Pakistan Blamed for Worldwide YouTube Break

 Publicado por Mike Nizza en The Lead, columna de The New York Times.

If all had gone according to plan, Pakistan would have been the latest government taking part in an unsettling trend from Brazil to Thailand: YouTube blocking. Unlike its predecessors, though, Pakistan also affected thousands of people beyond its borders. In case you were wondering on Sunday why you couldn’t watch the video clip of the moment – President Nicolas Sarkozy telling a man to “get lost” – YouTube’s answer was simple: Pakistan. Here is what the company had to say, via CNet:

“For about two hours, traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet Protocols,” said YouTube spokesperson Ricardo Reyes in a statement. “Many users around the world could not access our site. We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan. We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again.”

Now that online video junkies have their favorite Web site back in good fettle, a more serious problem comes to the fore than boredom – Internet security.

“There will definitely be some fallout from this,” wrote Darren Waters, a technology reporter for BBC News. “It would seem that all it takes to hijack a website globally is [...] a piggyback chain of confusion” at Internet service providers.

The chain of confusion started when Pakistan’s Internet tinkering was copied to an affiliated I.S.P. in Hong Kong, which copied it to other companies routing Internet requests across the world.

Experts on Internet routing agreed on their mailing list that the spread of the YouTube-blocking beyond Pakistan was an accident, according to Ars Technica, an erudite technology site that describes the incident in its full technical glory.

Another network experts told BBC News, “This was probably a simple mistake by an engineer at Pakistan Telecom.” (Wait until the boss finds out about this!)

As with previous cases of official YouTube-blocking, the anti-censorship crowds on the Web leapt first to criticize the Pakistani government’s action, while others questioned the stated motive for the move: Was it really just about videos of the controversial Muhammad cartoons, as the government said, or did it have more to do with President Pervez Musharraf’s grudge against the media?

Yet another theory was that Pakistan was actually testing some new form of cyberwarfare, an increasing concern from Washington to Beijing. But that seemed unlikely, not least because a real attack mounted in this way would have crippled Pakistan’s own Internet access.

By suddenly rerouting YouTube-content requests from around the world to be handled in Pakistan, a volume of Internet traffic far greater than usual for the country, “the leadership of Pakistan just created a massive Denial of Service on their own country,” Richard Stiennon, a ZDNet blogger, wrote.

In his estimation, the chain of events was downright karmic:

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