Internet Censorship Update: Blocking of murrayhunter.substack.com website
Internet Monitoring and Action Project
23rd October 2023, the website of writer Murray Hunter, murrayhunter.substack.com was found to be blocked by Malaysian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) implementing what appears to be a Malaysia Communications and Multimedia (MCMC) mandated blocking of a website. This was confirmed by Sinar Project with test data measurements from Open Observatory for Network Interference (OONI).
The website murrayhunter.substack.com was detected to be blocked following a report by the website owner on 22nd October. The website is a blog belonging to a researcher, Murray Hunter who does work on issues related to Asia-Pacific.
As of 7.00pm, data on OONI indicates that blocking occurred on networks run by at least 4 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which redirected users to a server maintained by MCMC. This would have resulted in users facing difficulties in accessing the website. The ISPs are:
TM (AS4788)
Digi (AS4818)
Maxis (AS9534)
TIME (AS9930)
Users of these networks are unable to access the website unless they use methods to circumvent the censorship such as using a VPN or a different DNS resolver.
At the time of this report, there was no sign of confirmed blocking on U Mobile (AS38466), although data on OONI showed a number of failures during the testing.
Source: OONI Explorer
The data on OONI was collected through the OONI Probe App by Sinar Project and various volunteers. A confirmed blocking on OONI shows that there has been DNS blocking on the website whereby the DNS had been tampered to redirect to MCMC’s IP address: 175.139.142.25.
Until 23 November 2023, the website owner claimed that they did not receive any response from MCMC to unblock the website. This was also corroborated by data collected through OONI, a monitoring tool for internet censorship. As of today at 10.30am local time, the website continued to be inaccessible on the 4 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as below:
TM (AS4788)
Digi (AS4818)
Maxis (AS9534)
TIME (AS9930)
Source: OONI Explorer
Article updated on 24 November 2023 with latest data confirming that website is still blocked as claimed by the website owner.
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Oy vey, is the Hunter becoming the hunted?
It's becoming less easy to access this site.
Would mirror sites or alternative sites become necessary some time soon? That is if this site doesn't convert into a spineless act of behaving and toeing the line, next bowl of rice and all that, kiss arses slurp slurp and survive..?
For some unhealthy reason or reasons porn websites are blocked too, though many websites are quick to rename themselves and carry on like normal.
Not that I frequent those websites all that much, I am not a religious person, sometimes I stumble upon them porn sites accidentally...