GE13 Censorship of On-line Media in Malaysia

Online Censorship of 13th General Elections media in Malaysia
A number of Youtube videos and Facebook pages of opposition parties and on-line news media has been blocked in past few days, through what looks like ISP level packet filtering of network traffic. This page is tracking known problems and workarounds for the Malaysian public.

YouTube

When you try to view a YouTube video, your browser will make 3 requests to stream the video from different servers. It will usually start playing from the fastest servers. If the server is on a network controlled by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) employing content filtering, then you will not be able to view the video.

Workarounds

  • The packet filtering is not 100% effective at the moment, and after a period of 90-120s the videos will sometimes start. This may change at any time.
  • Enter the URL into ProxFree http://www.proxfree.com (make sure the YouTube link is http and not https when submitting into the input box)
  • For more technical users, using a VPN or proxy on unaffected networks which may be getting results from different uncensored YouTube servers will work. Currently those on P1 and TIME networks are not affected.

Known list of blocked urls

Packet filtering

Similar to the videos, packet filtering is being applied to check for text such as hostname headers, video ids and urls to block/delay access to sites. This filtering is done on unencrypted http requests (http not https in your browser).

Known list of blocked urls

Workarounds

On-line Media

  • Malaysiakini has been under various form of denial of service measures http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/228203
  • Semparuthi.com Tamil News site has been under DDOS [Currently redirects to their official FaceBook page as workaround measure]
  • Utusan.com.my (May 8th) not accessible by an ISP except TMNet (in Malaysia) 

Workaround

Other sources of information and workarounds

http://brianritchie.me/devops/bypass-my-internet-censorship-step-by-step including listing of several VPN services you can subscribe to bypass ISPs and use an encrypted connection from outside Malaysia.