Too Good To Be True

[MikeWill]

Too good to be True

The ADSL service offering by True sounds too good to be true - high speed at a low price. Well, it is not so "true" after all.

All web access is redirected through a transparent proxy owned by the boys in brown, presumably so they can block access to any web sites they happen to disagree with.

This has a number of real disadvantages for the user.

1) Web download speed is effectively limited to the bandwidth and processing capabilities of the proxy server at www.police.go.th, which resolves to a single IP address (suggesting a single proxy server unless they have deployed a layer 4 switch, but at the least introducing a single point of failure).

2) Web pages are cached by this proxy server for what it considers to be static content. This assumes that pages ending in .htm or .html are static content but this is not always the case.

3) The results of DNS lookups are cached by this proxy server. I recently spent 30 minutes typing a long email which was thrown away when I hit the send button because the proxy server could not resolve a Yahoo hostname and had cached the DNS failure temporarily.

Your readers can find a way around this "problem" at this web page: http://herculeez.com/proxy.html.

In the fashion of a truly timid business model, True Internet charges cannot be paid over the Internet. Just thought you should know.

ROB LEPPER

P.S.

Unfornunately, the above link to the "proxy" is automatically redirected to the onspeed.com site, which is a paid service that already has been dicussed in quite depth here.

When I tried to use my "cgiproxy" to access the above link, I get an empty page.

Any thoughts of finding a way around the "proxy owned by the boys in brown"?

[Oleg_Rus]

this is Not true - the web site www.police.go.th has nothing to do with proxy - it's just a web site of thai police ( IP:203.150.3.242) to which all "funny" content redirected by DNS servers during client's browser request.

If you don't like bein' watched - use encrypted VPN chanel and feel safe. It costs some 5-15$ per month but for some reasons it worth it.

btw, using proxy looks quite pathetic - if you're monitored than you're monitored staight at your connection, so it doesn't matter how do you browse the Net - boys can watch and analyse all info coming and going to your computer, doesn't matter through how many proxies you receive it.

again - to be safe use VPN, alternative DNS and some other nice things.

regards

[marquess]

What about one of those annonymous surfing sites, where you put in the address and get round the censorship, surely the only see the IP address of the proxifyer. Anyway I have not heard of anyone being prosecuted for looking at stuff that the boy in brown disagree with. I thought that there self appointed task was to prevent people seeing those sites in the first place. Which is quite futile anyway, as there are ways around it.

[Oleg_Rus]

Yep, that anonym sites can help.

Collecting informatiom about Net usage is not for prosecution, rather for censorship and preventive reasons. This days is not very difficult to monitor ALL connections all time and building own index with "who-when-where-what did over the Net" database. It's done in so many countries - why LOS should be exception ?

Actually it's a good idea - to prevent terrorist groups, pedophiles and others freaks from their activities.

But being watched still feels some how uncomfortable...

[Oleg_Rus]

I forgot - this is called "Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill" in UK and allows kinda "Big Brother" attitude from Boys.

P.S. don't forget to use PGP, anyway...

[MikeWill]

Oleg, you may be right in regards to the monitoring, but...

3) The results of DNS lookups are cached by this proxy server. I recently spent 30 minutes typing a long email which was thrown away when I hit the send button because the proxy server could not resolve a Yahoo hostname and had cached the DNS failure temporarily.

this actually happened with my email, it was undelivered on several occasions.

[Oleg_Rus]

actually, the result of DNS lookup is an IP adress and it's cached by lower DNServers. So, when you type www.yahoo.com first request goes to lowest ( or closest to you, provided by ISP), then if not found - it goes higher and higher untill it would be resolved.

Now, how boys are doing their trick - when you type banned web site adress you getting domain name resolution (DNS) not to real site but to www.bigbrother.go.th

Now about funny things with e-mails.

For long time ( starting I think 1997) Thailand was in top 10 SPAM Mail Hosts. That is the main reason why mails are bouncing back from services like yahoo, hotmail and others. They just cannot afford mass spamming on their servers - so they just block thai IP subnet ( loxinfo : 203.14x.x.x, True 202.133.x.x etc ).

Very annoying, esp when the mail is about business or important personal info, isn't ?