Update Dec. 4, 2009: added Google public DNS servers.
There is a lot of confusion about whether Facebook is in the process of being blocked right now. Here are my thoughts to try to clear up some of the misconceptions.
In short, these are my claims: Yes, Facebook is being blocked by the internet service providers in Vietnam because of the authorities. Yes, there are workarounds in order to access Facebook. No, that’s not enough. Yes, this totally blows.
What access problems is Facebook experiencing in Ho Chi Minh City recently?
Starting around November 4, 2009, the major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) SCTV/VDC and Viettel blocked access to Facebook by removing www.facebook.com and apps.facebook.com from their DNS service for a time ranging from a few hours to a few days. Another major ISP FPT followed suit for a few hours on November 10, 2009. Rumors have designated these as tests in anticipation of an official censorship decree. Starting on November 16, 2009,FPT, Viettel, SCTV/VDC, and EVN all started blocking DNS requests for Facebook, in what many people believe to be a permanent ban.
How is this evidence of an official block and not just an accident or glitch?
The ongoing Facebook block is not an accident. It is not due to technical unreliability. It is a surgical strike on the each of the major Internet Service Providers’ (ISPs’) DNS service (which is a service to translate www.facebook.com and apps.facebook.com into addresses that computers can understand, e.g. 69.63.184.31).
The recent access problems are akin to having the Yellow Pages all of a sudden missing the entries for Highlands Coffee. It’s not as if someone spilled food all over your Yellow Pages and you have trouble reading it. The rest of your Yellow Pages is completely fine but suspiciously missing 2 major entries. Moreover, there isn’t just one set of Yellow Pages. FPT, SCTV, Viettel all have their own Yellow Pages books and each of them are missing the same 2 entries.
The odds of the DNS omission being due to accident are thus close to nil. All this adds up to evidence of deliberate action.
What other evidence is there of an impending official block?
The actions from the ISPs speak for themselves, but there is no known concrete proof of an official decree to block Facebook yet.
A supposedly-official decree demanding that the ISPs block Facebook was earlier leaked on the internet in September 2009, but its authenticity has not been confirmed. There is a version of this document with a stamp and signature from a hospital, but this version can be ignored as it has clearly been doctored (look at the bottom line where letters are chopped off, right where the original version of the decree is cut off).
A commercial customer of FPT talked to representatives who have unofficially stated that there is a pending decree banning Facebook which has not yet been publicly released.
Why do you think it’s being blocked if some of my friends can still access Facebook?
We are hearing reports that some people can still access Facebook, e.g. at universities like RMIT.
A block does not have to be complete to be real. And in any case, as I explain below, a partial block is all that’s needed to kill off the widespread use of Facebook.
Why not just wait until there is an official decree instead of going nuts over this?
An official decree may never become public.
And for some of us, waiting is not an option. We need to anticipate whether we can rely on Facebook to communicate with groups or promote events in the future. Any downtime affects the effectiveness of online marketing initiatives, organizational efforts, let alone being able to keep up with friends and family.
What are motives for a Facebook block?
As everyone can guess, political censorship and control. But also, there are rumors that local competitors may be using their government connections to shut out the mighty giant Facebook.
Are there workarounds to access Facebook?
Yes, right now, you can use either of these workarounds:
- Use the limited functionality of http://lite.facebook.com/, which has not been blocked.
- Configure your computer or router to use Google Public DNS or OpenDNS instead of your ISP’s default DNS service.
- Here are instructions on how to set up OpenDNS
- Here are instructions on how to set up Google Public DNS
- Hard-code some IP addresses for Facebook servers.
- Here are instructions on how to edit a hosts file
- Here are some example entries for IP addresses for Facebook, but replace 69.63.178.11 with the newer 69.63.181.15
- Unfortunately, these IP addresses may be changed by Facebook in the future.
- Use some of the freely available web proxies
- If you have access to a server overseas, you can use VPN or set up your own SOCKS proxy using ssh tunneling.
- Since this is for advanced computer users, I’m sure you can figure it out yourself
Of course, these workarounds may stop working in the future if the authorities or the ISPs want to tighten their block. But there is a reasonable chance that they won’t go that far, for reasons I discuss below.
Why aren’t they blocking the workarounds?
Blocking some of the above workarounds is easier than others. Certainly, throwing lite.facebook.com in with the rest would be simple. But what about blocking OpenDNS or blocking Facebook by IP address?
It’s easier, quicker, and cheaper to block Facebook by DNS than to block Facebook or OpenDNS by IP address. First, DNS requests are much less frequent than web content requests by nature of the data. Second, DNS requests are cached at many different levels making them even less frequent. Third, there are much fewer DNS entries for Facebook than there are IP addresses for Facebook to block. Not only are there many Facebook domain names, but each domain name such as www.facebook.com can actually map to hundreds of ever-changing servers around the world, which is a technique that big web sites use to distribute traffic and keep things going fast.
IP filtering could slow down internet traffic in Vietnam, which is not the case for DNS filtering. It’s reasonable that ISPs would try to discourage IP blocks.
As for web proxies, there are just so many out there it would take quite a while. And if you have your own proxy that you can VPN or ssh to, then that’s effectively impossible to block.
It’s still conceivable that the workarounds will stop working, but it will take some time.
If there are workarounds, why worry?
The workarounds I listed above, e.g. OpenDNS and proxies, help but only a little. Blocking a social network is not like blocking YouTube or some anti-government complaint website. We generally don’t get on Facebook just to access titillating information. We are on Facebook to connect with one another. As Metcalfe’s Law states, “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.”
In order for a social network to have all its promised value, you need a majority of your friends and community on it, not only you. In order to effectively promote an event on Facebook, you need most of your audience on it. If you can’t ensure that everyone in your community, whether it’s locals or expats, can get on easily, then your community will eventually die off. Proxies and OpenDNS are not well known and not easy to use. If 80% of your community don’t know how to use them and cannot access Facebook even if you can, you could still have lost 99% of the value of the social network.
And because of these network effects, Facebook will get fewer and fewer users logging on, even if they know how to use workarounds. Eventually, you may be all alone, and how fun is that? In China, the number of Facebook users dropped from a million to 14,000 in 3 months because of their ban.
So while DNS blocking is not effective in completely censoring information or censoring sites like YouTube, DNS blocking is highly effective in simply destroying the value of a social network like Facebook.
On the bright side, after Facebook gets so much less usage from Vietnam, there may not even be interest from the authorities to tighten their ban, which means workarounds would continue to work. This may be a sufficient situation for those of us who are still interested in staying in touch with overseas communities.
So what can we do?
Well, as we all know, there is no comparable web site out there with the same functionality and power as Facebook. Most likely, local Vietnamese will go to a number of local Vietnamese-language competitors.
And expats may choose to go back to the inferior Hi5, Orkut, or god-forbid MySpace. But I’m hoping that all expats in VN learn to use the access workarounds in order to maintain the value of the Facebook network.
Where can we find more information?
Here’s an AP story “Vietnam Internet users fear Facebook blackout“.
Lonely Planet has some interesting backstory regarding software licenses.
Super size me baby!
It’s rare to see another Vietnamese fellow who is so fluent in his command over English and yet has such penetrating knowledge of computer science, and e-marketing! Really a pleasure to meet you!
today is 15th january 2010 and they’ve just blocked facebook where i live in hcmc – i am in danger of being put to prison just by writing this message ! im scared
For the past two weeks I have not had much of a problem getting on. It is intermittent at times… now mostly I have a problem getting on app/games. Back in late August early September, there were connection issues. The page at times didn’t load correctly and I would have to reboot my computer, sometimes twice, two get the page to come up. I really don’t believe that the government is the issue but I could be wrong. My gut feeling is that there is either too much traffic to the site at times and its more an issue with the ISPs. Do you really think that an ISP is going to admit that their servers can’t handle the traffic or has problems?
YEah good advice, I was over in Vietnam recently with my wife and i just went via the work VPN and set a route to facebook. It’s a real shame people can’t jsut talk to each other. It’s just paranoia that makes governments act like this.
Been having trouble for weeks, but hardcoding the IP addresses’ worked easily(I am not computer literate!)… Only problem now is uploading photos..keeps getting stuck halfway through “confirming data”..could this also be blocking or just some sort of virus.?…
Here is my take on it. If you can put in the IP address and it works… its not being blocked. Do you really think that if they wanted the site blocked they would leave IP addresses open? They would block IP address DNS. The reason that photos get stuck uploading is the same reason that you cannot stream video with out it buffering every 5 seconds. The ADSL line and servers cannot handle the traffic. Try uploading photos after midnight and you will see that it goes a lot faster and you can also log into facebook without the IP address or a proxy site/server.
Actually it seems that they have started to block the Facebook’s IPs.
The main page works without problems, but the login.facebook.com does not. And that is needed for login on, obviously
I’m using the Google DNS 8.8.4.4 and I can resolve correctly the URL, then I can ping it and it replies me. But then, when logging in Facebook, it fails while trying to access login.facebook.com
So i guess they are blocking HTTP traffic from Facebook’s servers.
¿Any other thoughts about this?
I’m having no problems at all getting on now… other than apps/games are still a bit slow loading. I’m sure its an ISP issue now.
hmm….I am getting a filtered error today and have my DNS hard coded. Thinking FB may have changed them again. What numbers are you guys using?
Have noticed that RMIT received official notification from authority not long after this FAQ.
Facebook.com works for me on FPT (IP 69.63.181.11) and Viettel (69.63.181.11) using standard DSL modems.
I hate communism.
Dylan: Although this ban and many of the government bans going around lately are shameful and and even unnecessary being that most of the time they have mistaken reasoning, it is Not Communism that causes this. In fact, true Communism does not exist. Vietnam is just run by a group who lable themselves Communist. The literal meaning of communism is “no state”; simply having this group of leaders is paradoxical to what communism is.
The authoritarianism of the state is used in commerical battles, including on line. (‘We shut you down in the name of the state and the name of state security’). The battles are between commercial factions within the state. A simple Google search will not, in recent months (it is now early June) turn up Facebook or, for another instance, ‘China’s fear of the Internet’. State development policy is diametrically opposite in direction to state political policy. The first is for unbridled dealing, using, for example, ‘lobbying’, which is defined as the use of money to buy advantage. The second is to head for ‘communism’, via ’socialism’, ‘bypassing capitaism’.
so im vacationing and the first 2 weeks i used the open dns it worked
now it isnt
Open DNS has been working in HCMC on VNPT but suddenly a couple of days ago it stopped working. I can get the Facebook mobile on my mobile phone but not from my laptop on the same system. I can use a proxy server but this doesn’t allow me to post comments of status. Obviously we need a new workaround. Any ideas?
you have to be kidding me…i just got to vn and open dns doesn’t work…..
well, i can’t even log in from my iphone.. THIS SUCKS!! anyone has ideas of how to get around either from phone or mac? PLEASE!!!!!
Hello,
I’m a Canadian living in Hanoi. I came across this article when I was trying to find out why I cannot access facebook anymore. Unfortunately at this time, even the workarounds don’t work anymore – google and open DNS, facebook lite, it’s all been blocked.
What shocks me most are 3 things:
(1) The Vietnamese government doesn’t even inform its people about the block, it’s all only a speculation. How is it that people don’t know what the government is doing? This could be very dangerous, if someone in the government decided to do something bad, and the people were not informed about it. Because history shows us what happens when bad people get in a position of unrestrained power – for example Hitler. In any case, the people should at least be informed about the new laws.
(2) Facebook being blocked is ridiculous. What is the reason? It’s not a bad site – not pornographic or anti-government. It’s a social network. The only reasons I can think of for blocking facebook are bad reasons, done by bad people. Maybe someone who wants to compete with facebook wants to eliminate the competition in Vietnam, and paid the big ISPs to block facebook. In any case, bad people should be exposed and punished.
(3) I don’t understand why people in Vietnam don’t do something about this. They use workarounds (as long as they work) but don’t address the problem directly. If this happened in Canada, it would be on every TV channel, in the news and people would demand an answer from the government. They would put the government under so much pressure that something would have to be done. People would get fired for this, for sure. But unfortunately in Vietnam it seems that people don’t have the guts to stand up to injustice, and just try to find a way around the problem instead of dealing with the problem itself.
Luckily in July I’m going back to Canada so I’ll have unrestricted access to anything I want. Including facebook.
Has Facebook changed their IP addresses? Had hardcoded the IP addresses but it stopped working a few days ago.
yah, it’s depressing. They are not blocking pornographic over here though.
tried all ways still block grrrrr…..any solution? please help.
Try a proxy server
http://technicalbliss.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-use-free-proxy-with-firefox.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/135982
vietnam has laws, the laws might be shit but thats a different topic. my point is that on facebook they not only had anti vn government groups but even it was an advertisment. something about free ngyuen …. i tried to delete these adverts but they kept showing up. i contacted facebook and said if you dont remove this ads facebook will get blocked. they didnt listen. these ads and groups are against vn law, so ofcourse it had to be blocked. if you want to fight the vn government and its laws thats your choice but understand blocking facebook is the correct action.
I’ve been visiting Vietnam for 1 week already, and I still haven’t been able to log on Facebook. This is bullshit. Even going on this website to read this article is blocked. It transferred me over to cuocsong.net or something like that. I had to use Google cache to go on this website.
VN is growing beautifully and is truly a great country. It is great to be able to see it develop first hand living here 8 years as an expat, but folks, I hate to tell you it is still a very state controlled government. If the government announces to the people they blocked Facebook, they are admitting they need to answer to the people…which on matters not relating to life or death…they don’t.
The real question should be raised at these pin heads that are still fighting the VN/America war. It is over guys. Support the government. They have brought the standard of living up 100X or more for most VN Nationals. In other words, other than a little paranoia from Facebook they have done a pretty good job.
Being without Facebook for a fortnight is probably a good thing anyway. You will have plenty of catch up time in the airport lounge in HK or BKK. Enjoy Vietnam.