Cnet blogs is reporting on Youtube being down from over an hour today thanks to the actions of a Pakistan ISP.
The telecom company that carries most of Pakistan’s traffic, PCCW, has found it necessary to shut Pakistan off from the Internet while they filter out the malicious routes that a Pakistani ISP, PieNet, announced earlier today. Evidently PieNet took this step to enforce a decree from the Pakistani government that ISP’s must block access to YouTube because it was a source of blasphemous content.
I cannot let the irony pass with out commenting. A religious state, Pakistan, identifies a content provider, YouTube, as the source of blasphemous, seditious content and orders, King Canute style, that the Internet tides be stopped. A zealous ISP ignorantly decides the best way to comply with the decree is to re-route all of YouTube’s IP addresses to whatever site they thought was more appropriate. The first repercussion was that YouTube disappeared from the Internet for almost an hour. I suspect the second repercussion was that Pakistan’s Internet access crawled to a halt as all of a sudden they were handling IP requests for one of the busiest sites in the world. As of this writing YouTube has announced more granular routes so that at least in the US they supercede the routes announced by PieNet. The rest of the world is still struggling. So, while working on a fix that will filter out the spurious route announcements, PCCW has found it necessary to shut down Pakistan’s Internet access. The leadership of Pakistan just created a massive Denial of Service on their own country.
It’s scary how easy it is for an ISP on the other side of the world to take down an entire website. Of course, taking down youtube didn’t turn out so well for them. This shows how vulnerable the Internet really is.
People for the American Way have started a petition to stop congress from granting Immunity to Telecommunication companies that illegally wiretapped phones under order of the Bush Administration. Help bring justice to those who defy the constitution by signing the petition and letting congress know what you think.
The long awaited, I know my readers at my personal blog have been begging for this information, Dragonball MMO has gotten some more information in the past few days including some very nice looking promo videos and gameplay footage. Anime News Network posted a nice summery of all the news surrounding the new extension of the Dragon Ball Universe.
The Bandai Korea entertainment company, the NTL game developer, and the Korean CJ Internet service provider presented more details and footage from the upcoming Dragonball Online massively multi-player online role-playing game at a press conference in the Seoul Plaza Hotel on February 14. The Japanese game news website 4Gamer.net has posted a promotional movie from the conference, and the Korean game news website GameMeca has posted that promo and a gameplay video. The gameplay video includes character customization screens, interaction with non-player characters, and player-versus-player combat.
The game is jointly developed by Japanese and Korean staffers, and is set 250 years after Akira Toriyama’s original fighting manga. (According to the producers, Toriyama is supervising the designs of the characters and monsters.) In this Age 1000 era, the world is at peace until mysterious invaders appear. Despite the timeframe difference, the producers are promising that players can recreate the feel of the original manga with battles in Dragonball’s signature Tenkaichi Budōkai tournaments and “time machine quests.” In time machine quests, players can travel back to the time of the original manga and meet their favorite characters and recreate famous story arcs. Players can also choose to search for the seven Dragon Balls that are crucial to the original work’s plot.
The producers also promise the system will feature three species (Human, Namekian, Majin), each with unique attributes and classes. The gameplay will incorporate transformations as well as character leveling through occupations. The combat system will have chained attacks (the ability to set up various combinations of attacks) and HTB battles (the game’s setup which enables players to easily launch attacks found in the original manga, like Kamehameha and Genki-dama).
Lack of playing as a Saiyajin is a bit upsetting but other than that this seems to be turning into a solid MMORPG adaption of the beloved Anime and Manga franchise.
The iPhone battery has been behaved fairly well in the eight months I’ve had the iPhone. But after the latest update (1.1.3) I noticed the gauge dropping faster than it should. I feared that it was my battery beginning to fail but tonight after plugging the phone in to be charged the battery meter doubled. This is either a problem in software or the battery is just out of sync with the meter. I’m going to try and completely discharged the battery tomorrow and see if this problem continues after it receives a full recharge. I remember this having a positive effect on the accuracy of the battery meter of my old 3rd Gen iPod.
