Election Time in Malaysia…a cloud of uncertainty and unrest looms over…
Anticipating severe load, MalaysiaKini.com created mirror sites to provide live election results. But at around 3pm British Time, MalaysiaKini.com, one of the most popular sources of independent news in Malaysia went offline.
Interesting enough, DNS lookup for MalaysiaKini.com returned 127.0.0.1, the local loopback IP address, which essentially means you won’t be able to connect to the real Malaysiakini.com server:
nslookup from Manchester University name server in United Kingdom.
nslookup from Synapse Global Datacenter in Los Angeles, USA to OpenDNS name server
nslookup from TM IDC in Cyberjaya, Malaysia to OpenDNS name server
Looks like their DNS has been poisoned. Remember how Pakistan’s telecom denied access of half the globe to YouTube by spreading wrong DNS data to other ISPs?
Now comes The Conspiracy Theorist style conspiracy theory: Is the authority denying the people’s rights to obtain up to hour election results? Why is the authority taking so long to release the official results? Sanitization? You decide!
As of 5.40pm, the national coalition (BN) has marginally lost it 2/3 majority in the parliament (standing at 62%) for the first time since 1969.
Malaysiakini.com is not the only non-favouring-BN site to go offline the night after the Malaysian General Election. Several popular blogs and sites like JeffOoi.com, Blog.LimKitSiang.com and MerdekaReview.com went offline as well…probably due to traffic surges and hundreds of thousands of Malaysians pour into check out the latest election results.
Google giving a mirrored MerdekaReview.com a hard time.
March 28th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Boss, next time dig directly to the IDC’s DNS resolver, the last two result are query from OpenDNS so no matter where you look up from, the result is always the same
March 29th, 2008 at 6:33 am
ah yes! that is very true. Thanks for the advice boss