TWA blocks Blasphemous Video while PIE blocks entire domain

[Dr. Awab Alvi]

Assalam Alaikum

Courtesy of Abdul Sami Azeemi from the Proud Pakistani mailing list who helped us investigate that youtube.com is not blocked on the Transworld Internet backbone and the censorship is only limited to the blasphemous video.  while most of ISP's in Pakistan using FLAG/PIE connectivity remain in darkness

So we can easily blame the PIE's (Pakistan Internet Exchange) archaic filtering/censorship system for plunging the entire country into a youtube blackout more on my blog including screen captures along the same lines

http://tinyurl.com/25nkba

I feel its time to step up the heat to push PTA/PIE for unblocking the youtube website as it is blind / blatant censorship and then in turn we as responsible Muslims and citizens of Pakistan help urge Google / youtube to pull down this religious hate-spurring video

--
Awab Alvi
http://teeth.com.pk/blog

[Masud]

The TWA1 has a Juniper M320 at their landing station in Karachi which
is currently doing the URL filtering for the banned youtube.com site.

Essentially, it allows TWA1 to match the URL (which has been banned by
PTA) and drop that traffic.

PIE runs on Cisco gear (12000 GSR series) which does not have this
capability.

So it's not a matter of PTCL/PIE's will but a shortcoming of the
hardware.

Masud

On Feb 24, 2:29 am, "Dr. Awab Alvi" <dra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Assalam Alaikum
>
> Courtesy of Abdul Sami Azeemi from the Proud Pakistani mailing list who
> helped us investigate that youtube.com is not blocked on the Transworld
> Internet backbone and the censorship is only limited to the blasphemous
> video.  while most of ISP's in Pakistan using FLAG/PIE connectivity remain
> in darkness
>
> So we can easily blame the PIE's (Pakistan Internet Exchange) archaic
> filtering/censorship system for plunging the entire country into a youtube
> blackout more on my blog including screen captures along the same lines
>

> *http://tinyurl.com/25nkba*

[Naveed]

I am not sure if its relevant to ask here, just curious......which
backbone does Wateen use?

[Saad Ibrahim]

FLAG

[bmug...@gmail.com]

There one other solution to all of this...switch to Trasnworld. Be sure to ask your service provider in the future if he is using the ordinary backbone or Trasnworld backbone! Be 100% Sure ;)

[Osama A. Hashmi]

Masud - that's very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

--
"Isn't it a shame that nights go by and I do not increase in knowledge, yet this time is counted as part of my life?" - Al-Sha'fi

[Mustafa Rana]

 

 

AS38264 WATEEN IMS PK AS AP National WiMAX/IMS environment

 

AS PEERS

 

peers sorted by AS-rank

AS15412 FLAG AS Flag Telecom Global Internet AS London, UK	ANY	AS38264
AS17557 PKTELECOM AS AP Pakistan Telecom ITI Region PTCL	ANY	AS38264
AS9541 CYBERNET AP Cyber Internet Services (Pvt) Ltd PAKISTAN BASED ISP	ANY	AS38264
AS23966 DANCOM AS AP Dancom Online Services Network Service Provider	ANY	AS38264

 

AS Analyze

Number of unique AS-peers:	4
Number of found peering routers:	0
Number of prefixes:	15
Number of ip numbers:	60672

member of as-flagp, as-flagt, as-reach-customers, as-seabone, as-setptcl, as38193:as-peers

Routing Registry

aut-num:      AS38264
as-name:      WATEEN-IMS-PK-AS-AP
descr:        National WiMAX/IMS environment
country:      PK
import: from AS17557 action pref=100; accept ANY   (ITI-PTCL)
import: from AS9541 action pref=100; accept ANY    (CYBERNET)
import: from AS23966 action pref=200; accept ANY   (DANCOM/LinkDotNet)
export: to AS17557 announce AS38264
export: to AS9541 announce AS38264
export: to AS23966 announce AS38264
default:      from AS17557 action pref=100;
default:      accept ANY
default:      from AS9541 action pref=100;
default:      accept ANY
default:      from AS23966 action pref=200;
default:      accept ANY

 http://www.robtex.com/aspeers/as38264.html

Rgds/Mustafa

[Sajjad Zaidi]

Whether the hardware supports it or not, from the screenshot, it is obvious that the filtering is being done via a proxy. This can be done on PTCL/PIE's end just as easily, so the main issue really is their will.

YouTube still blocked on Wateen.

Sajjad | http://sajjadzaidi.com

On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 2:35 PM, Masud <masud...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Zaeem Arshad]

Pakistan 'Sparks youtube outage' -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7262071.stm

Awesome...PCCW is really really abysmal not to mention the PTCL folks.

--
Zaeem

[Rizwan Sarwar]

Announcements for BGP are wrong from PTCL network, that is what broke
youtube for the rest of the work too, I was following this last night. It
was worse than that. What they said is a BGP config error by the main ISP
in Pakistan propagated incorrect routes and killed youtube's IP range
around the world.

They have got around that by pointing the DNS for www.youtube.com to their
servers in Hong Kong which are on a different IP block.
The actual IP range that was affected is still apparently unroutable.

Rizwan

On Mon, 25 Feb 2008 04:31:52 -0000, Zaeem Arshad <zaeem....@gmail.com>
wrote:

--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

[Zaeem Arshad]

PTCL $nocmoneky made the mistake of advertising the /24 upstream but
the upstream had no filter to restrict what they were accepting from
PTCL. Generally, once the update crosses the directly connected hop,
it becomes difficult to stop such updates. PCCW is equally responsible
for the larger mess for not checking the aithenticity of the
advertised prefix.

Btw, youtube ignored the bcp and put their 2 primary dns in the same
/24 though that has been fixed now.

--
Zaeem

--
Sent from Google Mail for mobile | mobile.google.com

[Masud]

"it is obvious that the filtering is done by proxy". There are many
ways that this statement could be interpreted.

Juniper M320 can forward ONLY that traffic to a proxy server which
matches a specific URL. So in our scenario, the M320 would match the
URL of the blasphemous video and forward THAT traffic to the proxy
server. The proxy server can then display an appropriate message blah
blah blah.

Cisco 12000GSR would have to use Policy Based Routing (PBR) to forward
ALL traffic going to the youtube.com IP addresses to the proxy server.
The GSR cannot 'divert' traffic by matching URL and herein lies the
difference between Juniper and Cisco. With the GSR, you would have to
redirect the entire traffic destined for youtube.com to the proxy
server. The proxy server would display a message if the URL was the
one which was 'blasphemous'. Otherwise, it would transparently pass
the traffic.

If the traffic to youtube.com is substantial, say a few hundred
megabits, then a normal Squid server just won't cut it.

Just to give you an idea of the prices of a 'proper' proxy server
which can scale to Gigabit level, a recent quote from Bluecoat for my
network was over a Crore Rupees.

PTA is having a meeting tomorrow (Tue) in which they will discuss the
methodologies employed by the Service Providers to implement the PTA
orders and their merits /demerits.

Masud

On Feb 25, 2:10 am, "Sajjad Zaidi" <sajjadza...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Whether the hardware supports it or not, from the screenshot, it is obvious
> that the filtering is being done via a proxy. This can be done on PTCL/PIE's
> end just as easily, so the main issue really is their will.
>
> YouTube still blocked on Wateen.
>
> Sajjad |http://sajjadzaidi.com
>

[Rizwan Sarwar]

> If the traffic to youtube.com is substantial, say a few hundred
> megabits, then a normal Squid server just won't cut it.
>

I run squid cache's which cope with 500Mbps only for you tube, there is
of course other traffic going through them. :)

Rizwan

[Shaheer Khan]

Rizwan, where do you run your squid?

And update: PTCL/PIE's unblocked Youtube. I'm accessing it through
Cyber (dialup) in Islamabad.

[Zaeem Arshad]

PIE seems to have lifted the ban but PTA is hot on our heels for
blocking the website. Anyone got updates on the issue?

--
Zaeem

[Imtiaz Noor]

PTA needs to check with PIE :P

--
- Inspirex

[Sajjad Zaidi]

Depending on how good the hardware is and how simple the configuration, Squid can indeed be scaled up really high.

YouTube accessible via PIE, though I'm not sure if the videos in question have been removed.

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 3:18 PM, Shaheer Khan <shaheer...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Faisal Naik]

I ditto Sajjad's comment 200 %

:)

 

--

FN

 

[Mustafa Rana]

Heard a few hours back that PTA has 'now' issued a notification to service providers to 'UNBLOCK' Youtube !!

Rgds/Mustafa

[Mustafa Rana]

The Video responsible for the PTA act has been removed by Youtbe - Read it at BBC Technology section yesterday.
Will post the link in a few hours.

[Adnan Sadiq]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7262071.stm


Adnan.

[Mustafa Rana]

Thank you Adnan !

[Shaheer Khan]

Well you can ditto this now as well: the offending video (that was
mentioned in the memo) has been removed. It said "the video violated
the terms of use" of Youtube.

On Feb 26, 4:47 pm, "Faisal Naik" <fna...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I ditto Sajjad's comment 200 %
> :)
>
> --
>
> FN
>

> On 2/26/08, Sajjad Zaidi <sajjadza...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Depending on how good the hardware is and how simple the configuration,
> > Squid can indeed be scaled up really high.
>
> > YouTube accessible via PIE, though I'm not sure if the videos in question
> > have been removed.
>

> > On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 3:18 PM, Shaheer Khan <shaheer.a.k...@gmail.com>

[Zubair Ahmed]

Pak Govt opens YouTube

 

 

Islamabad:

 

Zubair Kasuri

 

 

The Government of Pakistan has opened American website YouTube once again on all the networks of the country. Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) blocked the most famous and most visited website YouTube yesterday.

Government blocked this website because of some blasphemous video clips which were uploaded by some one.

The story began unfolding Friday when the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, ordered Pakistan 's Internet service providers to immediately block access to a specific YouTube video which it said was so incendiary it could trigger riots.

 

The decision to block the website came after a meeting held at the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecom in Islamabad. Senior representatives from the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Religious Affairs, Cabinet Division, FIA and PTA attended the meeting a day back in which it was decided to block YouTube.

 

 

Now YouTube is once again can be seen on internet in Pakistan. PTA orders all the ISPs of the country to open the YouTube on their networks. Now those blasphemous video clips are no more on YouTube therefore government decides to open it in all net works of Pakistan.

 

A leading internet and fiber cable service provider company did not block the site last day. The decision taken by the government to block the YouTube was widely criticized in International and local media. YouTube is opened once again in Pakistan.

--
Regards,

Zubair Kasuri
Editor-in-Chief, Flare Magazine,
Special Correspondent, Geo TV and Jang Group
Cell:       +92-321-519-7777
Landline: +92-51-2890054
Fax:       +92-51-2891339