MORE ON THAI BLOCK OF YouTube

From Wednesday's Bangkok Post (following up my post of March 11):

Wednesday March 14, 2007

CENSORSHIP
Thai users blocked from YouTube site

DON SAMBANDARAKSA

Authorities in Thailand temporarily blocked video sharing service YouTube on Friday and Saturday, though it remains unclear who did the blocking and why.

On Friday people trying to watch videos at http://www.youtube.com were instead greeted with an error page.  By Saturday morning, rather than the error page, the site was redirected to http://www.mict.go.th, the ICT Ministry's web site.  However, the block was removed around noon on Saturday.

ICT Ministry spokesperson Dr Vissanu Meeyoo was contacted by phone and denied any knowledge of a block.  He said that in any case, it was unlikely the MICT was involved as everyone there was simply too busy with the telecommunications law seminar on Friday to arrange or authorise the alleged block.

A thread on the popular geek site blognone.com did some analysis of the block early on Saturday morning.  It showed that the DNS (Domain Name Server) was still pointing to the correct address, but rather than data from YouTube, the "server" had returned HTTP error number 301, a permanent redirect, sending the browser to the MICT web site.  This would indicate that the sessions were being hijacked.

The HTTP response said that the server was running Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) with the modhwforward10 module.  Such a module does not officially exist.  This peculiar fingerprint has been seen in the past when web sites critical of the government are blocked and suddenly go offline.

YouTube allows any user to upload their videos to the site to be shared and viewed over the Internet.  Many popular videos are viewed by millions of users around the world.  YouTube had not responded to emails by the time we went to press.

CENSORSHIP, THAI-STYLE

Yesterday, I repeatedly tried to login to my YouTube account in order to upload some video footage I shot of Alex dancing along to a Marillion song ("Accidental Man" from the new Bootleg Butlins DVD).  However, I kept getting re-directed to the Thai Ministry Of Information and Communication Technology site and couldn't figure out why.  When I asked my wife she told me it said that I was trying to access a website that "was bad for Thailand."  I realized the last time I'd encountered the MICT re-direct was last year when I tried to access the Yale University Press page for The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej by Paul M. Handley (back then, the censorship page was a stylized eye — I much prefer the picture of their Royal Highnesses the King and Queen).

At least I wasn't the only person the Thai government was censoring from the "evils" of YouTube this weekend (I certainly haven't uploaded any naughty or politically-incorrect videos).  2Bangkok reported on the blocking and mentioned that in the past if controversy about a site censorship becomes too great the Ministry removes the block and denies it ever restricted access.  Both the BoingBoing directory and Global Voices Online discussed it and the latter speculated the censorship could be due to the recent interviews former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra gave to CNN which were banned in Thailand but available on YouTube.