Internet Censorship Update: Blocking of murrayhunter.substack.com website

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 Observervatory 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.

murrayhunter.png

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)

2023-11-24_blockingofmurrayhunter.png

Source: OONI Explorer

Article updated on 24 November 2023 with latest data confirming that website is still blocked as claimed by the website owner.