A German ISP tampered with their DNS - specifically to sabotage my website

lina.sh

They did similar things to block the pirate bay, I guess 💀

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There's an important follow-up post. https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up
- The Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) is a private group formed by ISPs and copyright holders. They decided what websites to block, and ISPs followed, without any court ruling. No judge was involved, no legal process.
  The members: The four largest ISPs in Germany and a bunch of copyright holders (the Motion Picture Association, Sky, ...). If they decided that a site should be blocked, the ISPs just blocked the domains from being resolved. This ran completely outside the courts, a private system made by corporations for censorship. Blocked sites included streaming services, but also sites like Sci-Hub or game piracy sites.
  In a previous blog post, I went into detail on how we trolled them:
  We leaked their secret blocklists (the list of domains was kept secret!)
  We exposed dozens of wrongful and outdated blocks.
  We made them unblock a lot of domains, including some that were blocked for years.
  ... and so much more. We just made a lot of bad press for them.
  The CUII now only coordinates blocks between ISPs after a court order. That's it. No more secret votes. No more corporate censorship. The new version of their website says: "The CUII coordinates the conduct of judicial blocking proceedings and the implementation of judicial blocking orders."
  ...
  
  That’s the most ridiculous name. Es muss natürlich ‚Waldlichtungstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (WUII)‘ heißen, was für Ottos.
- That seems almost more important than the original post
- Just WTF, how could that be legal?
- Lina is the goat
- This blog was classified as "parked" by Palo Alto urlfiltering service.
  I just reported is a personal website about computer and cybersecurity.
  
  Wait, maybe was intentional on their side????
  I just read better the blogpost.
Telefonica (O₂) also blocks 4d2.org and its subdomains for (at least) their Czech customers due to "malware", and refused to undo this when I complained, although they did restore access to piefed.world when I did the same. I know I can get around this myself but what can I do to convince them about the false positive besides campaigning on social media?
- Wtf it’s not even their job to protect against malware. Don’t most browsers have warning banners for known phishing and malware sites? Just let them handle it.
  
  Their malware protection is on by default (can be turned off or dialed up to include porn but obviously there are hundreds of thousands of customers on default settings), and it's a "selling point" so the best course of action is probably to make a ruckus about false positives while keeping it on so that I can spot any others. Too bad that most client software (browsers, apps) doesn't show details of why content (such as a Lemmy post image) failed to load – the apparent error for O₂ Security intervention is "net::ERRCERTCOMMONNAMEINVALID" because they're doing MitM for HTTPS to show their "Access denied" page – so it seems like a server is just down until I put the URL of the resource into the address bar.
In Germany, we have the Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) - literally 'Copyright Clearinghouse for the Internet', a private organization that decides what websites to block, corporate interests rewriting our free internet. No judges, no transparency, just a bunch of ISPs and major copyright holders deciding what your eyes can see.
This is worse than whatever the UK is doing IMO.
- Germany's been doing fucked up stuff for a while. People have literally had the police visit and gotten citations for what they said online (for example calling a politician a "penis" on social media.) It's fucked.
  
  Specifically the person got raided on a wrong address, so actually his ex partner and child got raided, the raid came after the owner of the twitter account already had identified himself to the police and admitted to the "crime".
  There was absolutely no possible investigative reason for the raid. It was purely meant to intimidate someone for an insuot that is rather mild in German language
  
  That one at least got cleared up in court, and even the damn police was pissed to be instrumentalized by 1 Penis like that (not to mention the societal backlash). In many cases it's even legitimate to have police involved, like with wild racist deathwishes in Facebook… but they indeed went way too far in too many cases.
  Surely some more Chatcontrol and big cousin Palantir will fix that, right? …right? 🫠
  
  UK also arrests people for online comments
- Recently they switched to a more public court-order based approach.
  But my thought on this is as well: Once their domain name servers are configured according to law, can they force us to not use other domain name services?
  
  Theoretically an ISP can block all outgoing queries to the DNS port 53 except to whitelisted servers, but now DNS over HTTPS exists, haven’t looked into how blockable that one is.
  
  They probably can just block IPs of foreign DNS but I suspect there's ways of mirroring around that.

32 comments