
Twitter Confirms That They’re Being Blocked In Egypt - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/25/twitter-blocked-in-egypt/
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siculars
Ok so this is interesting to me from a data distribution model. Twitter is
accessible natively (from their own web page/applications) and via third party
applications over their API. I imagine the connection flow goes like this:

you -> native twitter -> you

Or

you -> 3rd party app -> twitter -> you

From what it sounds like, that is the path because it is the link to twitter
that is being severed[1] and ultimately you can neither make the request for
data nor receive a response.

Now what if the 3rd party app proxied your requests like so:

you -> 3rd party app -> twitter -> 3rd party app -> you

That way the 3rd party app would need to be blocked. Which is obviously a much
more difficult problem as there are more than one of them. The only downside
would be more bandwidth consumption for the 3rd party app.

If 3rd party apps routed messages through their ip's wouldn't this instantly
become a much more difficult problem for the blockers?

[1]I'm talking about lower level blocking here at the dns or ip level. This is
moot if they are doing higher level packet inspection and blocking everything
with certain words in it (non encrypted).

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pmorici
Apparently there is something a foot there, [http://www.examiner.com/foreign-
policy-in-national/breaking-...](http://www.examiner.com/foreign-policy-in-
national/breaking-president-s-son-and-family-have-fled-to-the-uk)

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bastian
We actually have a few users who translate tweets about the Egypt Jan 25
Protests on curated.by. It's not what we designed the product for but we
thought that is an interesting use case and maybe it even helps someone get a
better picture of what is really going on:

<http://www.curated.by/meedan/egypt-jan-25-protests>

------
cma
We arm the Egyptian government. Unlike the Tunisian revolution, we won't let
this one go anywhere.

~~~
kotrin
I think it's more along the lines of the Egyptian government is blocking
twitter because they saw how social networking effected the same type of
incident in Tunisia. They are scared.

~~~
idiopathic
I think the original comentor meant that - beyond Egyptian government's own
Twitter / social media blocking - the US government will not allow the
Egyptian government to fall as it is a big supporter of regime. I agree with
this assessment, but hope that I am wrong.

~~~
kotrin
I apologize -- I misunderstood.

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maeon3
Egyptian users could access twitter (bypassing the block) by visiting a web
proxy in another country and then logging into twitter through there.

