Thai Govt' Blocks CNN, Yahoo Finance, Facebook And Other American Sites

[Erich]

interesting to put this on a news ticker without checking it. It could have been the Nation they too never check facts.

Given your 3 ISP's comment, I wonder what DNS' are you using on them? Presently I can access cnn, bbc, youtube, however facebook.com is being redirected to w3.mict.go.th on TOT in Bangkok using their DNS service.

Regards

PS By the by I can ping facebook.com 69.63.184.142 fine, but on the same machine I get mict.go.th in browser.

I'm using True and have no problems at all, during the last days I recieved warnings from my Internet Security that the reverences of some moduls have been changed, but they are free of viruses, there came also warnings about some attacks that had been blocked from an adress kurd....com and they happend when I opened The Nation and Bangkok Post but since two days I see no more warnings.

[isaanbrit]

does this mean that facebook will still work as long as it's accessed through a facebook site which is not in america?

[thaibkk]

this must be the latest LOS joke, right...

what i often see is that i get disconnected during a session from TOT and suddenly I am on another range 113. or 118. instead of 125

can only mean that government is tracking what you are doing !!!!

[george]

Twitter.com is now blocked by ICT. I am on CAT internet.

[DP25]

My guess is that we are suffering from a Monday morning after the weekend update. What is true, whatever is being said is that under some conditions requests for external [to Thailand] sites are failing and it would appear that this failure cascades down to mict as the point of last connexion. That does not mean that the sites are being blocked per se, but that standard http requests are failing and the system [abusing that word] ends up at mict which is revealing if you think about it.

Regards

Yeap, this is most likely exactly what is happening.

[lowbo]

... can't really tell if the sites are being blocked or scanned, or even filtered. From Chiang Mai on CAT, abcnews.go.com, cnn.com, cbsnews.com,plus a few others are either not resolving or reflect garbled and pages in dissarray.... it almost appears as though they are being filtered for content before being rendered on your local machine.

I too have my own DNS servers, but everything in Thailand is passed thru the Thai gateway in Bangkok.

[TAWP]

^^ TwaP what do you get if you type facebook.com into browser [Firefox?]

Regards

I can access Facebook as is.

[Changian]

Twitter / Facebook / CNN / Yahoo etc etc all fine on TOT ADSL here in Koh Chang 'Island of the Free'.

More likely some ISPs screwing things up than the government.

[LivinLOS]

Am able to access all the listed sites, but some very slowly.

Also in general my internet this morning is VERY slow..

Maxnet Premier 3Mb in Phuket.

[OxfordWill]

My guess is that we are suffering from a Monday morning after the weekend update. What is true, whatever is being said is that under some conditions requests for external [to Thailand] sites are failing and it would appear that this failure cascades down to mict as the point of last connexion. That does not mean that the sites are being blocked per se, but that standard http requests are failing and the system [abusing that word] ends up at mict which is revealing if you think about it.

Regards

Yeap, this is most likely exactly what is happening.

[Pattaya Diver]

No problems here with access or speed.

[Guderian]

It's not only the sites mentioned so far. Most of the file sharing sites I use seem screwed up. Rapidshare simply fails to complete a file request and times out (been doing so since yesterday evening). On Hotfile the download URL changed to w3.mcit.go.th, and then blocked the site completely. The Hotfile problem leads me to think that eitehr it's yet another government censorship attempt, or else True (the ISP) trying out new software to filter out 'undesirable' sites.

[Totster]

What the heck are you talking about!? None of these sites are 'blocked by the Thai government'. You should edit the headline and story for wildly inaccurate hysterical information.

"Thai Immigration website is reported as an attack site by Google and FireFox."

Reported as an attack site by Firefox? Since when does Firefox report attack websites? Do you understand the difference between your browser and a search engine reporting an attack site?

Did you actually read the first post before making yourself look like a fool ?

Google have listed the immigration website as harmful - firefox just displays a page to alert you of this - you can verify this by carrying out a google search for the Thai Immigration site using any browser.

Some sites do appear to be blocked by the Thai Government, as has been reported on another thread http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Mictgoth-t321837.html

btw - The Thai Immigration site is now showing as 'under construction'

Totster

[vahack]

this is 2 separate issues, so should have been 2 separate threads.

malware warnings come from Google and are pretty annoying.

blocking "dangerous" sites is the Thai govt being Thais.

i can confirm Maxnet Premium is blocking facebook & cnn in my city in the NE.

(redirects to http://w3.mict.go.th/)

i also have TOT dsl on my desk which loads these sites fine.

[DocHolliday]

something smells very fishy. Web sites are redirected to a government block site.... A human error?

Sorry I cant share that opinion. I am too long working in the IT business to believe such fairy tale about an engineer who clicked

at the wrong button. I think its a serious matter and it wans't caused coincidentally

Edited December 14, 2009 by DocHolliday

[justplainjoe]

Are they blocking Hotmail ? Because for the last 1,5 week it's difficult to reach hotmail as well as many other websites (website my bank in the Netherlands and so on)

I'm living in Central Pattaya and I use TTNT for my internetconnection.

Anybody has the some problems ?

I have had problems with hotmail too...

[moskito]

Twitter.com is now blocked by ICT. I am on CAT internet.

just checked all mentioned pages, everything is working fine here in Phuket with ToT...slowly as usual but ok.

Regarding the answers of the immi office.... THEY NEVER ANSWER Emails, I have tried it several times

Maybe try another Browser, Explorer is Cra_p anyway, so is Mozilla...(some adware found in Firefox)

get a REAL Browser, and still the best + FASTEST on the net...made in Norway OPERA 10.1 DOWNLOAD

and btw. you should not have only an ANTIVIRUS running. A spy and adware scanner is usefull also you will find one here ADAWARE by Lavasoft FREE

the german GOOGLE show a warning under the Thaiimmigration link -----if you click this page it can harm your PC

Edited December 14, 2009 by moskito

[Phuket Stan]

All sites A OK with TTT in Phuket

[geovalin]

Sites US OK with TRUE in BKK

The only site down is... http://www.mict.go.th/ or http://mict.go.th/

[Changian]

I think we can have a good game here. Which Thai government site does this Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page report on?

Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 202 time(s) over the past 90 days.

What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 12608 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 2150 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-12-13, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2009-12-13.

Malicious software includes 1423 trojan(s), 813 scripting exploit(s), 117 exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 4 new process(es) on the target machine.

Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?

Over the past 90 days, xxxxxxxx appeared to function as an intermediary for the infection of 3 site(s)

Has this site hosted malware?

Yes, this site has hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.

Any ideas? Looks like this site has a few problems with internet security. . . . click here to find out.

[baht&sold]

Tin Foil Hats Proven Ineffective

A recent study at MIT produced alarming results which throw the security of every paranoid person’s thoughts into question.

It seems that the tin-foil hat– often the brain’s only line of information defense– is ineffective for the task of blocking government-controlled frequencies. In fact, in some cases, these aluminum anti-intrusion devices actually amplify the radio waves.

Of course, this is all assuming the government isn’t manipulating this, to destroy the our confidence in the protective powers of tin-foil…

From the study’s web page: http://www.damninteresting.com/tin-foil-ha...ven-ineffective

^^"It's not me, it's the paranoid ppl, they're after me"...^^

[dude]

Where are the forum moderators?

The headline for this thread is simply wrong. The gvnt. has NOT blocked those sites.

If you use TRUE, the sites load but without CSS (graphics and layout) if you switch to KSC, then the sites load just fine.

Just think a little, we had an almost 9 days of holidays behind us (many Thais took the entire last week off), and most people are using TRUE. Thus, the TRUE servers are having a difficult time to cope with the high load, now that everybody is back in the office.

If you run cmd and then tracert the IP of your 'blocked' site, you will see where it hangs.

Just give it a few hrs and it'll be fine again.

And to Thaivisa.com... pls start moderating your forums! I cannot believe that you actually sent this thread to your mailinglist before verifying it's correctness.

[opalhort]

I have no problem with any of the mentioned web-sites.

Tested in BKK on TRUE ADSL, CSLoxinfo dial-up and PacNet dial-up.

Only on the immigartion.go.th do I get a "Under construction" notice, hopefully this means they will finaly update their info.

opalhort

[sedeflonga]

Strange, can't get in CNN, Facebook but yahoo mail still works.

in status bar it shows: w3.mict.go.th it seems to wait for something from there but nothing happens

EDIT:

And now it works again -CNN.com

Edited December 14, 2009 by sedeflonga

[FreedomDude]

Where are the forum moderators?

The headline for this thread is simply wrong. The gvnt. has NOT blocked those sites.

If you use TRUE, the sites load but without CSS (graphics and layout) if you switch to KSC, then the sites load just fine.

Just think a little, we had an almost 9 days of holidays behind us (many Thais took the entire last week off), and most people are using TRUE. Thus, the TRUE servers are having a difficult time to cope with the high load, now that everybody is back in the office.

If you run cmd and then tracert the IP of your 'blocked' site, you will see where it hangs.

Just give it a few hrs and it'll be fine again.

And to Thaivisa.com... pls start moderating your forums! I cannot believe that you actually sent this thread to your mailinglist before verifying it's correctness.

KSC? cmd? tracert? English please!

I think your information could be helpful if I could only understand your lingo.

Thanks.

[kmj]

True in Bangkok is working fine for me (youtube, hotmail, twitter, CNN ++), no speed issues and IP trace shows no interceptions. can using a proxy be illegal ?? I have been using a proxy to get UK BBC TV and other tv channels for over a year now Ooops...

[Moonrakers]

Tin Foil Hats Proven Ineffective

A recent study at MIT produced alarming results which throw the security of every paranoid person's thoughts into question.

It seems that the tin-foil hat– often the brain's only line of information defense– is ineffective for the task of blocking government-controlled frequencies. In fact, in some cases, these aluminum anti-intrusion devices actually amplify the radio waves.

Of course, this is all assuming the government isn't manipulating this, to destroy the our confidence in the protective powers of tin-foil…

From the study's web page: http://www.damninteresting.com/tin-foil-ha...ven-ineffective

^^"It's not me, it's the paranoid ppl, they're after me"...^^

Are you sure about that? THEY have not gotten to me yet and so my hat seems to be working just fine 

[yuyi]

I noticed a weird behavior and error message for a week or so already - depending on which route I use to browse, attempts to access sites outside of Thailand ended all in the same error message. That was clearly not intended, but an error. Possible reasons are:

• network misconfiguration at ISP
  
• network misconfiguration at the transparent proxy (used to watch you surfing)
  
• DNS misconfiguration at the censorship system (used to block websites)
  

Just now, after reading here, I tested accessing facebook.com, and it tried to forward to w3.mict.go.th, but timed out:

504 Connect to w3.mict.go.th:80 failed: Connection timed out

The following error occurred while trying to access http://w3.mict.go.th/:

504 Connect to w3.mict.go.th:80 failed: Connection timed out

Running traceroutes to facebook showed nothing unusual though, just IPs from CAT, but then again, w3.mict.go.th uses 202.47.227.20 which shows up as CAT owned IP address, so there might be a mict IP in the route. Anyway, this behavior is most likely not happening at DNS level, but I assume at the transparent proxy they force us through.

My guess is that this is not an intentional block, but just a misconfiguration of the surveillance and censorship system, making the existence of these systems obvious. And the massive accesses due to this misconfiguration might overload the w3.mict.go.th server. a self made DOS attack ?

[sedeflonga]

True in Bangkok is working fine for me (youtube, hotmail, twitter, CNN ++), no speed issues and IP trace shows no interceptions. can using a proxy be illegal ?? I have been using a proxy to get UK BBC TV and other tv channels for over a year now Ooops...

I would say it would be more illegal to bann those sites. Free speech!!

[dude]

Where are the forum moderators?

The headline for this thread is simply wrong. The gvnt. has NOT blocked those sites.

If you use TRUE, the sites load but without CSS (graphics and layout) if you switch to KSC, then the sites load just fine.

Just think a little, we had an almost 9 days of holidays behind us (many Thais took the entire last week off), and most people are using TRUE. Thus, the TRUE servers are having a difficult time to cope with the high load, now that everybody is back in the office.

If you run cmd and then tracert the IP of your 'blocked' site, you will see where it hangs.

Just give it a few hrs and it'll be fine again.

And to Thaivisa.com... pls start moderating your forums! I cannot believe that you actually sent this thread to your mailinglist before verifying it's correctness.

KSC? cmd? tracert? English please!

I think your information could be helpful if I could only understand your lingo.

Thanks.

Hello

KSC is another internet provider in TH : just type ksc internet in google and you'll see.

cmd and tracert: Click on your Windows Start button and then click on run and type cmd

now you see a black window (DOS shell)

simply type tracert www.facebook.com (or any other site) and you will see the hops (routers/switches it connects to) it makes to from your computer to their server. If you use a different ISP, then there will be different hops. Traditionally, the TRUE routers have had problems and huge amount of package loss (data sent from the server to your computer is lost), thus the loading of CNN or flickr.com without images or layout (css).

Another nice tool that does this job is pingplotter (u can google for it)