BGP is a protocol used to exchange routing information. Pakistan's main provider is a company called PCCW, so they are Pakistan's "upstream" provider.
Each BGP peer announces which set of routes they are the final destination for, e.g. Level3 announces themselves as the final dest for my Class C, 206.192.23.0/24 .
In blocking YouTube, they either meant to be malicious, or, they meant to null-route YouTube inside Pakistan but instead fat-fingered it and issued commands that instead of null-routing, made them the final destination for those YouTube IPs.
Mistake that YouTube made was that this Class C was also where their DNS servers were, so they were unable to redirect people elsewhere once they were aware what was going on (since corrected).
Comments
BGP is a protocol used to exchange routing information. Pakistan's main provider is a company called PCCW, so they are Pakistan's "upstream" provider.
Each BGP peer announces which set of routes they are the final destination for, e.g. Level3 announces themselves as the final dest for my Class C, 206.192.23.0/24 .
In blocking YouTube, they either meant to be malicious, or, they meant to null-route YouTube inside Pakistan but instead fat-fingered it and issued commands that instead of null-routing, made them the final destination for those YouTube IPs.
Mistake that YouTube made was that this Class C was also where their DNS servers were, so they were unable to redirect people elsewhere once they were aware what was going on (since corrected).
Also see http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/pakistan_hijacks_youtube...
Interesting. Thanks.