Don't Block the Blog

GlobalVoices Advocacy Summit ‘08 (Live Blog)

Administrator — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:41:08 +0000

Just an update on the happenings of the closed door session about the Advocacy Summit today on 26th June 2008 at Budapest, Hungary

Two shows of Geo.tv are being blocked in UAE

Administrator — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 22:02:24 +0000

Reports are coming in that Hamid Mir’s Capital Talk and Dr. Shahid Masood’s Merey Mutabiq on GEO both programs have been banned by UAE govt.

RSF issues an immediate press release questioning the blockage of Capital Talk and Meray Mutabiq on GEO tv

PAKISTAN-UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Dubai-based satellite TV station GEO News censored again

Reporters Without Borders calls on the governments of Pakistan and United Arab Emirates to explain how GEO News, a Pakistani privately-owned TV station that broadcasts by satellite from Dubai, was forced to drop two very popular talk shows under threat of losing its licence to operate in Dubai.

GEO TV president Imran Aslam told Reporters Without Borders that the Dubai authorities informed him last night that the station would lose its licence if “Capital Talk,” a show hosted by Hamid Mir, and “Meray Mutabek” (According to me), hosted by Shahid Masood, were not taken off the air.

Officials at Dubai Media City, where the GEO TV group is based, said these programmes threatened UAE’s relations with a friendly country.

The Pakistani information minister said her government was not involved in the decision. But GEO TV journalists suspect that President Pervez Musharraf applied pressure for the two programmes to be withdrawn. Masood recently interviewed a former general who was very critical of Musharraf.

The two shows also had also given a lot of coverage to efforts by lawyers to obtain the reinstatement of judges dismissed by Musharraf last year. In November, Musharraf pressured the Dubai government to suspend GEO TV’s operations altogether.

Blogspot inaccessible from Pakistan

Administrator — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 09:17:29 +0000

Late last night there were reports that blogspot.com was being confronted with a network error when trying to attempt access to any sub-domain on that particular site. First instinct was the new DST time change which came into effect midnight yesterday and could have been the contributing factor to perpetuating this error, but a number of users reports that they saw similar problems even earlier at around 3pm on Saturday afternoon 31st May 2008.

Accessing any sub domain on blogspot give the following error [orthodontist.blogspot.com]

Network Error (dns_server_failure)

Your request could not be processed because an error occurred contacting the DNS server.
The DNS server may be temporarily unavailable, or there could be a network problem.

For assistance, contact your network support team.

Screen Capture:

Which is little different then accessing fastrising.blogspot.com which produces a TCP error

Network Error (tcp_error)

A communication error occurred: “No route to host”
The Web Server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time.

For assistance, contact your network support team.

Screen Capture:

On a personal note I can access blogspot without any problems on my Mobilink Blackberry browser but am unable to do it on MaxCom (KHI) while reports also have come in with similar issues on WorldCall & PTCL (LHR).

Additionally Tee Eee has also stumbled across a worrisome outage on PKNIC.NET.PK which should also raise some alarm bells as it is Pakistan’s only registrar

Traceroutes to all sites produce the same results as follows with not problems in en route

traceroute to orthodontist.blogspot.com (72.14.207.191), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 192.168.0.200 (192.168.0.200) 50.743 ms 51.646 ms 53.614 ms 2 10.0.0.138 (10.0.0.138) 56.596 ms 58.578 ms 59.560 ms 3 129.108.181.58.dynamic.max.com.pk (58.181.108.129) 97.557 ms 98.533 ms 100.510 ms 4 192.168.1.41 (192.168.1.41) 105.499 ms 107.481 ms 111.479 ms 5 192.168.10.14 (192.168.10.14) 117.461 ms 121.455 ms 125.434 ms 6 192.168.3.5 (192.168.3.5) 126.415 ms 40.854 ms 46.356 ms 7 khi77.pie.net.pk (202.125.137.49) 47.283 ms 49.256 ms 53.236 ms 8 khi77.pie.net.pk (202.125.128.141) 56.222 ms 60.205 ms 63.189 ms 9 rwp44.pie.net.pk (221.120.250.246) 66.159 ms 70.142 ms 73.144 ms 10 t2a1-p2-0.uk-glo.eu.bt.net (166.49.170.17) 217.180 ms 220.154 ms 222.140 ms 11 t2c1-prc1.uk-glo.eu.bt.net (166.49.135.139) 227.134 ms 230.110 ms 233.024 ms 12 t2c2-p4-0.uk-lon1.eu.bt.net (166.49.208.146) 191.952 ms 223.928 ms 182.897 ms 13 t2a5-ge2-1.uk-lon1.eu.bt.net (166.49.135.115) 186.828 ms 188.801 ms 191.777 ms 14 gi5-1.cr2.th.hotchilli.net (166.49.214.134) 242.779 ms 241.760 ms 240.750 ms 15 209.85.255.175 (209.85.255.175) 214.714 ms 192.876 ms 209.85.252.76 (209.85.252.76) 188.818 ms 16 64.233.175.213 (64.233.175.213) 265.817 ms 284.795 ms 66.249.95.146 (66.249.95.146) 268.774 ms 17 72.14.236.219 (72.14.236.219) 291.772 ms 72.14.233.113 (72.14.233.113) 290.103 ms 216.239.46.25 (216.239.46.25) 294.014 ms 18 72.14.236.183 (72.14.236.183) 306.999 ms 309.980 ms 66.249.94.90 (66.249.94.90) 312.963 ms 19 72.14.236.130 (72.14.236.130) 304.931 ms 319.920 ms 66.249.94.50 (66.249.94.50) 318.899 ms 20 eh-in-f191.google.com (72.14.207.191) 313.879 ms 315.865 ms 273.492 ms