[ NNSquad ] Re: Pakistan YouTube block routing changes disrupt YouTube worldwide

[Rahul Tongia <tongia@cmu.edu>]

Having spent a lot of time in and worked with developing regions, there 
are many archaic laws if not draconian ones whereby blasphemy, hurting 
the sentiments of minorities, etc. are criminal acts.

IMHO, this isn't an issue of NN per se, just complying with really 
stupid/misguided laws.

I remember the relatively recent issue in India where someone was 
(falsely) arrested for posting inflammatory stuff on Orkut (Google's 
MySpace equivalent, big in Brazil and India), stuff that actually let to 
some mild violence.  The person arrested was handed over by his ISP, who 
matched his IP address. Turns out they got it wrong, but he still spent 
days in prison. :(  [makes me wonder about keeping my open WiFi access 
point!]
e.g.,
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Wrong_man_jailed_for_50_days/articleshow/2513737.cms 


A government is always free to say that content X is illegal.  Drugs, 
bombs, pedophilia, denying the holocaust, etc. The challenge is how we 
deal with it. By taking down an entire domain?  That then shifts the 
onus of policing - but is that upon the ISP or on the 
application/service provider?  An ISP can only block a set of IP 
addresses, unless they start examining content.  So in that sense, it's 
"better" ala NN they banned YouTube than forcing ISPs to block specific 
content within YouTube.

Rahul

************************************************************************
Rahul Tongia, Ph.D.
Senior Systems Scientist

Program in Computation, Organizations, and Society (COS)
School of Computer Science (ISR) /
Dept. of Engineering & Public Policy

Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA
tel: 412-268-5619
fax: 412-268-2338
email: tongia@cmu.edu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rtongia



McTim wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 8:10 PM, Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com> wrote:
> > This story hasn't seen much mainstream media play yet.  Apparently
> >  the means chosen by Pakistan's ISPs to conform to their government's
> >  attempt to block their people's access to "religiously offensive"
> >  video materials -- low level routing changes
>
> Points up the need for securing the routing infrastructure...work is ongoing.
>
> If you want to see exactly what happened, and when, go to:
>
> http://www.ris.ripe.net/dashboard/36561, and you will see the /25
> announcements from youtube.
>
> For a really cool look, try http://www.ris.ripe.net/bgplay enter
> 208.65.153.0/24 and specify starting time on the 23rf Feb, and you can
> clearly see when AS1757 stating announcing the /24 more specific.
>
> Do we know for sure it was malicious? Routing is hard, not knowing
> what they were doing is a more likely scenario.