How can it possibly be, that an ISP, which I’m paying for gets to decid, which sites I’m allowed to have access to, and which not?
All the torrenting sites are restricted. I know, I can use VPN, and such… but I want to do it because of my privacy concerns and not because of some higher-up decided to bend over for the lobbying industry.
While on the other hand, if there’s a data breach of a legit big-corp website (looking at you FB), I’m still able to access it, they get fined with a fraction of their revenue, and I’m still left empty-handed. What a hipocracy!!
What comes next? Are they gonna restrict me from using lemmy too, bc some lobbyist doesn’t like the fact that it’s a decentralized system which they have no control over?
Rant, over!
I didn’t even know that my router was using my ISPs DNS, and that I can just ditch it, even though I’m running AdGuard (selfhosted)
Sometimes the block is on whole different level than a DNS
Yeah, even if they miss your DNS request, the ISP can still do a reverse lookup on the destination IP you’re attempting to connect to and just drop the traffic silently. That is pretty rare though, at least in US, mainly because It costs money to enforce restrictions like that at scale, which means blocking things isn’t profitable. However, slurping up your DNS requests can allow them to feed you false error pages, littered with profitable ads, all under the guies of enforcing copyright protections.
It’s pretty much the only way they enforce stuff here in Ukraine. Back in 2015 when the government blocked social media websites tied to Russian companies and in 2022 when .ru domains were blocked, changing your DNS provider didn’t help. I’m not sure about piracy sites, though, because everyone kinda doesn’t care about this stuff here, but I don’t think they would invent other mechanisms when they have a working one that doesn’t rely on DNS.
That makes sense! Believe it or not it’s actually easier for an ISP to block a whole country than select websites and services. We actually null route all Russian public IP space where I work, that would absolutely be plausible on a national scale as well.
It’s imperfect, you can get around it, but it catches 99% of normal users, which is the goal.
Not just ISPs, it can be blocked at the enterprise level in a few clicks.
I was temping at a place during the pandemic when my hospitality based IT job shuttered. With their set up, I could just block a country in a couple clicks.
I didn’t do the clicking, but we were getting hit with a DDoS from a nation we had no business in, and it was just blocked in a matter of minutes once the meetings and BS were attended to. Those took hours over days.