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YouTube Wars
Pakistan vs YouTube
In the end, YouTube wins!
At around 18:48 GMT, on February 28th 2008, Pakistan Telecom acted upon a Pakistan (Provincial) Government censorship order, and started blocking what was supposed to be a single video on the YouTube. The methods used were however like using a nuclear bomb to assisinate a single entity. Result, Pakistan Telecom owned Pakistan Internet Exchange started advertising a route for 208.65.153.0/24 to its provider, PCCW (AS 3491) and managed to Nuke youtube from face of the earth for over an hour.
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.
In the process however, this action resulted in two major consequences besides YouTube getting nuked - Pakistan Telecom created a self inflicted denial of service on itself as it was overwhelmed with traffic, and secondly, PCCW decided to take Pakistan off from the Internet.
It should be noted that the original censorship order mentioned blocking just a single video - not the entire YouTube website ... and this order was localized to a single province which had a more fundamentalist type provincial government, but somehow, someone at the national telecom peering point decided to have their own way with it, and decided to deny access to the entire YouTube to the entire country (perhaps because the individual ISP's within the country did not see it as an appropriate action and were not complying with the block request?). But then either intentionally or by mistake, this person at the peering point managed to create a world wide block, by a simple action, that only took seconds to propagate and exploited a weakness in the BGP which has been known since over a decade and still goes ignored as of today ...
But then again, the power of YouTube has grown to such proportions, that PCCW decided that it was appropriate to take an entire country off from the Internet because they disturbed the Gods of the YouTube :-) Although this time the war did not escalate as there was no further backlash, still I think its a possibility that any action in these powerful media sites can actually start a world wide backlash.
Read more about this war by following the links below:
YouTube Hijacking: A RIPE NCC RIS case study
http://www.ripe.net/news/study-youtube-hijacking.html
Using BGP Play to see how the route propagted in internet and time space
http://www.ris.ripe.net/cgi-bin/bgplay.cgi?prefix=208.65.153.0/24&start=2008-02-24+18:46&end=2008-02-24+21:05
In the end, YouTube wins!
At around 18:48 GMT, on February 28th 2008, Pakistan Telecom acted upon a Pakistan (Provincial) Government censorship order, and started blocking what was supposed to be a single video on the YouTube. The methods used were however like using a nuclear bomb to assisinate a single entity. Result, Pakistan Telecom owned Pakistan Internet Exchange started advertising a route for 208.65.153.0/24 to its provider, PCCW (AS 3491) and managed to Nuke youtube from face of the earth for over an hour.
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.
In the process however, this action resulted in two major consequences besides YouTube getting nuked - Pakistan Telecom created a self inflicted denial of service on itself as it was overwhelmed with traffic, and secondly, PCCW decided to take Pakistan off from the Internet.
It should be noted that the original censorship order mentioned blocking just a single video - not the entire YouTube website ... and this order was localized to a single province which had a more fundamentalist type provincial government, but somehow, someone at the national telecom peering point decided to have their own way with it, and decided to deny access to the entire YouTube to the entire country (perhaps because the individual ISP's within the country did not see it as an appropriate action and were not complying with the block request?). But then either intentionally or by mistake, this person at the peering point managed to create a world wide block, by a simple action, that only took seconds to propagate and exploited a weakness in the BGP which has been known since over a decade and still goes ignored as of today ...
But then again, the power of YouTube has grown to such proportions, that PCCW decided that it was appropriate to take an entire country off from the Internet because they disturbed the Gods of the YouTube :-) Although this time the war did not escalate as there was no further backlash, still I think its a possibility that any action in these powerful media sites can actually start a world wide backlash.
Read more about this war by following the links below:
YouTube Hijacking: A RIPE NCC RIS case study
http://www.ripe.net/news/study-youtube-hijacking.html
Using BGP Play to see how the route propagted in internet and time space
http://www.ris.ripe.net/cgi-bin/bgplay.cgi?prefix=208.65.153.0/24&start=2008-02-24+18:46&end=2008-02-24+21:05
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mk7718 |
Latest page update: made by mk7718
, Mar 14 2008, 12:23 AM EDT
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