Accessing Malaysia-Today from within Malaysia

As most Malaysians already know, ISPs in Malaysia had been ordered to block access to the Malaysian Today news blog resulting critisisms from bloggers and even the former prime minister Tun Mahathir himself.

But I am not here to discus about the right or wrong of the decision. I am here to share my knowledge on how to bypass the blockade.

At the time of writing, Malaysia ISPs had blocked the site through their DNS server.

The Domain Name System (DNS) associates various information with domain names; most importantly, it serves as the “phone book” for the Internet by translating human-readable computer hostnames, e.g. www.example.com, into IP addresses, e.g. 208.77.188.166, which networking equipment needs to deliver information.
Source: Wikipedia.org

In simple terms, whenever you type a domain in your browser, your computer will ask the ISP’s DNS server(s) for the address of the domain. So when these DNS servers gives you an incorrect or null answer, you will not be able to access that particular website at the domain.

To bypass this blockade, the easiest way is to not rely on these DNS servers for the correct answer. As long as we already have the IP addresses of these domains, we do not need the DNS servers. All we need to do is to add 3 lines of text to the “hosts” file. Using Notepad, open the file “C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\Hosts” (Yes, this is a file without extension. The entire file name is “hosts”. ) and add the lines:

202.71.97.141	malaysia-today.net
202.71.97.141	www.malaysia-today.net
98.131.13.102	m2day.org
98.131.13.102	www.m2day.org
72.47.236.85	harapanmalaysia.com
72.47.236.85	www.harapanmalaysia.com

Remember to save the file after editing.

Example of the “hosts” file after editing.

# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a ‘#’ symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host

127.0.0.1 localhost
202.71.97.141 malaysia-today.net
202.71.97.141 www.malaysia-today.net
98.131.13.102 m2day.org
98.131.13.102 www.m2day.org
72.47.236.85 harapanmalaysia.com
72.47.236.85 www.harapanmalaysia.com

Remember, this is for Windows users only. And if any of you have problems editing or saving the file, you most probably have some kind of anti-virus/anti-malware/anti-spyware protecting the file. You will have to disable the file protection from the software before editing this file.
After that clean the DNS cache on your computer by running the command “ipconfig /flushdns”.

Those who would like to know how I got the IP addresses, I used this external website to convert the domain names to IP numbers. So you know that to do next time. And let’s hope this workaround lasts.

Updates:

• At the time of writing, only http://malaysia-today.net is fully accessible with images and CSS loaded.
• If this is not working for you, try clearing you browser’s cache/temporary files.
• You might need to stop and disable ‘DNS Client‘ service on your compuiter. (Run the command “sc stop dnscache” without the quotes. Then run “sc config dnscache start= demand” again without the quotes. Note the space after the “=” sign in the second command.)
• For those who trust me, download a small program here to automatically modify everything for you. Source code of the small AutoIt script is here. Download and scan for virus before running the file. But analyze the result with a grain of salt. False positives is a norm.

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- Written on Saturday, August 30, 2008 0:03 - 0 Comments -