[tor-talk] ISP CenturyLink Blocking Tor?

Ben Tasker ben at bentasker.co.uk
Sun Feb 1 23:24:58 UTC 2015


Looking at their info page -
http://www.centurylink.com/Pages/AboutUs/Legal/InternetServiceManagement/ -
it seems Century Link run what they call a Protection Program.

If they detect (what they consider to be) potentially malicious traffic,
the connection gets put in a walled garden to notify the end user.

Is the OP's friend using non-Century link DNS? Wondering if it could be as
simple as an over-enthusiastic detection policy triggering the walled
garden. I've no idea how Century Link achieve redirecting to the
notification page, but if they simply return the IP of one of their
servers, using external DNS servers could easily break that leading to the
impression that your internet has dropped out.

As others have said, rebooting the router would likely have acquired a new
IP, so effectively cancelling a block.



On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 10:58 PM, Yuri <yuri at rawbw.com> wrote:

> On 02/01/2015 13:50, Matthew Finkel wrote:
>
>> Wow. That is quite coincidence. Can you ask your friend to contact
>> CenturyLink and ask them why this happened. It appears no one has
>> experienced this or, at least, no one updated the Good/Bad ISP wiki
>> page with this[0].
>>
>
> I didn't get the OP's e-mail, but (assuming this is in US) customers have
> a lot of leverage. Just keep tor and torrent clients running, and call
> their customer service, and demand an explanation why the service they
> charge you money for doesn't work. Let them send the live technician to fix
> the problem. Escalate this as much as possible. Eventually they will have
> to fix your connection (with the mentioned services running). And if they
> don't, you can sue them in small claims court and demand compensation for
> all time, effort, suffering, emotional distress, deprivation of service,
> etc, etc, etc. And you will likely easily win the case.
>
> Just trying to work around the problem in technical ways with bridges,
> Pluggable Transport, trying to hide tor traffic isn't necessarily the right
> way to deal with the problem.
>
> Yuri
>
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-- 
Ben Tasker
https://www.bentasker.co.uk


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