In Pakistan vs. YouTube, it's not all about technology

The flap earlier this week in which Pakistan Telecom knocked YouTube.com off the Internet for two hours seems almost inexplicable.

It's not like when a court in Turkey blocked access to YouTube from within the country, or when China restricts Western news sites.

Those were country-specific and intentional. The outage on Sunday was global and, as far as we know, unintentional.

So what's to stop another Internet service provider--especially a government-owned one--from intentionally trying this trick? It's easy enough to imagine a situation in which North Korea feels like yanking Voice of America off the Internet, or some nations choosing to assail al-Jazeera (their satellite broadcasts already have been interrupted).

The short answer is that while the Internet is anarchic, it's not that anarchic. (It's closer to the original definition of anarchy: order without government regulation, from the Greek "anarchos," meaning without a ruler.)

In fact, the way network providers handle Internet routing is very specific and carefully defined in a series of standards.

Network providers--called autonomous systems, or ASs--are assigned unique ID numbers that are compiled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. While ICANN holds the master list of AS numbers, they're actually assigned by allocating large blocks of 1,000 or so at a time to regional address registries.

And when one network provider misbehaves and broadcasts a false claim to be the proper destination for certain Internet addresses--as Pakistan Telecom (AS 17557) did this week--it's easy enough to figure out what's going on. If AS 17557 hadn't backed down and fixed the problem relatively quickly, some network providers probably would have "blackholed" it by ignoring some or all of its broadcasts. At the very least, there would have been some manual intervention.

Don't believe me? Some sysadmins have banned all e-mail from China, Korea, and Taiwan on grounds that so much of it is spam. There are commercial products that will do just that for you.

The Internet may be run by computers, but it's managed by people--a remarkably savvy and dedicated group of folks, in fact, who share tips and alert each other to potential network problems. Some of these discussions take place on public mailing lists; some occur in more private settings. Many of these network operators know each other personally through groups like NANOG, AfNOG, and SANOG.

Human intervention, manual overrides, and personal relationships based on in-person meetings aren't perfect: ideally, false broadcasts could be prevented completely through encryption-outfitted mechanisms like Secure BGP. But these less-formal relationships have worked remarkably well, and are (for now at least) the first line of defense against someone learning the lessons from Pakistan Telecom and attempting to do far more damage than merely taking out YouTube for a few hours.

[tenbosch]

Very informative

Declan, this was a very informative post. I wish more were like this.<br /><br />Regardless, are you aware if there are checks/balances in place that were bypassed which caused the outage in the first place? Seems like a newsgroup post or something would have been sent out for warning or something. Or I guess, this kind of blockage occurs all the time and is not easily manageable. Although, blocking a site like Youtube from an entire country seems like a big enough change to go through some sort of process.<br /><br />On a side note, it looks like Youtube complied, which is unfortunate for free speech folks. I have since found many videos that I would find offensive, if I were muslim. I'm curious as to what was so bad about the video in question that it was removed.

[penguinhfx]

block of youtube

If it is for blocking a particular website for a country or region, isn't it the better way <br />to use filtering proxies instead of messing<br />with the bgp routing tables and mess up access <br />to the website for everyone in the world who picks up the false update? Almost all the middle eastern countries block access to lots of websites without indulging in this kind of stuff. Or was it the intention to block access to the controversial videos for everyone on the internet! Who knows! Hopefully incidents like these will make the isp's, universities etc who own big ip blocks put more care and thought into accepting the routing table updates from someone else and implement some filtering as the author has mentioned in the article.

[wright207]

Offended

I wish I could live in a nice country that would block this stuff for me, I dislike having the personal responsibility of making up my own mind what i should or should not see. Much better to live in a country where I am told what to and when to watch certain things.....<br />ALTHOUGH SOME FOLKS ARE TRYING TO CHANGE IT, One of the great things about the United States of America is that NOBODY has a right NOT TO BE OFENDED...

[gurfrip]

CNET Editor

You are so completely behind the times on Internet Intelligence, Surveillance and Counter-Intelligence Issues that it is a surprize that anyone still reads this electronic rag.<br /><br />If you do not get up-to-date [like internet related PROTECT AMERICA ACT Issues] being voted on now, you are really doing your reading public a total disservice. <br /><br />Reading CNET hardly keeps involved parties informed on what is really going on with the internet and the now, OLD NEWS of Counter Surveillance and Strikes on Domestic and Foreign ISP's by Governments [again, domestic and foreign].<br /><br />The You Tube attack [counter-attack] was made for reasons of which all should be aware, regarding Google.

[Pete Bardo]

Where's the beef?

Ok, so Declan is behind the times. I must point out, however:<br />1. You didn't provide any information either.<br />2. If this is so bad, why do you read it?<br />3. If there were reasons of which all should be aware, why didn't you enlighten us?<br /><br />I find the blogs and discussions very entertaining, but not very informative. Your reply was more of the same! Maybe a little gravy, but no beef!

[gallde]

The problem is not outages...

The problem is fraud. Imagine that someone -- or some government body -- on the "inside" clones the actual CitiBank website login, complete with https and the genuine URL, and then issues a DNS advertising their server as the "real" one, Before it can be caught and blocked, the damage is done, and they have untold numbers of account logins. Normal anti-phishing tools and user precautions would not prevent this sort of exploit, which could be used to fund any sort of nefarious activity.

[n3td3v]

Our enemies have too much control over western infrastructure

Read a previous comment by yours truly...<br /><br /><a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.news.com/5208-10784_3-0.html?forumID=1&#38;threadID=35535&#38;start=0&#38;tag=ne.fd.pulse.comments" target="_newWindow">http://www.news.com/5208-10784_3-0.html?forumID=1&#38;threadID=35535&#38;start=0&#38;tag=ne.fd.pulse.comments</a><br /><br />Regards,<br /><br />n3td3v