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.
From the (inevitable) Slashdot discussion:
<blockquote>They announced a route [merit.edu] out of AS 17557 [apnic.net] sending all traffic from ANYWHERE on the Internet to a black-hole in Pakistan. The effect was to make YouTube unreachable from ANYWHERE until the route was filtered by the backbone providers. They claimed it was an “oops”.</blockquote>
It’s not just Pakistani’s who’re fed up with PTCL:
<blockquote>PCCW took far far too long to fix their broken customer (Pakistan Telecom) … Argh.</blockquote>
The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” — John Gilmore
The really frightening thing is that the people over at PTCL, PTA and PIE are the ones deciding internet policy in Pakistan!
According to bbc Pakistan lifts the ban on YouTube
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7262071.stm
But still on some ISP website is not opening. Look like ban is not applied on this site even on some genuine site too. Censorship method used by ISP is some what unpredictable.
In near future I can predict that Pakistan ISP will block most of traffic outside the world to protect its internal Political situation and customers of Internet will face slowdown of bandwidth due to censorship applied by PTA.
Asalaam o Alaikum,
Has the forum been hacked?
I don’t know why but I see most of the Pakistani websites being hacked.
I read the article today and its hilarious. I laughed so much. The use of word “incompetent” made me laugh more.
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thank you for such a great topic. I have learned a lot by reading on this website today.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
what ever is the reason all i know is that pakistani ppl are very gud in their work what ever they want to do they can do and they proved this to world many times i dont know why we are all taking it in negetive way i think if this is true that pakistan blocked or hacked youtube from the whole internet then it means pakistanis are stronger then americans if america cant secure its own websites then what is the mistake of pakistan????????????????????????????hackers are genius ppl but they use their mind in a negetive way some times but in this case pakistani ppl did this cuz they dont want some videos so they block the whole web site,i m an indian but i like to appricate pakistan
I think this is a genius action and not a mistake.Youtube should adopt some self sensor mechanism to check whether any video is causing some hurt to anyone. If you hurt someone, you cannot expect that you will not be hurt as a reaction. Thanks RAvi warma for appreciating Pakistanis. People of indo-pak subcontinent are really Genious.
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wow great land and great people ……..PAKISTAN.
Youtube should hire people from PAKISTAN to protect their website.
It’s mean ppl of Pakistan can do anything if they can hijack a popular mostly seen in the world website, America should accept that Asian ppl are more intelligent than America.
ohh !!! i only wanna say it happens too late..
newaz PROUD TO B A PAKISTANI ever
welldone
Jiay Bhutto !!!
hahahahahahaha
man its so cool that Pakistan hacked youtube n made it bloacked for the whole world …….n BEST PART accidently hahahahahahaha
hahahahahaha
it means you ffin tube’s security is nothing match to pakistanii telecom engeneers hahahahahahaahh
O IM Pakistani….
internet Black hole in pakistan…..ahhahahahaahahaha