Intellectual Property Law

Internet Vulnerability - Part 2

By Michael Scott

In my last post, I noted that the Internet is incredibly vulnerable to outages at various points where there is little or no redundancy. A recent event seems to indicate that global Internet vulnerability is more widespread than I thought. According to news reports, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority told Internet service providers within the country to block access to YouTube due to an allegedly blasphemous clip that had been posted. But instead of just blocking YouTube access in Pakistan, the ISPs ended up blocking access to YouTube by the entire Internet, rather than just Pakistan. The result was that YouTube was unavailable anywhere in the world for two hours!!!

Full post as published by Singularity on February 27, 2008 (boomark / email).