back to article Orange blows up French govt website in terrorism censorship snafu

The French Interior Ministry suffered an unexpected denial of service attack yesterday – after ISP Orange mistakenly routed heaps of traffic to the government's website. Several popular and legit internet domains were wrongly added to Orange's terrorism block list. Browsers visiting domains on the list are redirected to a …

  1. Old Handle
    Facepalm

    Dumb idea anyway. Like a DNS block would really stop someone who wanted to look at that.

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      I think the government needs to feel like it is doing something. Not so long ago the British government did much the same thing regarding kiddie porn. I guess if their technically illiterate selves can no longer directly see the bad stuff, they can pretend that it has been dealt with.

      1. Old Handle

        I'm not a fan of either scheme, but it seems a little more plausible that the average non-pedoterrorist user would want to be "protected" from accidental exposure to CP than TP* Although the IWF's blacklist was actually working as intended when it messed up Wikipedia, where as this one only did it by accident, so I guess that's a point for France.

        *terrorist propaganda

    2. Tom Chiverton 1

      Something must be done. This is something.

  2. Hans 1
    Happy

    Sacré bleu, tonnerre de Brest!

    Merci, Orange, pour nous avoir offert un DDOS sur le site du ministère de l'intérieur, "quite a feat!" comme on dit de l'autre coté de la manche, vous remontez dans mon estime! Si vous auriez l'amabilité de réitérer l'exploit, ce coup-ci j'ai du pop-corn pour mieux en profiter!

    Merci, aussi, au ministère de l'intérieur d'avoir mis en service un site nous expliquant pourquoi on a pas le droit de voir quelque chose ... cela me fait penser a une blague de Coluche: "Dites-moi ce dont vous avez besoin, je vous expliquerai comment vous en passer."

    La censure sur internet, c'est INEFFICACE, non, FUTILE, même les chinois n'y arrivent pas ... on va finir par vous prendre pour des gros cons, nous, les informaticiens ... MDR.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Big Brother

      Mon cher ami!

      As the reliably "crabby nanny" The Guardian explains, your despondent mood, hating on glorious politicians and pervasive nihilism might actually due to rank Russian propaganda

      David Clark, a former Foreign Office adviser and the chair of the Russia Foundation that the Kremlin used RT not for straight propaganda purposes but “information warfare”: “The clue is in the strapline: ‘Question more’. They are trying to sow confusion and to create a climate of intellectual pessimism and nihilism by mixing the genre of news and outright fabrication.” He added: “The channel is designed to undermine rational debate. It’s a multi-layered thing and just one instrument they use.”

      You just have to Believe!.!

      1. Anonymous Blowhard

        "As the reliably "crabby nanny" The Guardian explains, your despondent mood, hating on glorious politicians and pervasive nihilism might actually due to rank Russian propaganda"

        So it's not because they're twats then?

  3. Pen-y-gors

    Moteur de recherche?

    I do love languages!

  4. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Big Brother

    "Websites that promote terrorism"

    The website of the State Department should be banned in la France.

  5. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    Hmm. A few "accidents" along those lines might make govts realise that messing with DNS might make life harder than they like.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I actually like Qwant

    Well, something good came from it, I was unaware of Qwant before and I like it.

    I tend to use DuckDuckGo for searching to avoid ye olde data snafflers, but Qwant offers another alternative and I'm all for having options. I like their presentation, and their privacy policy is worth a compliment for its clarity.

    So thank you Orange, both for telling the truth about Google (no, just kidding) and for allowing Qwant to poke fun at them..

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