Pakistan Unblocks YouTube, O’ Rly?
In what seemed a rash attempt at pulling the iron curtain down onto the poor, innocent surfers of YouTube by the government of Pakistan, turned out to be an honest attempt at alerting the web service of a Terms of Service (ToS) violation by the uploading party. Bloggers in Pakistan were furious about this decision citing this had been done since videos of malpractice in the recent electoral polls had also surfaced and been posted on the famous web video website.
One small infraction for the poster, one major hassle for all of us. Thankfully, proactive bloggers in Pakistan and the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) requested Google to remove the video as per Terms of Service regulations. While the outage was only for an hour, the outrage was mimicked that of centuries. But there is more to it…
But then why can’t I seem to access the website? I don’t know. But I do know that there was ways of viewing videos off YouTube through proxies, anonymously. I earlier posted about proxies on this blog here, but most of them couldn’t stream or buffer the video. Well, there is still a way. Check out UnblockYouTube and RastaProxy. These websites allow you to stream and download videos just the way you used to.
Due to the degree of freedom involved with such a medium it is very likely that YouTube gets banned in every second country after a little while. And this has been happening before too. Either that, or YouTube it self has had to take videos off that violate the ToS.
Whether it was genuinely an attempt to inform Google about the violation or not, that needs to be seen. The sad part is, proxy sites and anonymisers can be banned or blocked, too. But till then, enjoy!
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