The Digital Dad

Cyber-terrorism at its finest – The nation of Pakistan has broken YouTube.

Huh? They broke YouTube? Oh, right. This is about the current YouTube ban in Pakistan, right?

Right.

So You mean the national ISPs have blocked access to YouTube from within Pakistan.

Wrong. They broke YouTube. Oh, sure, you can get to it now. But last night, any and all traffic worldwide destined for YouTube servers was redirected towards Pakistan and… nothing. Ars has a great article explaining the ins and outs, but here’s the skinny. Think of internet routing like an open-source Google Maps. Now, any and everyone can add directions willy nilly, Wikipedia style. They just have to know how to do it. And sometimes, even when people are trying to do good things and comply with silly nonsense like a nationwide YouTube ban, they can screw it up for the rest of us.

So, let’s say I know how to get to Wichita, Kansas from anywhere in the USA. I add all of those directions to our theoretical Google Maps Wiki thing. Well, the nation of Pakistan doesn’t want its people going to Wichita, Kansas. So it adds a bogus set of directions for its people, telling them that Wichita is, like, in a guy’s garage somewhere in Pakistan. It’s a bum way of keeping people from visiting Wichita, but under the current system, it works. However, they fat finger the directions and instead of bogus addys for Wichita, they list it as the ENTIRE STATE OF KANSAS. I know, silly right? Bigger problem. Our mappy-wiki woohoo says that larger-scale directions trump smaller ones. And since the wrong locale is listed for the entire state, it trumps my directions to Wichita and gets served up to anyone, anywhere, wanting to go to Wichita. So all these people trying to get to Wichita end up in some guy’s garage in Pakistan, which is, like, sooo not where they thought they were going.

And now that I’ve written Wichita, Kansas more times that I ever thought I would in my entire life, I’ll leave you with this: This is a core problem with internet routing I experience on a daily basis. Because any ISP can inject routes to internet locations and can (and often do) add that information inaccurately (Seriously, take a class. Buy a book. It’s not that hard.), network administrators are forced to play constant catch-up wasting time hard-coding in static internet routes to bypass bum ones as they appear. Even worse, these static routes, our fix for the problem, limit the internet’s inherent ability to route around network congestion and outages, further limiting the safeguards of the internet.

I guess my gripe is with all of the slacker sysadmins out there. Here’s a tip: If you’re making changes to network equipment that could possibly have global, devastating changes on the internet as a whole, have somebody else check your work first. Use the buddy system for Pete’s sake. Then I won’t have to come in behind you and fix your mess.

Oh yeah, and read the Ars article. It does a much better job of explaining this particular issue. [link]