Update: It's been confirmed that Youtube is being blocked by all Tunisian ISPs since November 2nd, 2007.
Several Tunisian bloggers are reporting today not being able to access the popular video-sharing site Youtube. One Tunisian blogger who has done a traceroute from Tunisia to check the block has sent us this screenshot:
If it turns out to be true, Youtube will be the second video sharing site blocked by Tunisia. Since September 3rd, 2007, Tunisia is still blocking access to Dailymotion.
Written bySami Ben Gharbia
52 comments
affirmatif.. it’s blocked
thx for who help us to contourn censorship
just use the ip address – it’s still available
thx but can u tell me the ip of dailymotion?
Indeed, no way to get to Youtube…
Umm – where exactly do you see in the traceroute example above any block?
What CAN be seen is the weak tier into the tunisian backbone (lag!), probably the access concentrator construction (which seems to have not improved in the last 2 years) and the pityful connectivity of Tunisia to the European/American internet (lag!!!). In this example here the route runs from Tunisia through Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Holland to Washington. Before, Tunisia routed the complete traffic directly via a provider in the UK, which was slow and showed all the time big packet losses – when I look at the actual routing now, I see, however, no improvement whatsoever with this solution.
The astericks around the intercontinental jump just show that the provider has switched off ICMP (eg. PING) responses, but that is not too uncommon. The final destination, youtube at 208.65.xxxx replies and demonstrates that it is working and responsive – in this regard, the above traceroute shows the exact opposite of what it was supposed to show .
IF the website was böocked, the traceroute would not even have shown one response, because the tunisian method of blocking a website is by its nameserver translation and by its IP address, each IP request is as well inspected as each nameserver request (unless they have changed that in the last few weeks), so it will bring up from the nameserver side something like “page not found” and from the IP side something like “no route to host”.
You’re absolutely right Wolph,
I was also wondering when I saw the tracert. But this does not change the fact that on that same day, Youtube was blocked by all tunisian ISP. I don’t really know how is that possible. I was chatting with the Tunisian friend who sent me the screenshot and with other, the result is the same: the traceroute is showing response, but the site is blocked!
Thanks for this detailed information.