A question about DNS.

Turkish

Lifer
May 26, 2003
15,547
1
81
Ok, I hope someone can help me out on this.

Unfortunately, I live in Turkey (for another 5 days that is, viva Spain!) and if you haven't heard already, quite a few sites are blocked in Turkey by district courts. Don't let the term "district" fool you, when a site is blocked by a DC, it is blocked everywhere in the nation till the investigation ends. Not gonna get too political here but the current ruling party which loves to cry about democracy and freedom is just not very democratic when it comes to free speech. There are more than 1100 sites blocked right now including Youtube, DailyMotion, Blogger, RichardDawkins.net, and many more ...

Anyways, I can access all these sites via alternative DNS. It's quite simple to do, but I am clueless as to how it works, so not sure if this going to last. I changed my DNS servers to 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.1 respectively and can access any site I wish. I told my close family and friends and they can do. So what I am wondering is whether this can last and if the government here can do anything to mess up our way of getting freedom of speech? If no, I and a few other friends will start an awareness campaign, possibly find a programmer who can code a little application that will change a user's DNS settings when run.

Any ideas? Thank you Security Forum, I rarely comeby here but thanks :D
 

bsobel

Moderator Emeritus<br>Elite Member
Dec 9, 2001
13,346
0
0
Well as you discovered the courts must be requiring the IPS's to provide invalid entries for certain sites via DNS. Using an alternative DNS works, but if widespread I'd quickly expect the courts to require the ISP's to disallow DNS to other networks and simply leave with no choice but to use the ISP's DNS server.

After that they could block the ip ranges of banned sites at the network level as the egress your carriers network or force all traffic thru large proxies (ala China).

 

Turkish

Lifer
May 26, 2003
15,547
1
81
Originally posted by: bsobel
Well as you discovered the courts must be requiring the IPS's to provide invalid entries for certain sites via DNS. Using an alternative DNS works, but if widespread I'd quickly expect the courts to require the ISP's to disallow DNS to other networks and simply leave with no choice but to use the ISP's DNS server.

After that they could block the ip ranges of banned sites at the network level as the egress your carriers network or force all traffic thru large proxies (ala China).

Damn... I really wanted to widespread the freedom but I guess its better to keep it to a minority than ruin it quickly by spreading it :(

Can't wait till I move to Spain on Wednesday.

Thanks bsobel.