Youtube recently had a global site outage. According to Youtube this is because of an ISP based in Pakistan. Politics aside, what happened here is that the government wanted the ISP to block access to Youtube and it sounds like the ISP took a sledgehammer to tap in a nail.
Here is another way to look at it, if the Pakistani government wanted to block access to Victoria's Secret catalogs to its mass population, it is easy to do. Locate all points of entry and destroy the printed material. Unfortunately restricting access to Youtube is a bit trickier, routing protocols are smarter than the 20 words used to describe them in Wired.
My point being, I think we are going to see a lot more of this in the future. The good news is that clumsy attempts on information restriction will now be globally noticed, the bad news is that in many cases (like this one) the effects will also be globally felt.
Btw, I heard on NPR this morning that Taliban has given cell phone companies three days to turn of their cell towers at night (to prevent US troops from tracking them through their cell phone usage) . After three days they plan on blowing up cell phone towers that operate through the night.
Welcome to the era where the CEO and technology companies have to discuss terrorist demands in their board meetings. This was inevitable as technology kept moving towards becoming an indispensable commodity like energy. Well it is here now... enjoy
Monday, February 25, 2008
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