In an unprecedented move for a multi-cultural tourism destination, Malaysia has begun to block Internet access to public information about HIV/AIDS and LGBT travel, effecting busy travel hubs like Kuala Lumpur’s International airport and creating digital roadblocks for citizens throughout the country. On May 4, Sinar Project, a Malaysian media watchdog, reported the country’s first known online censorship of an LGBT-specific community travel website, Utopia-Asia.com, which TMNet, a Malaysian Internet Service provider, began blocking in April without explanation. Ooni Explorer, a global observation network for detecting censorship, surveillance and traffic manipulation on the Internet, found that TMNet was engaging in DNS tampering by re-routing Utopia Asia’s domain name to display a false notice and deceive customers in Malaysia into thinking those resources no longer existed. “Is your website down? I cannot access Utopia-Asia.com in Malaysia any longer,” wrote confused netizen, Ian T. “My browser displays a ‘server error 404 – file or directory not found’ message.”
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