Did you have a spot of bother getting access to the full to overflowing intertubes this morning?If you were on Optus, you did. You might not have been able to get google to show up. Certain sites might appear, but others simply would not load.
Here's the report from our technical department:
This morning Optus suffered what they called a DNS outage. But when I did some noodling around with my network utility, I got back this charming little result: "65.120.78.58: Communication prohibited by filter" (see image above). 65.120.78.58 is an Optus address. What the message meant was that Optus was filtering my search and blocking the site I was trying to access. The sites were, of all things, Amazon.com and Google.com.
Obviously someone had turned Senator Conroy's filter up to the "extreme" setting.
Communications prohibited by filter! Please explain, Optus. Please explain, Senator Conroy!
O brave new world.
The evil sites requiring filtering: Amazon and Google, amongst others. Dens of iniquity.
What a fool this man is, what a disaster for the internet. Unless of course it's just a pack of mice nibbling at our cables. Oh wait, it might well be mice, led by a very large rat.
I wouldn't be too hasty in ascribing malice to this. "Communication prohibited by filter" is the text the ping utility reports when it receives an ICMP_UNREACH_NET_PROHIB message, which is generated by routers if the packet you've transmitted has tripped an access control list.
ReplyDeleteMy guess in this instance is that someone at Optus made a typo in an ACL, and accidentally blocked way more than they should have.
Just a guess, mind you.
Eminently rational and totally sensible, and yes between conspiracy and a cockup, always chose a cockup (or a muddle if you don't like the patriarchal tone). Indeed with Telstra some would say it's an infallible rule.
ReplyDeleteBut hey, this site is dedicated to whipping up paranoia about Senator Conroy and his intertubes filter, and when I see the word filter, I reach for my Glock. It's kind of automatic.
It's not a living, but plenty of people do it. Because one day someone will think it's a good idea to filter sites for sub judice comments, or say for political comments in the 24 hour cooling off period before voting, and so on and so forth, along with all the juicy bits that currently litter the web which might need a little de-juicing.
Once the hammer's in place, there'll be people who see plenty of walnuts worth a cracking, and then this morning's incident will become part of a daily routine rather than a typo.
So your guess is probably a good one, but since Optus can't be bothered to use its service status report card to explain its outages (clearly this morning didn't happen), it's on with the paranoia. Even if it was just an accidental blockage, it shows the power at hand ... and bugger that for a 'hand of derelict techo typo in future will act under Conroy's orders' joke ...
Newt, your comment would make more sense if it wasn't for the fact that the same error in a filtering system would result in the same problem - a filter is, after all, a form of ACL.
ReplyDeleteAnd Optus did recently agree to become part of Conroy's filtering "trial".
My guess in this instance is that someone accidentally put a typo in a DNS record in the filtering software, taking out a few major IP blocks belonging to big companies with big CDNs of their own.
Interesting that in this thread on Whirlpool people commented that when the problem occurred the speed of the Optus Network actually improved for other sites. That's strongly suggestive of a filtering system that suddenly underwent a major change. A simple DNS fault should have resulted in an increase in latency, not a decrease.
ReplyDeletehttp://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1337118&p=2