Pakistan Breaks Youtube (I DONT THINK SO)

I noticed this weekend that on two blogs I read there were Youtube videos. Both of which did not work. I thought it was my computer or that Youtube was down. I am not a big Youtuber but it can be interesting. Turns out that Pakistan was trying to block Youtube within its borders because of “offensive” content. More likely political dissent. Anyway, they did this by changing the DNS record to point somewhere else. The concept would be similar to changing the phone number in the directory to someone else’s to prevent telemarketing calls. Somehow they changed it for the WHOLE WORLD instead of just within Pakistan. This is not supposed to be possible so in reality it is likely the fault of whoever wrote the DNS zone files for Youtube and not Pakistan. However, Pakistan should not have been blocking sites at a country level in any case. Pakistan’s unorthodox workaround brought to light this problem and exploited the mistake. What they did should have only blocked people on their network. Anyone ever hear of AUTHORITATIVE FREAKING DNS?

 

OK. I have geeked out. Sorry for the confusion. Some of you may follow. Most normal people wouldn’t know wtf I was talking about.

 

I heard about this on a tech podcast. My conclusion that its Youtube (or their hosts) fault is my own based on knowledge of how DNS works and just how much misinformation there is.

 

Pakistan sucks and should not be blocking sites. Neither should China, or the US for that matter. I am against censorship and for free speech all the way. However, the Pakistani’s are not mad hackers and the scope of the problem was caused likely by some lazy network administrator right here in the good old USA. Somehow, I doubt anyone else will believe that. I guess it will become another look what those people can do to us. We must go to war. AGAIN. They meant no harm to anyone outside of their own country.

 

DNS is the system where names (such as www.youtube.com) are converted to IP addresses for easy access. Without it, you would have to go to the IP address directly so instead of typing in www.youtube.com you would have to type in 208.65.153.253 to get there. Go ahead and try. It will get you to Youtube. It would have even worked during the “outage”