LiveWire

A post by Maynard

Moving to squelch blasphemy, Pakistan banned YouTube. In enforcing the national censorship, a Pakistani service provider unintentionally shut down YouTube for the whole world.

How could this happen? Internet traffic is dynamically routed to seek the quickest path, in the same way that you listen to traffic reports and route your car. It seems that this service provider, in an effort to establish itself as the national bottleneck, made the electronic claim that it had the inside track on quick delivery of YouTube traffic. This unintentionally sucked in YouTube-bound data packets from everywhere in the world, all of which disappeared into a black hole. To undo the damage, Pakistan has rescinded the ban, at least for the time being.

The Internet is a global organism. This is an interesting example of its vulnerability.

The crackdown was an effort to block video previews of an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders. His movie portrays Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.

Could this become another cartoon jihad? Or perhaps Wilders will end up like Theo van Gogh or Hirsi Ali (see her personal site), respectively murdered and exiled for their collaboration on the short film “Submission”.

You can watch the English-language version of “Submission” (11 minutes) on Google Video. It’s not a great film, and might have been forgettable enough if not for the fact that anyone associated with something like this stands to die horribly. Thus the mainstream media will likely be subdued (or, to put it bluntly, self-censored) in its reportage of Geert Wilders’ progress. It’s safer to stick to criticizing targets that don’t shoot back, such as Christians and America.

For additional information, visit Geert Wilders’ English-language website. His FoxNews interview has been posted on YouTube; here’s part 1 and part 2. I’m not necessarily endorsing him, but the world can’t move ahead until we can discuss these issues without getting murdered.