From the
Associated Press:
Pakistan's telecoms regulator said Tuesday it has lifted restrictions on the YouTube Web site that led to the knocking out of access to the popular video-sharing site in many other countries for a few hours over the weekend. ...
Pakistan ordered YouTube blocked on Friday over a clip featuring a Dutch lawmaker who has said he plans to release a movie portraying Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence. As a result, most of the world's Internet users lost access to YouTube for several hours on Sunday.
(Note to Pakistan: If you really want to see blasphemy, I'd refer you to UselessJunk.com. That's like the Blasphemer's YouTube.)
Now, Pakistan really didn't try to block the rest of the world from using YouTube.
Just the infidels. Or so it says. Here's what happened, AP reports:
An Internet expert said Sunday's problems came after a Pakistani telecommunications company complied with the [government's] block by directing requests for YouTube videos to a "black hole." So instead of serving up videos of skateboarding dogs, it sent the traffic into oblivion.
The problem was that the company also accidentally identified itself to Internet computers as the world's fastest route to YouTube, which is owned by Google Inc. That led requests from across the Internet to the black hole.
If you're really into the inner workings of the Internet, Declan McCullagh over at CNET News.com does some impressive
drilling down into the technical details of what he termed this "serious Internet vulnerability."
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