Pakistan is responsible for almost total blackout of YouTube, the popular video site, around the world. The BBC is reporting that the hour-long global outage was almost certainly connected to Pakistan Telecom and Asian internet service provider PCCW.
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.
In the last couple of days, the Pakistan Telecom Authority was being attacked by the bloggers and others in Pakistan for attempting to block anti-government video content. Some believed it had to with alleged "election rigging" by MQM. In fact, the motivation was to block access to material deemed offensive to Muslims. It is thought that, unlike the filters in China and Saudi Arabia, Pakistani filters lack the ability to stop content selectively and block the entire domains instead.
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 Domain Name Servers (DNS) that resolve domain names to specific IP addresses and direct the flow of data around the world.
Showing posts with label BBC News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BBC News. Show all posts
Sunday, February 24, 2008
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