Friday, November 27, 2015

What's wrong with law.moi.go.th?

One of the Thai government websites which gave me lots of early information on planned administrative changes - especially the municipal upgrades - is the site of the Office of Legal Affairs of the Ministry of Interior (สำนักกฎหมาย สำนักงานปลัดกระทรวงมหาดไทย), found at law.moi.go.th. However, for more than a year already, I get nothing but connection timeouts when I try to open that site. Even services like "Down For Everyone Or Just Me" show it offline. Yet, strangely, Google still is able to access it, so the Google cache is an awkward backdoor to access the site. Even stranger - a month ago I noticed that with the free proxy from hide.me the site was accessible, so luckily I used the chance to download all the new board meeting transcript files then. Because - it seems the webmaster now blocked access by that proxy, it shows a 403 error.

I really wonder what is going on there. Has the Ministry of Interior placed this website behind the planned Great Firewall of Thailand already wrongly set to filter in the wrong direction? Or did just a stupid network administrator screw up the routing tables which effective blocked the site from foreign access? Needless to say that its impossible to notify anyone by email about this problem, the email address on the website is not working, and also all other standard email like webmaster don't work.

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

     law2555@hotmail.co.th

The error that the other server returned was:
550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable


The connectivity problem seems to be not just this one website, also many of the province websites hosted within the MOI don't work either, e.g. Ubon Ratchathani gives timeouts for me but shows online at "Down for everyone".

Would be curious how much the accessibility of law.moi.go.th has been limited, so I invite you to leave a short comment stating whether you can access the site and from where you did.

1 comment:

Andy said...

Yes, should have mentioned my network location - it fails from both relaix.net as well as via unitymedia.de, and even from Smartphone using O2. The pages I am monitoring are http://www.law.moi.go.th/l5_group1report%2059.html and http://www.law.moi.go.th/l5_group2report%2059.html - those usually get updated about once a month.

Doesn't surprise me much that it works within Thailand - if they screwed it up completely and locked the site totally, then the admins could notice it themselves when they try to access remotely, or Thai people would call by phone to complain and would not try email as they know that way never works.