[AusNOG] Telstra manipulating DNS to block botnets

[Eric Pinkerton]

I think that as Rod has elegantly demonstrated, simply contacting the registrars dosen't cut the mustard, any more than Spamhaus et al's attempts to get ISP's to disconnect known spammers have made SPAM disappear in the last decade.

Even in an ideal futuristic utopia where registrars were held to account, spammers will come up with any number of ways to sidestep such controls in minutes, until such time people stop clicking on links.

So at risk of a good old flaming, I think this is a bold move by Telstra, and actually quite commendable.  Also let's face it they have been 'tampering with DNS' for years now  with sponsored adds for nxdomain, and more recently the Interpol blacklist, and to my knowledge the sky hasn't actually fallen down yet.  Some people opted out,  perhaps some of them churned but we aren't all eating soylent green just yet.

I don't agree that this opens the door to censorship, that door has been off it's hinges for quite some time, and let's face it using DNS to effect censorship is like making suicide illegal to save lives.

Eric
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