internet blocking problem ?

[Paul Koning]

> On Sep 11, 2015, at 10:46 AM, Lyle Bickley <lbickley at bickleywest.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 10 Sep 2015 20:32:11 -0500
> Jon Elson <elson at pico-systems.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hello, all,
>> 
>> I am a member of the Homebuilt CPU web-ring, and a really 
>> weird problem has turned up.  The guy who administers the 
>> ring, David Brooks, is in Australia, and uses iinet.net.au 
>> as his ISP.  All members of the web ring link to his 
>> personal web pages at iinet. Apparently, due to government 
>> censorship or a private war between iinet and US content 
>> providers, iinet or Australia are blocking access from at 
>> least some sites in the US. ...
>> 
>> Some webring members are now using classiccmp mirrors to 
>> host the affected files to get around this problem.
>> 
>> So, I wonder if I can ask classiccmp members, especially in 
>> the US, to check if they can view this page:
>> http://members.iinet.net.au/~daveb/simplex/simplex.html
> 
> Works from Silicon Valley (Mountain View)
> 
> Lyle

I tried "traceroute" from three places: a machine in Palo Alto (result: fail), my home firewall (result: works) and my office (result: fail).

The routes shown are utterly different.  The PA case shows just a few hops, into megapath.net, then no further.  The office goes into alter.net, then through a whole bunch of different hosts all in cogentco.com, then nothing.  And from home, I see a path through comcast.net, gtt.net, ii.net, then iinet.com.au and from there to the destination.

The "censorship or ..." notion may be someone's overheated imagination -- it looks more like there's a backbone routing issue.

	paul