7 ms·

Why is the US Green Party's site blocked?

89 points by oriesdan 5y ago

hhlbf 5y ago
It couldn't have been an honest mistake, they must have blocked it for political reasons. Imagine living in this state of paranoia.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  I have found during Canadian election seasons that green party signs and posters are the only ones consistently vandalized. The people who think the Green party is stealing 'their' votes are unbelievably entitled. If only they knew how much that does to make them not my second choice either.
  - speeder 5y ago
    I am from Brazil, and once there was a Green Party candidate with a real shot at presidential elections, she ended in third, because the candidate that ended being in second made a heavy campaign asking people to vote for him and not "waste" votes on the Green Party that was "never going to win anyway". They missed their chance though, because after that election the candidate in question tried to appeal to everyone by being so ambiguous that instead made everyone not trust her anymore (for example spousing communist policies and at same time choosing the richest banker in the country as vice-president).
    - jalbertoni 5y ago
      Don't forget scaring away most of her leftist supporters by getting too cozy with megachurches; At least it sounds like you're talking about Marina Silva lol
    - whatatita 5y ago
      > she ended in third, because the candidate that ended being in second made a heavy campaign asking people to vote for him and not "waste" votes on the Green Party that was "never going to win anyway". This always happens in single vote systems. Any options who draw from the same subset of voters will divide the vote and weaken their own, and one anothers, chances of success. It's one reason many countries have a few large parties, with internal "subparties" rather than lots of seperate parties that differ only slightly. Ranked choice voting solves this problem beautifully. It's a real shame it's not widely used for elections.
      - speeder 5y ago
        In our case elections work by having two "rounds", in the first one the top 2 candidates go to the second round, and then people vote for one or the other. This means that the "vote division" thing is not really an issue... If you end in second place, you still get a shot to get all the votes of whoever doesn't want to vote for the first place. Thus basically any candidate in second place trying to campaign saying the vote will be "divided" is basically bullshitting the voter base in an attempt to secure his second place. The first place DO want to concentrate votes though, if you end with more than 50% of the votes (and Brazil has mandatory voting, so basically 50% of voters) then you win outright, so sometimes parties DO attempt to do this by pooling all their votes toward one candidate (for example several xxx-wing parties choosing only one candidate among them all and campaigning all of them for that same guy).
- marcinzm 5y ago
  Given the last 10 years of political "discourse" and third party election interference calling it "paranoia" seems like a very naive view of the world.
  - foolzcrow 5y ago
    We have literal psycopathic leaders in some positions and people still say to me " but why would they do that to us". Why would power hungry psycopaths hurt us? How do I communicate with this?
herbst 5y ago
I've worked with several kinds of public blocking lists and one thing I learned is that they are all full of false positives. For whatever reason, I would not be surprised if just nobody ever noticed the mistake.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  Yeah, that's a given because they're not constructed manually ie. no manual verification. Give them some time to react. My wife complained to me she could not visit a website (I run Pi-Hole on our network, and our mobile devices get routed to it even on external networks). I looked through the logs, figured the offending rule, contacted the maintainer, and they fixed it within a few hours. The issue has been up for one hour thus far.
  - xoa 5y ago
    Yeah, same here, I run OPNsense and make use of Unbound's blacklist feature to similar (and surprisingly potent!) effect, along with Suricata and Sensei. I have had to manually whitelist some stuff though. False-positives, things that are good defaults but advanced users should be able to bypass, or just plain unfortunately necessary workarounds are certainly all issues though. I think user available fallbacks can be useful sometimes for that reason. Like at a site using 802.1x auth, set it up so users can append "-noblock" to their login and then it'll change them into a different VLAN which can just point at a different DNS (or alternately Unbound supports views for split-brain DNS).
    - Fnoord 5y ago
      I don't want to educate my wife about how to circumvent the blockade with an all or nothing decision. I mean, its possible, and I taught her to update Google Play over 4G because else it does not work (on Nvidia Shield and Google Pixel 3a it does not; on all my other devices it works, not sure why). The reason I don't want to teach her that, is that the measure helps her (and our) privacy and security. By temporarily giving that up, we open up the whole attack surface for that time, which is kinda OK if you remember to switch back immediately but people tend to forget... The correct way to solve the problem is by fixing the blacklist and/or whitelist, (temporary) collateral damage be damned. I use Pi-Hole on EdgeOS with a second server with Docker as backup. I also have NextDNS as fallback. I'll probably switch to OPNsense at some point though.
notafraudster 5y ago
My trivia league was blocked by Heathrow's airport wifi because of "games/sports". I contacted Boingo, who told me they don't block websites (? okay, so then your client operates a rogue blocklist that uses Boingo headers for the error page -- that's even worse). I also tried contacting some sort of pseudo-government safe browsing list to see if it was their blocklist being used by Heathrow and got no response. The annoying thing is not the false positives: these things happen, and mostly it's not all that urgent to resolve immediately. The annoying thing is a total lack of obvious appeals process to resolve a false positive. At least the OP's example is on GitHub and thus can easily be issued.
- deepsun 5y ago
  Does UK honor "net neutrality"? If yes, that could be a way to hold them (ISP, whoever it be) accountable.
  - reom_tobit 5y ago
    Ofcom (the UK’s coms regulator) has just announced a review of net neutrality [1]. Which will have some big companies aiming to give themselves more “flexibility”. Currently however, providers are bound by EU mandates to treat every packet the same (roughly speaking). I hope it stays that way. [1] - https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/ofcom-to-review-uks-net-neutrality-framework https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/ofcom-to-review-uks-net-ne...
- pricechild 5y ago
  My static home IP was blocked by my new energy supplier. It took almost 4 months to get through to someone who would accept my problem wasn't forgetting my password. In the end, I was pointed to their third provider and told "sort it out yourself, not our problem". Thankfully that other company had a reasonable-ish appeals process... ...obviously I got relisted in their db a few times but things seem to have calmed down now. https://pricey.uk/blog/connection-reset/ https://pricey.uk/blog/connection-reset/
  - tialaramex 5y ago
0xf00fc7c8 5y ago
It's also on VirusTotal
bencollier49 5y ago
They probably got hacked ages ago and it was added at that point. I wouldn't be assuming malice here.
aaron695 5y ago
They are a phishing site https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HWH6z4cPUYMJ:https://www.gp.org/shamim4s/_streaming-live_-_2020_tokyo_olympic_games_live_free_23th_july_2021+&cd=15&hl=en&ct=clnk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HWH6z4... Perhaps they have fixed it in the past 3 weeks, maybe they haven't. From yesterday, so not fixed - https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rMUgla-2e_0J:https://www.gp.org/juliett61116111/_free_ufc_265_fight_live_stream+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rMUgla... Also love the way it's signed, the persons online profile is "I'm Black Hat SEO Expert" if anyone wants to write any Green policy I guess contact them?
- jonnycomputer 5y ago
  Hmm, that doesn't look like content the GP would put up intentionally.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    No, it looks like they have glaring security issues of their website and the site regularly gets used for phishing, spam, etc. So maybe that only has been an issue for 3 weeks (which is bad enough), but all things considered, it’s possible it’s been like this for years.
    - mathewsanders 5y ago
      I read an interesting article on the Big Lie over the weekend and it mentioned an example from 2016 where private non-profit conservative groups were involved in promoting Green and Independent candidates with the intention of diluting vote for Dem candidates. Probably not related, but worth mentioning the coincidence just because it was such a good article https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-...
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago
      It looks like they allow user generated posts on a calendar, and every site that allows user generated content regularly gets used for phishing, spam, etc.
Vaslo 5y ago
I can no longer visit End-To-End encrypted sites anymore at work. It sucks because I use ProtonMail and end up having to use my phone to forward things from there or to my Google email, which I wanted to stop using entirely.
- rPlayer6554 5y ago
  I am confused? Does your employer just block any https site?
  - sithadmin 5y ago
    Probably doing MITM SSL inspection. Basically, a corporate security appliance with trusted certs on the endpoint sits in the middle of everything to inspect for malware/viruses/blocked content. A relatively common corporate practice, honestly. It's a shame more people aren't aware of it.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >Probably doing MITM SSL inspection. Probably not, judging by the gp's use of the term "end to end encrypted". Nearly every site uses HTTPS, so if they were really doing MITM, either everything would be broken (because the root certs aren't installed), or everything works. My guess is that his employer's network has some sort of network filter installed, and "end to end encrypted" is a classification category for sites that is blocked for whatever reason.
      - sithadmin 5y ago
        HTTPS is not an obstacle to this. As I mentioned before, the methodology requires publishing a trusted cert to endpoints. This is done with GPOs or whatever RMM tool is used to manage workstations + MDM to push to mobile. You will find this implemented in nearly any high-security network environment (finance, government, etc.), primary schools, and a lot of miscellaneous businesses.
    - licebmi__at__ 5y ago

89 points by oriesdan 5y ago

It couldn't have been an honest mistake, they must have blocked it for political reasons. Imagine living in this state of paranoia.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
I have found during Canadian election seasons that green party signs and posters are the only ones consistently vandalized. The people who think the Green party is stealing 'their' votes are unbelievably entitled. If only they knew how much that does to make them not my second choice either.
- speeder 5y ago
  I am from Brazil, and once there was a Green Party candidate with a real shot at presidential elections, she ended in third, because the candidate that ended being in second made a heavy campaign asking people to vote for him and not "waste" votes on the Green Party that was "never going to win anyway". They missed their chance though, because after that election the candidate in question tried to appeal to everyone by being so ambiguous that instead made everyone not trust her anymore (for example spousing communist policies and at same time choosing the richest banker in the country as vice-president).
  - jalbertoni 5y ago
    Don't forget scaring away most of her leftist supporters by getting too cozy with megachurches; At least it sounds like you're talking about Marina Silva lol
  - whatatita 5y ago
    > she ended in third, because the candidate that ended being in second made a heavy campaign asking people to vote for him and not "waste" votes on the Green Party that was "never going to win anyway". This always happens in single vote systems. Any options who draw from the same subset of voters will divide the vote and weaken their own, and one anothers, chances of success. It's one reason many countries have a few large parties, with internal "subparties" rather than lots of seperate parties that differ only slightly. Ranked choice voting solves this problem beautifully. It's a real shame it's not widely used for elections.
    - speeder 5y ago
      In our case elections work by having two "rounds", in the first one the top 2 candidates go to the second round, and then people vote for one or the other. This means that the "vote division" thing is not really an issue... If you end in second place, you still get a shot to get all the votes of whoever doesn't want to vote for the first place. Thus basically any candidate in second place trying to campaign saying the vote will be "divided" is basically bullshitting the voter base in an attempt to secure his second place. The first place DO want to concentrate votes though, if you end with more than 50% of the votes (and Brazil has mandatory voting, so basically 50% of voters) then you win outright, so sometimes parties DO attempt to do this by pooling all their votes toward one candidate (for example several xxx-wing parties choosing only one candidate among them all and campaigning all of them for that same guy).
marcinzm 5y ago
Given the last 10 years of political "discourse" and third party election interference calling it "paranoia" seems like a very naive view of the world.
- foolzcrow 5y ago
  We have literal psycopathic leaders in some positions and people still say to me " but why would they do that to us". Why would power hungry psycopaths hurt us? How do I communicate with this?

herbst 5y ago

I've worked with several kinds of public blocking lists and one thing I learned is that they are all full of false positives. For whatever reason, I would not be surprised if just nobody ever noticed the mistake.

Fnoord 5y ago
Yeah, that's a given because they're not constructed manually ie. no manual verification. Give them some time to react. My wife complained to me she could not visit a website (I run Pi-Hole on our network, and our mobile devices get routed to it even on external networks). I looked through the logs, figured the offending rule, contacted the maintainer, and they fixed it within a few hours. The issue has been up for one hour thus far.
- xoa 5y ago
  Yeah, same here, I run OPNsense and make use of Unbound's blacklist feature to similar (and surprisingly potent!) effect, along with Suricata and Sensei. I have had to manually whitelist some stuff though. False-positives, things that are good defaults but advanced users should be able to bypass, or just plain unfortunately necessary workarounds are certainly all issues though. I think user available fallbacks can be useful sometimes for that reason. Like at a site using 802.1x auth, set it up so users can append "-noblock" to their login and then it'll change them into a different VLAN which can just point at a different DNS (or alternately Unbound supports views for split-brain DNS).
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    I don't want to educate my wife about how to circumvent the blockade with an all or nothing decision. I mean, its possible, and I taught her to update Google Play over 4G because else it does not work (on Nvidia Shield and Google Pixel 3a it does not; on all my other devices it works, not sure why). The reason I don't want to teach her that, is that the measure helps her (and our) privacy and security. By temporarily giving that up, we open up the whole attack surface for that time, which is kinda OK if you remember to switch back immediately but people tend to forget... The correct way to solve the problem is by fixing the blacklist and/or whitelist, (temporary) collateral damage be damned. I use Pi-Hole on EdgeOS with a second server with Docker as backup. I also have NextDNS as fallback. I'll probably switch to OPNsense at some point though.

notafraudster 5y ago

My trivia league was blocked by Heathrow's airport wifi because of "games/sports". I contacted Boingo, who told me they don't block websites (? okay, so then your client operates a rogue blocklist that uses Boingo headers for the error page -- that's even worse). I also tried contacting some sort of pseudo-government safe browsing list to see if it was their blocklist being used by Heathrow and got no response. The annoying thing is not the false positives: these things happen, and mostly it's not all that urgent to resolve immediately. The annoying thing is a total lack of obvious appeals process to resolve a false positive. At least the OP's example is on GitHub and thus can easily be issued.

deepsun 5y ago
Does UK honor "net neutrality"? If yes, that could be a way to hold them (ISP, whoever it be) accountable.
- reom_tobit 5y ago
  Ofcom (the UK’s coms regulator) has just announced a review of net neutrality [1]. Which will have some big companies aiming to give themselves more “flexibility”. Currently however, providers are bound by EU mandates to treat every packet the same (roughly speaking). I hope it stays that way. [1] - https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/ofcom-to-review-uks-net-neutrality-framework https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/ofcom-to-review-uks-net-ne...
pricechild 5y ago
My static home IP was blocked by my new energy supplier. It took almost 4 months to get through to someone who would accept my problem wasn't forgetting my password. In the end, I was pointed to their third provider and told "sort it out yourself, not our problem". Thankfully that other company had a reasonable-ish appeals process... ...obviously I got relisted in their db a few times but things seem to have calmed down now. https://pricey.uk/blog/connection-reset/ https://pricey.uk/blog/connection-reset/
- tialaramex 5y ago

0xf00fc7c8 5y ago

It's also on VirusTotal

bencollier49 5y ago

They probably got hacked ages ago and it was added at that point. I wouldn't be assuming malice here.

aaron695 5y ago

They are a phishing site https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HWH6z4cPUYMJ:https://www.gp.org/shamim4s/_streaming-live_-_2020_tokyo_olympic_games_live_free_23th_july_2021+&cd=15&hl=en&ct=clnk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HWH6z4... Perhaps they have fixed it in the past 3 weeks, maybe they haven't. From yesterday, so not fixed - https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rMUgla-2e_0J:https://www.gp.org/juliett61116111/_free_ufc_265_fight_live_stream+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rMUgla... Also love the way it's signed, the persons online profile is "I'm Black Hat SEO Expert" if anyone wants to write any Green policy I guess contact them?

jonnycomputer 5y ago
Hmm, that doesn't look like content the GP would put up intentionally.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  No, it looks like they have glaring security issues of their website and the site regularly gets used for phishing, spam, etc. So maybe that only has been an issue for 3 weeks (which is bad enough), but all things considered, it’s possible it’s been like this for years.
  - mathewsanders 5y ago
    I read an interesting article on the Big Lie over the weekend and it mentioned an example from 2016 where private non-profit conservative groups were involved in promoting Green and Independent candidates with the intention of diluting vote for Dem candidates. Probably not related, but worth mentioning the coincidence just because it was such a good article https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-...
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    It looks like they allow user generated posts on a calendar, and every site that allows user generated content regularly gets used for phishing, spam, etc.

Vaslo 5y ago

I can no longer visit End-To-End encrypted sites anymore at work. It sucks because I use ProtonMail and end up having to use my phone to forward things from there or to my Google email, which I wanted to stop using entirely.

rPlayer6554 5y ago
I am confused? Does your employer just block any https site?
- sithadmin 5y ago
  Probably doing MITM SSL inspection. Basically, a corporate security appliance with trusted certs on the endpoint sits in the middle of everything to inspect for malware/viruses/blocked content. A relatively common corporate practice, honestly. It's a shame more people aren't aware of it.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Probably doing MITM SSL inspection. Probably not, judging by the gp's use of the term "end to end encrypted". Nearly every site uses HTTPS, so if they were really doing MITM, either everything would be broken (because the root certs aren't installed), or everything works. My guess is that his employer's network has some sort of network filter installed, and "end to end encrypted" is a classification category for sites that is blocked for whatever reason.
    - sithadmin 5y ago
      HTTPS is not an obstacle to this. As I mentioned before, the methodology requires publishing a trusted cert to endpoints. This is done with GPOs or whatever RMM tool is used to manage workstations + MDM to push to mobile. You will find this implemented in nearly any high-security network environment (finance, government, etc.), primary schools, and a lot of miscellaneous businesses.
  - licebmi__at__ 5y ago