and ordered Malaysian Internet Service Providers to censor Malaysia Today, an extremely popular anti-establishment blog. Seems like our MSC bill of guarantees is going out the window for political expediency.
Well, although I am not in Malaysia at the moment, there are many ways to get around any form of blockage that the ISPs can put in place. If people can even work around the Great Firewall of China, there are definitely ways to work around the problems in Malaysia. If I was running an ISP in Malaysia and was legally ordered to block access to a particular website, I would choose a couple of ways to do it.
The Internet works on IP addresses, which are a series of user unfriendly numbers. So, most of us depend on a Domain Name Service (DNS) to translate human readable domains such as http://www.malaysia-today.net to a series of numbers such as 202.71.97.141 in this case. Most users would automatically use the DNS servers of their local ISP to do this conversion. So, the first step to blocking a website would be to modify it’s setting in the server to point to some other series of numbers. This can be useful to redirect a user to a special page that announces that the website has been taken down by court order.
For the home user, the easiest way to work around this problem is to set our computers to use a different set of DNS servers. This will need to be done on the device that is directly connected to the ISP, such as the ADSL router or the host PC. There is a public DNS service provided on the internet called OpenDNS. Their website has detailed instructions on how to configure various settings to use their service. That will fix any problems with poisoned DNS entries in the local server.
Another way to block a website would be to configure the ISP firewalls to drop all traffic to and from a particular IP address. However, this is a very damaging step. Due to the way Internet hosting companies run, sometimes several websites share the same server and the same IP address. So, this step may end up blocking out other innocent websites sitting on the same server as well. However, this is a surer way of taking out any website.
But even filtering traffic to and from a specific IP address(es) can be circumvented. All that a user needs is to use an external proxy, one that is located outside the network. A proxy works as a middle man. So, if traffic between the website and the proxy is clear, and the traffic between the proxy and the user PC is clear, then all is clear. However, this also means that the proxy server has the ability to snoop into the traffic conversation. So, use this with care.
So, it is definitely not a problem to circumvent this little bump in the road. However, most people do not understand networking enough to know how to work around it. It takes about 30 seconds to make the changes and everything will work fine again. The larger issue is the morality of censoring the Internet just because the authorities do not like what is being said on it. That is just so wrong and smacks of incompetence and desperation.
Sybreon Ones Nought 