Repeating a move it made last week, the government of Muammar Gaddafi has once again taken itself off the Internet, according to Renesys, an Internet research firm, and Google’s Transparency Report.

Renesys says its traceroute pings — which are used to measure network heath and uptime — show that the connections remain live, but that traffic is apparently being intercepted as it reaches Libyan territory and sent into something of a black hole. Technically speaking this is different from what happened in Egypt last month, where servers were though to have have been simply shut down.

The Internet may seem secondary right now giving the gravity of events taking place there today, but the flow of correct information always becomes valuable — and therefore vulnerable — in the heat of violence such as this. Today there were reports of forces loyal to Gaddafi firing on people taking part in protests after Friday prayers, with dozens killed and scores more wounded. Meanwhile there was more fighting in the rebel-held town of Zawiya. Government forces tried to retake the town today, and as many as 35 were reported killed, with still more wounded.

It’s also unclear if, as was the case with Egypt, if wireless phone networks have been affected. The Wall Street Journal has a more complete report on the situation there.

Seems Pakistan Telecom blocked YouTube by hijacking its IP address and directing it to a so-called “black hole.” But when it sent that address out to the country’s Internet providers, it accidentally passed it on PCCW, one of Asia’s leading ISPs, as well. And PCCW propagated it to the rest of the world, and YouTube went down.

“It is exactly like the ‘game of telephone’ that kids play,” one network engineer explained: “For example, Pakistan Telecom says ‘I am responsible for 1.2.3.4 (some IP address)’ and then they tell PCCW. PCCW tells Verizon Business and NTT and others. NTT tells us, and so when my customers ask ‘Where is YouTube,’ we’re just answering based on what we’ve heard. … But all we know is that we heard it from NTT, who heard it from PCCW, who heard it from Pakistan Telecom. If Pakistan Telecom was lying (or made a mistake), we’d have no way to verify it.”

Apparently the transitive trust system on global routing is based can’t be trusted. “Whether accidental or not, the black-holing of YouTube by Pakistan Telecom demonstrates a serious weakness in the ‘longest prefix wins’ rule: There is no concept of trust contained in it,” Tomas Byrnes wrote in a message to the North American Network Operators Group mailing list. “Trust, whether implicit or explicit, is inherent in all human interactions, yet expressing it in cyberspace has continued to be troublesome. In routing decisions, once you are beyond a connected (either directly or multi-hop) peer, it becomes much more difficult.”