Bypass Ban on Websites

YouTube has been pulled off in Pakistan, and how!

According to the BBC, Pakistan accidentally crashed YouTube's international servers on Sunday, so no one in the world could access it for over an hour.

For most Pakistanis though, logging on is still not an option.

However, for the more tech-savvy Pakistanis, bypassing the government ban may not be a problem.

Explaining the banning mechanism, delDSL VP, Lalit Chandra Mathur said, “There is a digital URL, a code that we put in our servers. The moment traffic come to it, it’s made to bounce away. It’s digitally locked.”

Firewalls – that check the websites’ names before allowing them into the country’s network – are usually set up by governments who seek to ban certain sites.

But the solution to that is simple. A banned website can be accessed through another website, which is not on the government's list.

Especially designed for this purpose, they are called "proxy servers" and tons of them like these will help Pakistan log on despite the ban.

The site earned the government’s wrath because of videos insulting Prophet Muhammed. But as those have been around for some time, one wonders if it’s actually the videos alleging rigged elections that earned the government's wrath.

Two years ago, a similar ban on BlogSpot had irked Pakistani bloggers no end.

This is not the first time YouTube has been banned by a country.

Brazil, Turkey, and Thailand are among a host of other countries that have yanked the website off at different times for different reasons.

Even India threatened to shut it down in January last year after a video poked fun at Mahatma Gandhi offended the government's sensibilities.