Pakistan YouTube Block Breaks the World

Allen54 noted a followup to yesterday's story about Pakistan's decision to block YouTube. He notes that "The telecom company that carries most of Pakistan's traffic, PCCW, has found it necessary to shut Pakistan off from the Internet while they filter out the malicious routes that a Pakistani ISP, PieNet, announced earlier today. Evidently PieNet took this step to enforce a decree from the Pakistani government that ISP's must block access to YouTube because it was a source of blasphemous content. YouTube has announced more granular routes so that at least in the US they supercede the routes announced by PieNet. The rest of the world is still struggling."

Comments

Re:But how did they do it?

[suso]

Yeah that is very stupid. Why would you allow one of your customers to modify global routes when they don't have an AS number themselves?

I imagine that this event will introduce a lot of people to how high level internet routing works. Yes, its that vulnerable folks. Scary, but fortunately these events don't happen often. I think back in late 90s was the time when someone in Pennsylvania introduced a global route for everything to go to 0.0.0.0, which brought everything down for a day.

Gutenberg

[Max_W]

Once the Islam world already did the same error. In 15th century when Gutenberg invented the printing press the Islam countries were a way ahead in science.

But mullahs forbade printing for 200 years, while in Europe it exploded. Mostly it was silly: religious stuff, cartoons, sex, but it was also maps, mathematics, etc.

Internet is about the same as an invention of printing was then. And again they are making the same mistake, again due to a fear of mullahs to lose their power.

Like 500 years ago it will just slow the development of their civilization.

Re:But how did they do it?

[bluesky74656]

Pakistan Telcom does have an ASN number. Just for kicks, try this:

Head over to this site. It visualizes the BGP routes between different AS's. Click 'Start BGPlay'. The prefix in which YouTube lives is 208.65.153.0/24. Set the start time for about 24 Feb 2008 10:00, and the end time for about 25 Feb 2008 03:00 (times are UTC). Start the simulation.

You'll see a bunch of ASNs. Two have red circles around them. You can get their name by clicking on the number. On the left is YouTube, and on the right is Pakistan Telcom. Click play and watch what happens.

For those too lazy to actually watch this: All the routes destined for YouTube head towards Pakistan Telcom instead. Then, midway through, you see PCCW get wise and shut down those routes, and everyone slowly starts finding the actual YouTube. It's pretty neat to watch.