Since the launch of the information super highway, highwaymen have roamed free with little restriction of their movement. In 2020, these highwaymen control the botnet networks that control crypto-virus extortion schemes still with little potential of policing or prosecution.
The internet had been envisioned as a unrestricted pool of human knowledge available to citizens of the post-national states and therefore border-less. In the real world, jurisdictions need borders to enforce legislation and protect its citizenry and this has been largely missing from the internet.
A few jurisdictions made an early start of partitioning the internet for their own purposes most infamously, China. They’ve been able to control content to protect their citizenry from things they consider social evils and illegal activities. The likes of Jordan B Peterson has made the concept of these restrictions more palatable but on a smaller scales when he reminds us that we put locks on our home for a reason – not everyone is welcome.
CIRA, the Canadian internet body is finally taking strong steps to provide jurisdictional borders on our Canadian internet by cleansing DNS records. DNS is like the “White pages” of the internet and critically looks up internet content dozens of times each time you visit a web page. Locking down DNS gives the ability to lock down content deemed high risk , illegal or beyond jurisdictional review. All in all its a good thing. If you’d rather have everything – go browse the dark web. For the average Canadian, this is safer better and faster.
The implementation is easy. Just update the DNS records in your Shaw / Telus router with the custom DNS servers provided by CIRA. All content is then looked-up in the CIRA DNS servers and questionable content is simply not returned.
There are three filtering levels available: Private, Protected, and Family.
Private: DNS resolution service that keeps your DNS data private from third-parties. Use DNS Servers: 149.112.121.10 and 149.112.122.10
Protected: Includes Private features and adds malware and phishing blocking. Use DNS Servers 149.112.121.20 and 149.112.122.20
Family: Includes Protected and Private features and blocks pornographic content. Use DNS Servers: 149.112.121.30 and 149.112.122.30
Good job to the folks at CIRA and taking some bold steps to provide internet borders for Canadians.
For more information on CIRA’s Canadian Shield visit: https://www.cira.ca/cybersecurity-services/canadian-shield
