Pakistan blocks YouTube

Source: BBC

Pakistan has blocked access to the popular YouTube website because of content deemed offensive to Islam.

Its telecommunications authority ordered internet service providers to block the site until further notice.

Reports said the content included Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that have outraged many.

But one report said a trailer for a forthcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, which portrays Islam in a negative light, was behind the ban.

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7261727.stm

Might lessen the grip of the religious police. And we certainly can't people thinking for themselves,
now can we?

rerouted the world's traffic for YouTube to some other site until the Pakistani ISP trying to do the blocking was taken offline. That was probably a mistake, but it's eye opening nonetheless.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=548">Pakistan removed from the Internet

The Internet system is designed to automatically route traffic around nodes that go off line. The USA got this as a harsh reminder when we first bombed Iraq's command and control centers in the first war and we saw that things still "just worked" (all be it a little slower) until enough nodes were taken out.

Now Pakistan is in line with the Saudis ... Yet another good friend of the GOP/Petroleum Axis of Evil ...

The Pakistani government is doing so to block like the videos on youtube which are criticizing them and videos of election showing mqm poll rigging.

2/24/08 Pakistan's government takes out YouTube, worldwide by RiderOnTheStorm

Pakistan's government has identified one of the videos hosted on the site as offensive/blasphemous/whatever, and announced its decision to block the entire site nationwide -- and to pretend that this will actually somehow magically block the video itself. But that's not what's happened.

Explaining this will require a brief (and therefore necessarily incomplete and slightly misleading) explanation of how Internet routing works. Bear with me, I promise you I'll make this painless.

All Internet traffic is broken up into packets, which are shuffled around by devices called routers. Routers do with packets what the human beings (and machines) in the postal system do with letters: they look at the destination address and move them one step closer to it. Just as no one person carries your letter all the way from your outbox to the recipient's inbox, no one router transmits your data all the way from source to destination.

lots more...
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/2/25/82340/3007

excellent diary, and more information in the comments