Pakistan's attempts to block access to YouTube has been blamed for an almost global blackout of the video website for more than an hour on Sunday.
BBC News has learned that the outage was almost certainly connected to Pakistan Telecom and Asian internet service provider PCCW.
A leading net professional said the global outage was "probably a mistake".
Pakistan ordered internet service providers to block the site because of content deemed offensive to Islam.
44 comments
Ah, the classic error of mistaking a medium for its content. Someone makes an internet video you don't like? Ban internet videos altogether!
Why don't you assclowns ban books, newspapers, radio, TV, film and telephones too? I'm sure some data that is incompatible with Islam or even, gasp, denounces Islam has been transmitted via all of those in the past. Oh, but those are all established, whereas youtube is relatively new and trendy and you probably have only the dimmest notion of what it actually is!
Gah, nothing enrages me more than some ignorant government attempting to regulate new technology that it barely even comprehends.
"Ah, the classic error of mistaking a medium for its content. Someone makes an internet video you don't like? Ban internet videos altogether!"
Or... ban the Internet! Yeah!
Apparently, the mere fact of not being Muslims is an offense to Islam(for some, at least). So, why do they have youtube, to begin with?
We reject the infidel and everything of his is filth!!
Like the Kit Kat! This tiny, puny little wafer of chocolate it is the work of satan!
But the larger chunkier Kit Kat, truly, this is a snack fit for Allah himself.
Just same old same old. Oppressive leaders preventing anything that could cause independent thought to crop up among the serfs. It's surprising to me that one nation could block out something for the whole world though, maybe someone more knowledgable could explain how the main backbone, or big toe, of the internet is set up.
"Musharraf is so hated in Pakistan, I don't see how he could possibly NOT end up being publically executed one of these days."
And yeah, people in those countries go along with it because they are fed bullshit by their imams and politicians till they believe that the only way to please their Allah is to have deadly kite flying contests. And reject modern thought in general. Forget about the kite flying, I don't know where that came from.
And yeah, people in those countries go along with it because they are fed bullshit by their imams and politicians till they believe that the only way to please their Allah is to have deadly kite flying contests. And reject modern thought in general. Forget about the kite flying, I don't know where that came from.
Fighting kite flying was enormously popular in Afghanistan (let's face it, there's damn all else you were allowed to do there) until it was recently banned. I guess that's what you're thinking of.
To be honest this looks more like a mistake than an attempt at world censorship. I don't agree with censorship at all mind you, but it seems what happened here is Pakistans internal national changes to web routing 'leaked' out to the rest of the worlds DNS servers from one box with a priority high enough that it spread almost everywhere in about two minutes. Whoops. (Big whoops actually.)
More detail here - http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080225-insecure-routing-redirects-youtube-to-pakistan.html
All fairly pointless anyway as there are still dozens of ways to get to Youtube from inside Pakistan with a minimum of technical knowledge.
We've declared an entire country "fundie?" I would feel a little more comfortable if the fundie in question was Pervez Musharraf, although Shep has provided some compelling evidence that nothing fundie is going on here at all.
And even if we didn't buy Shep's evidence, I'm not ready to say that authoritarian power grabs necessarily equal fundie.
Wow. Pakistan is my mom? I mean, she blocks YouTube, but not FSTDT, and wonders why I don't get any homework done, muhahaha.
The Watcher: Well, I wouldn't say we've declared the entire country fundie, though I'll agree that the "name" term could have been chosen better; it's more a reference to Pakistani officialdom, but it's easier just to speak of the country itself, especially since we don't know who individually was responsible. When "England wins the World Cup," is it really the whole country that competes? When "the U.S. invaded Iraq," was it all of us? No, but it makes an easy form of shorthand.
Also, this was more than just an "authoritarian power grab"; it was specifically an effort to block out material that was considered "offensive to Islam" -- not even "offensive to Muslims," but supposedly an offense to the religion itself. That sounds like a pretty fundie attitude to me.
Two points I would like to make on this story.
1) The mistake was actually by Pakistan's upstream supplier (in Hong Kong, I believe), who mistakenly propagated an instruction to route all Pakistani traffic directed at YouTube to a 'black hole' to all its peers. Hence all the YouTube requests in the world (quite a big number) descended on one poor, unprepared Pakistani server. You probably heard the bang.
2) I think the Pakistan Government's idea was not so much censorship as crowd control. It's one thing to say "If you don't like it, don't look at it.", but we all know there are some people who are just itching to be 'outraged' by something. The PG didn't demand the material (which included the Mohammed cartoons that have caused previous controversies) be taken down, they've just decided that in the interests of public order their people will not see it.
My government has decided I can't watch child porn, or snuff movies, or dozens of other things on my behalf (not that I necessarily want to). It's not censorship, it's government.
Pakistan ordered internet service providers to block the site because of content deemed offensive to Islam.
Since anything that isn't bearskins and flint knives are 'offensive to Islam' I am surprised it took the freaks that long to do something.
@Mister Spak:
They did, for a while.
solomongrundy wrote:
"Tell that to Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, sentenced to death in a four-minute court case in Afghanistan for allegedly downloading a document on women's rights." When Disney's movie Aladdin came out in 1993, Arabs protested a line in the first song that read, "Where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face." Disney bowed to the pressure, and changed the line to something that didn't accuse the Arab world of cruelty.
Now, I think Disney had it right on the mark.
My government has decided I can't watch child porn, or snuff movies, or dozens of other things on my behalf (not that I necessarily want to). It's not censorship, it's government.
Technically, it is censorship. From M-W:
censorship
1 a: the institution, system, or practice of censoring b: the actions or practices of censors; especially : censorial control exercised repressively2: the office, power, or term of a Roman censor3: exclusion from consciousness by the psychic censor
Censoring:
: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable <censor the news>; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable <censor out indecent passages>
Of course, child pornography and snuff films cause actual harm. Videos about human rights abuses in Islamic countries don't.
"Technically, it is censorship."
Technically, it's self -censorship since it is done on our behalf by people we elected to do things on our behalf.
David B., self-censorship is when you censor yourself. When the state does it, it isn't self-censorship, it's state-censoship , regardless of what type of government the state is.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
To post a comment, you'll need to Sign in or Register . Making an account also allows you to claim credit for submitting quotes, and to vote on quotes and comments. You don't even need to give us your email address.
