After three years of running pretty uneventfully, this has been a pretty bad month for the website! First, wiredpakistan got banned by the PTA, then a few hours back today it got hacked!
Whoever it was, wiped out the entire database, and then… left. Didn’t even bother to say anything. It takes time to break into a forum… if a normal user or person did it I’m sure they would have left some sort of message or something - the fact that whoever did it just left it blank raises a red flag in my mind.
The current status: The last backup I had was too soon… by the time I found out, the ‘cracked’ version had been backed up - so at the moment I have no backup. My host is casting around for older backup as I type, and hopefully it exists. It doesn’t exist! Continue reading ‘Forums Hacked’
Numerous websites around the world reported earlier this week that Pakistan had blocked Youtube. This in itself is not news, as Pakistan regularly blocks websites, but what is interesting is the manner in which they blocked it - managing to take down Youtube for the entire world!
<blockquote>The BBC News website’s technology editor, Darren Waters, says that to block Pakistan’s citizens from accessing YouTube it is believed Pakistan Telecom “hijacked” the web server address of the popular video site.
…A leading net professional told BBC News: “This was probably a simple mistake by an engineer at Pakistan Telecom. There’s nothing to suggest this was malicious.”
IP hijacking involves taking over a web site’s unique address by corrupting the internet’s routing tables, which direct the flow of data around the world.</blockquote>
Industry professionals have been moaning about the Pakistan Internet Exchange for years about how incompetent they are, and this last issue really underlines that. PIE still has not managed to perform it’s primary function of establishing a working local internet exhange in Pakistan, and in the meantime goes about incompetently trying to block websites.
I run a popular travel website on Pakistan, offroadpakistan.com, along with a website on “all things tech†in Pakistan, wiredpakistan.com. They’re both hosted on the same server, and on Feb 3rd, the PTA ordered them blocked. I contacted a couple of ISP’s, and found out from them that my websites were being blocked at the Pakistan Internet Exchange, through which most Pakistan’s internet bandwidth is filtered. Continue reading ‘My personal brush with censorship’
This website is now on the PTA list of blocked websites, and is being blocked at the PIE servers, so you might not be able to access it from certain ISP’s in Pakistan which are routed through PIE. Discussion is ongoing at the forums here.
The possible reasons for censoring this particular website - none really, though there is a lot of criticism of PTCL, Wateen, PTA, and a few other local internet companies, but nothing out of the extraordinary.
I’m reposting an earlier article on internet censorship which I’d written but never posted here before, which explains how the government tries to censor the internet in Pakistan.
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