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Pakistan removes YouTube ban after fixing bad routing

By BetaNews Staff, BetaNews

February 26, 2008, 6:15 PM

Access to YouTube has been restored in Pakistan after the country ordered local Internet providers to unblock the site. The move comes two days after a mistake by one of the telecommunications companies that caused it to identify itself as the fastest route to YouTube, breaking the site around the world.

The problem was corrected after briefly knocking out access to YouTube on Sunday, but the ban within the country remained in effect until Tuesday. While other videos featuring Dutch politician Geert Wilders will still be available to Pakistani users, the offending video that led to the blocking order has been removed by YouTube parent Google.

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By OCedHrt

posted Feb 27, 2008 - 3:48 AM

The internet is resilient to a single point of failure. If a router failed in Pakistan, not many people would notice. However, the internet is not resilient to bad routing tables. Actually, it is the ability to automatically route around a bad route that made it so much worse.

Score: 0

By rsx508

posted Feb 26, 2008 - 11:36 PM

I was always taught that you couldn't break the Internet like this. It was supposed to be resilient enough to prevent any one point of breakage from breaking the whole thing. What next? Al Qeada will try this with some of the .mil domains?

Score: 0

By Paul Skinner

posted Feb 27, 2008 - 4:47 AM

You can't really do what happened normally.
You have to rely on someone jumping and making the router table hit one of the worlds big, big servers which then propagates to the rest.
This was a case of engineers not looking at what they were doing.

It's not impossible, but it's not something you can force to happen either.

Score: 0

By kashin

posted Feb 26, 2008 - 10:27 PM

"the offending video that led to the blocking order has been removed by YouTube parent Google."

So much for freedom of speech on the internet. I'm getting tired of all these pissant governments and companies going around complaining about content they find offensive. Too bad. We have a right to see it if we so choose. I also wish Google would grow a pair and start saying no to every whiny douchebag who comes their way with a complaint.

Score: 0

By radioactive21

posted Feb 26, 2008 - 7:17 PM

They could have just asked YouTube to remove the video instead of going through this mess.

YouTube has removed less offensive videos than this. Heck YouTube removes stuff just because a buncha people disagree.

Score: 0

By Mashahood

posted Feb 27, 2008 - 1:16 PM

I agree with you, the government official were very much irresponsible with this issue, Even when at one Television News anchor asked about the same the minister replied "Thats not the government works and we don't need to talk to them"

Hope the new Democrat Government will be more responsible.

Score: 0

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