wiredpakistan

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!