Pakistan & YouTube
UPDATE — In attempting to block access to YouTube, Pakistan ended up making YouTube inaccessible to everyone — not just everyone in Pakistan, but everyone! Martin A. Brown provides some of the technical details and a time line here (Thanks Steven!):
I’ve updated blockpage.com with a screen capture from an ISP in Pakistan from the Don’t Block the Blog Campaign. As noted, since most ISPs route through the Pakistan Internet Exchange which only blocks IP addresses, many users in Pakistan won’t have access to YouTube at all. Users of the ISP TWA appear to have partial access.
The Global Voices Advocacy blog has good coverage of the story and has also posted a copy of the blocking order. (Older blocking orders from Pakistan available here, here and here.)
Just before 18:48 UTC, Pakistan Telecom, in response to government order (thanks nsp-sec-d) to block access to YouTube (see news item) started advertising a route for 208.65.153.0/24 to its provider, PCCW (AS 3491). For those unfamiliar with BGP, this is a more specific route than the ones used by YouTube (208.65.152.0/22), and therefore most routers would choose to send traffic to Pakistan Telecom for this slice of YouTube’s network.–
I’ve updated blockpage.com with a screen capture from an ISP in Pakistan from the Don’t Block the Blog Campaign. As noted, since most ISPs route through the Pakistan Internet Exchange which only blocks IP addresses, many users in Pakistan won’t have access to YouTube at all. Users of the ISP TWA appear to have partial access.The Global Voices Advocacy blog has good coverage of the story and has also posted a copy of the blocking order. (Older blocking orders from Pakistan available here, here and here.)
Democracy “Magnified”
The “magnify” component of the Search Monitor project attempts to match the top ten results from Google/Yahoo with the top ten results form the China-specific versions of Google/Yahoo in order to note the similarities and differences in terms of censored, returned (the website is in the top ten of the both the .com and .cn versions of the search engine) and indexed (the website is in the top ten of the .com version, but not in the top ten of the .cn version, but is not censored). It also compares the results based on whether or not each website is hosted in China or ends in a .cn. This is taken as a measurement of “authorized” content that is unlikely to present information that China would block.
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