Pakistan Removes YouTube, Then Itself From Net
Some of you may have noticed that YouTube was down yesterday for about an hour. What happened seemed to be that the “democratic” government of Pakistan decided that the site was a source of blasphemous content, and decreed that YouTube access must be blocked. There’s several ways Pakistani officials could have accomplished this without affecting the rest of us. They didn’t use any of those ways.
What they did do, it seems, is set up a filter for YouTube’s IP addresses to filter out all access from Pakistan. Then they sent a message to the rest of the internet (the routers), that Pakistan was the most direct route to YouTube.
The internet is, in some ways, a pretty smart system. When one computer tries to connect to another, a request is sent out which gets sent around the net until it finds a router that basically says, “Hey, I know where that’s at!” and then the connection is made. Once Pakistan had announced to the net that IT was the most direct route to YouTube, literally ALL the requests for YouTube went to Pakistan.
Net result (pun intended) #1: YouTube was taken down by Pakistan.
Net result (even funnier) #2: Pakistan’s internet traffic crawled to a near standstill because of all the redirected YouTube requests.
Net result (Web’o’justice) #3: Pakistan authorities had to remove Pakistan from the web until they get this straightened out.
YouTube was inaccessible for about an hour. As far as I can tell, Pakistan is still isolated from the rest of the world while they try to get this right.
People are talking about this all over the web. Here’s just a few links to check out for more info.
Blogger News
ZDNet
Washington Post
AborNetworks(Very Good Explanation)
GeeksAreSexy
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I am Jon, and that’s Pakistan over there, in the corner of the web, looking a bit sheepish.
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