Pakistan’s War On Youtube

By now, you’re probably aware that Pakistan’s government banned youtube because of depictions that were being spread on Mohammad,  a taboo in the Muslim world.

ArsTechnica had the lowdown on some of the odd packet routing issues that resulted on Sunday, here’s  an excerpt:

On Sunday, YouTube became unreachable from most, if not all, of the Internet. No “sorry we’re down” or cutesy kitten-with-screwdriver page, nothing.  What happened was that packets sent to YouTube were flowing to Pakistan. Which was curious, because the Pakistan government had just instituted a ban on the popular video sharing site. What apparently happened is that Pakistan Telecom routed the address block that YouTube’s servers are into a “black hole” as a simple measure to filter access to the service. However, this routing information escaped from Pakistan Telecom to its ISP PCCW in Hong Kong, which propagated the route to the rest of the world.

Insecure Routing redirects Youtube to Pakistan

Fred Soto is an Attorney and Entrepreneur from the Silicon Valley.
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