Filed under: Computers, Google, YouTube

Pakistan has become the latest in a long list of countries that have banned the video sharing site YouTube. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority told the country’s Internet Service Provicers (ISPs) that the site will be blocked until further notice due to content deemed offensive to Islam, though they would not name the specific content that was deemed offensive.

Countries such as Turkey, Thailand, and Morocco have all blocked the site at one point or another for hosting videos deemed offensive to the nations’ leaders and government.

This would be worth noting even if the story ended here, but there’s more….The government blocks the site by redirecting all traffic from within Pakistan intended for YouTube to a different Web site. However, likely due to a careless error by a Pakistani engineer, YouTube was blocked around the globe for two hours yesterday.

Google immediately contacted the Pakistani government, and access to the site was quickly restored. The government is investigating the cause behind the outage.

From BBC and Wired

Related links:

• China Shut Down 44,000 Pornography Sites in 2007
• Saudi Blogger Jailed for Criticizing Religious Extremism
• China Blocking All RSS Feeds
• Governments Increasingly Censoring the Web

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 2:54 am and is filed under World news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.