[nukkad] Youtube censorship

[Mean Drake <>]

Hello Nukkad-list,

Yaaayyyy!!! Or should I say Yahoo! ... India is not the only country with 
strong moral police. Pakistan now blacklisting Youtube. Any such form of 
censorship shows me two things:
1. How insecure the government is.
2. Either the government thinks, or the people of the country really are morons.

Same applies to Jodha Akbar ban in MP. In this case the Rajput community showed 
their mentally retarded status so I cannot blame the ruling party there.

News:
  By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer Mon Feb 25, 7:18 PM ET

NEW YORK - Most of the world's Internet users lost access to YouTube
for several hours Sunday after an attempt by Pakistan's government to
block access domestically affected other countries.

The outage highlighted yet another of the Internet's vulnerabilities,
coming less than a month after broken fiber-optic cables in the
Mediterranean took Egypt off line and caused communications problems
from the Middle East to India.

An Internet expert explained that Sunday's problems arose when a
Pakistani telecommunications company accidentally identified itself to
Internet computers as the world's fastest route to YouTube. But
instead of serving up videos of skateboarding dogs, it sent the
traffic into oblivion.

On Friday, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered 70
Internet service providers to block access to YouTube.com, because of
anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site, which is owned by
Google Inc.

The authority did not specify what the offensive material was, but a
PTA official said the ban concerned a trailer for an upcoming film by
Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, who has said he plans to release a movie
portraying Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence against
women and homosexuals.

The block was intended to cover only Pakistan, but extended to about
two-thirds of the global Internet population, starting at 1:47 p.m.
EST Sunday, according to Renesys Corp., a Manchester, N.H., firm that
keeps track of the pathways of the Internet for telecommunications
companies and other clients.

The greatest effect was in Asia, were the outage lasted for up to two
hours, Renesys said.

YouTube confirmed the outage on Monday, saying it was caused by a
network in Pakistan.

"We are investigating and working with others in the Internet
community to prevent this from happening again," YouTube said in an
e-mailed statement.

A YouTube spokeswoman did not immediately respond to an e-mailed
question on whether the clips that offended Pakistan's government had
been removed. Several clips with interviews of Wilders were still up
on the site Monday afternoon.

<Technical content snipped ... see source below for details>

John Palfrey, executive director for the Berkman Center for Internet &
Society at Harvard Law School, said that while all the facts in the
case are not yet known, it appeared that the repercussions were due to Pakistan 
taking a relatively heavy-handed approach in trying to censor YouTube.

"It points in many respects to the difficulty, if not the folly, in
Internet filtering at the state level," he said."

Source-- http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080226/ap_on_hi_te/youtube_outage_pakistan



-- 
Best regards,
 Mean

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We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one 
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