China blocking DNS servers

[Liudvikas Bukys <liudvikas.bukys () ROCHESTER EDU>]

My university and a number of others are apparently having
some DNS server traffic blocked by some Chinese ISPs.

There is an excellent summary of the situation at:
  <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/>
(this includes a real-time test interface that unfortunately,
at the moment, seems to classify all results as "indeterminate")
and there are related recent articles at:
  <http://www.mail-archive.com/ip () v2 listbox com/msg00290.html>
  <http://www.politechbot.com/pipermail/politech/2003-November/000212.html>

It was noticed here because there were some complaints from
potential Chinese applicants, followed by a remarkably low number
of Chinese applicants on a particular deadline.  For any of our
institutions seeking Chinese applicants, this is a business-critical
outage.


For the workgroups:

* One technical countermeasure is to beef up secondary DNS servers,
  particularly with high-volume DNS services (Akamai or UltraDNS?)
  that may be less likely to be blocked.  Has anyone looked into
  this angle?

* (Short-term measures could include migrating DNS servers to
  unblocked IP addresses -- an annoying and messy shell game.)

* Are the EDUCAUSE .edu operators aware of this issue?
  Any recommendations from them?  (How does one contact them?)

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