Life is too short not to exact a bitter and bloody revenge
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Pakistan's YouTube plot thickens
PAKISTAN'S BLOCKING of YouTube might have been due more to political repression than the stated demand to ban content thought to be disrespectful to Islam, and a clumsy attempt to implement the ban by a local telecom apparently impaired much of the world's access to some of YouTube's Internet addresses.
A Pakistani blogger yesterday accused Pakistan's President Musharraf and his cronies of banning YouTube in order to suppress criticism and evidence of vote rigging in the country's recent election.
In addition, Pakistan Telecom reportedly set its gateway router to advertise part of YouTube's assigned network yesterday, a bumbling act that in effect hijacked that part of YouTube's Internet address space.
YouTube has since advertised more specific routes to override Pakistan Telecom's mistake, but that is said to be effective only within the US.
So the rest of the world is thought to be still routing traffic intended for part of YouTube's network into Pakistan, impairing access to YouTube and overloading Pakistan's corner of the Internet. µ
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RIPE has a nice tool the shows the BGP route convergence. Here's a predefined query:
http://tinyurl.com/2y69mv (Java needed)

AS36561 is YouTube, AS17557 is Pakistan Telecom. Click the play button and see that starting at 18:47 hours the routes moving over to Pakistan telecom. moving on, at 20:07 hours, you can see the routes start to fix themselves. By 21:04 there are no routes left going to AS17557

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/pakistan_hijacks_youtube.shtml
has a writeup.