Internet Censorship Crosses Borders
Internet Censorship Crosses Borders
February 27, 2008: Following January’s mysterious undersea cable problems, censorship in Pakistan has been blamed for another curious outage that saw two-thirds of the world’s YouTube users cut off from the astronomically popular video sharing site.
In response to alleged anti-Islamic videos being posted on the site, on Sunday the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) decided to block access to it and ordered 70 ISPs to do so.
The blocking of sites itself is not unusual in Pakistan and other countries in the region, however, what is unusual is that the decision ended up cutting off access far beyond the country’s borders, in some cases for several hours.
According to the Associated Press, the problem stemmed from one PTA ISP which “blocked” the site by sending all traffic requests into a “black hole”. Due to this, the company inadvertently turned itself into the fastest route to the site, thereby attracting huge amounts of traffic.
The incident highlights how there are still glaring holes in the security and reliability of the internet as we currently know it. While hacking, malicious code and viruses still pose a threat to the information superhighway as we know it, if human error on a small scale can knock one of the world’s most popular sites offline, a similar but targeted attack could cause all kinds of strife.
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