About six months ago, the Vietnamese branch of the Internet was abuzz with connectivity issues to Facebook. Basically, certain ISPs (SDC/VDC and Viettel) had blocked the DNS records of www.facebook.com, which led to a variety of workarounds used to get to Facebook.com including:
- Using alternative DNS like OpenDNS or GoogleDNS
- Accessing Facebook using lite.facebook.com or even m.facebook.com
- Harcoding the DNS addresses for www.facebook.com in a hosts file (like /etc/hosts) to ensure your requests were hitting the right page.
More details of this blockage could be found here at my friend Huy’s page, http://www.huyzing.com.
The VDC/SDC and Viettel blockage continued for about a month and disappeared without much fanfare. Optimists here in Vietnam saw it as a dodged bullet, and that the government had decided not to travel down the same road that China has gone down. In China, Facebook (and Youtube I believe) are blocked. Around this time Google had also decided to leave China and uncensored its search engine results (read Tiannemen, Tibet and Panda porn).
Over the weekend, it looks like the other shoe has dropped. ISP VNPT has blocked access to Facebook, and the above workarounds have not been able to access Facebook.
I have received that these workaround do work though:
- Ultrasurf
- Opera Turbo
- Hotspotshield
- Updating your /etc/hosts file as documented here
If Facebook goes, who would win? ZingMe? Go-online.vn? I’m not sure, though I for sure think that the population would lose out in general.
