Zone-H banned by some Indian ISPs: some workarounds

20/07/2011 Written by Kevin Fernandez (Siegfried)

As some of you probably know, Zone-H has been banned from some indian ISPs following the E2-labs scandals and a lawsuit from E2labs and Zaki Qureshey in an indian court, who claimed our documents and articles were defamatory (great joke!).

Zone-H was unable to defend itself as we didn’t receive any notification from the court. What is even funnier (scarier?), is that bloggernews.net has also been banned… for writing about the case!

Check out their articles:

http://www.bloggernews.net/124029

http://www.bloggernews.net/124890

http://www.bloggernews.net/126528

http://www.bloggernews.net/126831

There is a great article on the Wall Street Journal about these decisions from Indian courts that directly attack free speech:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704396904576226460167553174.html

Anyway this news is for those indian visitors that cannot connect to Zone-H. You should know that the block is on the DNS of each ISP, this is why some visitors can visit Zone-H and some cannot.

There are some workarounds, but first be sure that all Zone-H domains are banned by your ISP: www.zone-h.org www.zone-h.net www.zone-h.com

The first workaround is to use a different DNS service, such as the Google DNS:

8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

Second workaround: Use Tor, which also proxies DNS requests.

Another workaround is to use another Zone-H domain, we will try to make various DNS entries pointing to Zone-H. Just lookup the Zone-H IP and point a domain to it!

The unofficial domains:

http://www.zoneh.us.to

http://zh.ignorelist.com

http://zone-h.hacked.jp

If you create other unofficial domains, you can send them to us!

And if you want to read the whole e2labs saga, here’s the full list:

Zone-H statement on security trainings offered by E2-labs.com