Internet Censors

This past Sunday, YouTube disappeared for about 2 hours.

It was an incredibly heavy handed attempt at censorship, gone awry. The map at the right displays the worst Internet censors.

And here’s how it played out. (We’ll apologize up front, because this may get technical).

When someone in Pakistan decided that a video on YouTube was blasphemous and rang up Pakistani Telecom, who turned around and decided that the to block the video, the solution would be to advertise a route to YouTube that went nowhere.

If they’d only propagated that route, internally within the borders of Pakistan, that might be a more or less acceptable solution.

But, as will happen, they screwed up and advertised that route upstream, to their provider, who without checking, accepted and propagated this new “best route” to YouTube to the world.

Tragic shame, all those squirrels riding skateboards couldn’t be seen, eh?

That’s not the half of it.

There’s no way to prevent such mistakes from happening, once they slip into the routing tables of the backbone of the Internet.

The routing protocol BGP (it stands for Border Gateway Protocol) works on a “trust basis”, where in theory, you trust what your routing peer tells you.

But you see, this same protocol could be hijacked in exactly the same way, maliciously.

Say you want to do some phishing. Say you’ve got a near perfect copy of Bank of America’s website. Say you poison the BGP routing tables, so your near perfect copy of the BOA website is getting all the traffic destined for the Bank of America?

Or say you’re a terrorist, and you want to neuter Homeland Security.

Or you’re a major spammer, and you hijack Yahoo’s addresses, to send spam that looks like it came from the authentic server.

Starting to see how badly this can break things?