Monday, February 25, 2008
Do not anger the Internet gods or you will suffer their wrath!
I cannot let the irony pass with out commenting.A religious state, Pakistan, identifies a content provider, YouTube, as the source of blasphemous, seditious content and orders, King Canute style, that the Internet tides be stopped.
A zealous ISP ignorantly decides the best way to comply with the decree is to re-route all of YouTube's IP addresses to whatever site they thought was more appropriate.
The first repercussion was that YouTube disappeared from the Internet for almost an hour.
The second repercussion was that Pakistan's Internet access crawled to a halt as all of a sudden they were handling IP requests for one of the busiest sites in the world.
So, while working on a fix that will filter out the spurious route announcements, PCCW has found it necessary to shut down Pakistan's Internet access.
The leadership of Pakistan just created a massive Denial of Service on their own country.
I could say: "be careful what you wish for" to those elements that object to free and open access to information and expression of ideas. But to put it in terms they might understand better: Do not anger the Internet gods or you will suffer their wrath!
Posted by Nick HaC @ 11:28 PM
