PTCL Fumbles the Censorship to Block Millions of Websites

Over the past few days PTCL has been up to mischief yet again but this time rather then irritating the 0.001% of the population (the blogger class) they stepped on some giant kick-ass toes. They ended up blocking giants like Google.com, Download.com, Microsoft.com, Gmail.com, Yahoo.com, BBC, CNN, Systematic, Akamai, PC World, MTV, Best Buy, Logitech & ESPN. resulting in an estimated 20-30% loss of revenue in the brief span of five days,

All because the whole system had collapsed and owing to the blocking flaws (created for the Blogspot ban and the Baluchistan issues) resulted in sporadic and random outage of the key websites. The News reports as follows.

Sources said, “Since the PTCL did not have a proper anomaly detection system in place and their technical people were not empowered appropriately to inform the chain of command, the disaster-like situation could have been averted.

The mid-level PTCL techies have been brushing the issue under the carpet and sleeping over it. “Whenever a complaint is lodged, the PTCL officials are found in a denial mode, said a top IT professional, working at the Software Technology Park II. In his emails to the industry, a PTCL official has been denying receiving any complaint about delay or packet drop received from other customers.

The same PTCL official, in his mass email, admitted, “Some of AKAMAI server Internet Protocols (IPs) got blocked as a consequence of directives to block obnoxious/objectives. This may be the cause of slow browsing because single website links are hosted on different IPs. THE NEWS

After all when big money is at stake then the going will definitely be tougher for PTCL. It has been over one year that we the ‘poor bloggers’ have stood around whithering the storm protesting and yelling with all our might hoping someone might listen, everyone ignored the inconsequential blogger class which was actually pointing out a bigger issue at stake with a firecracker potential to get worse with a simple flick of a switch, and worse, it did become.

As of now PTCL has withdrawn all filters and one can easily browse all the censored domains, but I suspect once the issue is rectified i.e the big name companies have been pacified, it would not be long before the blogspot ban is resumed to its usual old self. I sincerely hope for the umpteenth time that some is actually listening or maybe someone with deeper pockets has the will to take them to court (i.e to hell and back) to ensure the PTA behaves itself.