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.