Countrywide ban? Options

[Naysayer]

(...) I would call whoever runs that router and explain to them that dumpshock is a game site and there is no objectionable content here. Perhaps they'll lift the ACL.

You sure? You seen some of the threads round here? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Little sit-rep:
No problems accessing DS so far.
No problems accessing any other sites, either.
In fact, everything seems smooth for now.
(Someone had posted a link to us.onionmaps or somesuch, and that didn't work for me yesterday. Now, it's fine too.)

If things start acting up again, I'll light the beacons.

[Dumori]

It seams like an iffy router or two some place but really it seams to have fixed its self now.

[Warlordtheft]

Could it be all the game related hacking threads of late?

[DireRadiant]

I will email my ISP later. Work would probably be an even better place to query as they pretty much are their own ISP. as far as I understand the technical side of things. But I'd be reluctant to put a support query in for not being able to access a non-work site. Very odd that Dumori was fine with the same ISP. Dumori - you were able to access on Sunday / Monday ?

I talked to a friend about this and he thinks some of the ISPs might have been implementing either a censorlist that some agency distributes to multiple ISPs, or some bad DNS record got entered somewhere and got adopted by a number of ISPs before it was fixed. Apparently, DNS records (which translate domain names into ISP Addresses) get updated on a piecemeal basis. No idea why a bad record would get in or how Dumori and I can get different results on the same service. Can Dumori and I be using different DNS's even though we're on the same ISP?

K.

Yes, if you have different DNS servers at the same ISP.

This whole issue looks like some bad DNS got into the DNS propagation process. The DNS servers themselves get their DNS data from their own set of reference servers, and if one of those trusted servers has a mistake it can be pushed everywhere.

The DumpSshock host also screws up there internal DNS entries internally, the last few times the site has been unavailable generally has been because they built an internal loop on their own two DNS servers which has a DNS resolution bouncing between two of their internal servers for hours.

In the above case, if that got out and then was immediately corrected, you can run into a situation where the propagation speed differences could cause some people not to notice anything at all since their DNS entries were either never updated incorrectly, or were updated and then reupdated so quickly no one notices. For others, they may have the bad DNS picked up, and then not corrected for a day or two. All based on timing. I especailly suspect this is the case since the reported problems are with the euro DNS server entries, which probably don't update US DNS entries as quickly they do their own region.

[Dumori]

Well it just hit me for a few hours.