This link was posted by uzyn 1 hour ago on HN. It received 67 points and 54 comments.
First thought is ofc this means censorship. Low-tech and easily circumventable censorship infrastructure.
Second thought: oh fuck do they have managed to get/make a forged certificate? DNS + forged cetrificate is enough to fake https connections and do mitm. This is the exact same stunt Turkey pulled off in 2013. Although how they managed to fake a cetrificate in 2013 was a more stupid reason
reply
Indeed quite circumventable. You don't even need a raspberry pi dns server or some shit like that.
You can just type in cloudlfare or google in your device settings as dns
What do you think: Politicians are tech-illiterate old people or they just don't care and censor big percentages of the population?
reply
I think the goal is always to censor the illiterate masses. If their policies affect 98% of the population, it's a success. Those literate will always find a way. It's worth spending $1m to whack the 98% and it's not worth spending $100b to whack the 2%.
A good reason to study tech and be among the 2% because it means they mostly leave you alone.
reply
ISP's can be easily coerced by the government to route those DNS IP's internally
The internet is physical infrastructure, if they really wanted to lock things down they could... including sending goons to anywhere that has an unauthorized satellite dish.
reply
Doing this to hopefully censor contents not favorable to the government. I might be wrong but in the guise of protecting the populace is highly sus.
reply
That's a good steap
reply
Manipulation through good intentions continues. My grandmother said that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."
Everyone is responsible for what they see, hear, say, think. It is not necessary for others to come and take care of my right. If I don't want to see or that my daughters don't want to see, I simply make my own control and that's it.
Governments are so afraid of citizen freedom and the autonomy of individuals that they strive to maintain control over what can actually teach them.
Because when we check Malaysia's literacy rate exceeds 90%, the question is: How much do they know about decentralization, inflation, Bitcoin, privacy, etc.?
When an ordinary citizen comes to have basic knowledge about these matters, to name a few, he begins to see the truth and it is the truth that liberates.
So it is not surprising that we continue to see and hear more cases of censorship with different methods
reply
Hmmmm... Thanks, valuable bit of info!
I should know this, how does this affect VPNs? Would residential VPNs like Mysterium be necessary now, or in the future for Malaysians?
Malaysia has had a lot of so called illegal Bitcoin mining, but also everyone there is very conscious about how insanely corrupt the whole fiat game is because of that huge corruption scandal.
reply
I should know this, how does this affect VPNs? Would residential VPNs like Mysterium be necessary now, or in the future for Malaysians?
You're thinking much to complicated here.
You can just type in cloudflare or google in your device settings as dns. It's that easy.
VPNs will just continue to work because they use the dns of the vpn provider outside of their country. Also Tor browser will continue to work just fine
reply
Would not ISPs be required to block even IPs? Maybe not now, but later if this takes hold?
What if there is simply no requests coming back when using the IP you want? Or if you get re-routed to another IP address?
As far as I know its mere convention and standard software setup that is keeping countries from doing things like that?
reply
Would not ISPs be required to block even IPs?
That would be a way to censor that actually works (but is still circumventable).
What if there is simply no requests coming back when using the IP you want? Or if you get re-routed to another IP address?
You're right for censorship via ip blocking, that's what it would look like. But they're not doing that, they're only rerouting dns.
As far as I know its mere convention and standard software setup that is keeping countries from doing things like that?
You're right the default dns in all modern operating systems makes this sensorship possible. But all modern operating systems you can just configure where to ask for dns instead. It's possible in windows, mac, iphone, android... everywhere. And affords very little tech skills to do.
reply